So after the usual shenanigans at the bus station – buses zooming in and out with everyone knowing which bus was which apart from us...we were helpfully directed to the right one when it arrived and jumped on in the 30 second window provided. Then began an interesting journey. Basically our driver was mental. He mostly liked to drive on the wrong side of the road overtaking every vehicle he came across regardless of if he was heading straight into a blind corner, beeping as he went. He also liked to drive extremely fast! There were numerous occasions where we headed straight into blind bends and Tom and I would just look at each other squinting and hold on to our seats. There would be something coming the other way, a car or tuk tuk who would just have to leave the road to get out of the way whilst our driver would swerve only into the middle of the road! (The bus was very wide). We were sat immediately behind the driver so could see everything. I even took a few videos as he was so crazy. We thought this was bad but an hour or so in we had to endure around two hours worth of the windiest roads! Not to mention a section of road which included no less than nine hair pin bends one after the other to take us down to lower ground. At the speeds he was going, with a huge drop awaiting us if he happened to misjudge the bend, I'm not actually sure how we managed to reach Ernakulum in one piece! 
 
As was becoming usual we arrived in the rain and headed in a tuk tuk to a hotel we had in mind. It was dark by now too. Then ensued an hour or so of much faffing... in the rain. Long story short the result was that we ended up in a prison cell of a room. We were only staying here one night before we headed over to Fort Kochin so just had to go with it.We showered and headed out in the rain to go to a restaurant we liked the sound off. We tried three tuk tuk drivers (whilst getting soaked again) and none of them could understand us so we decided to walk and try and find it ourselves. My mood had slowly been worsening since we got off the bus. Wondering along filthy dirty streets, trying to step over rubbish and food that had just been dumped in the street, in heavy rain with all the filth splashing up the back of my legs, after having just got clean and put clean clothes on.....this did NOT help and I was pretty fed up. We eventually found the restaurant which didn't look great so tried another. Food was ok for a change but I was still hoping this day would hurry up and be over and start afresh tomorrow! One of those days!

So we checked out of the prison and headed straight for the jetty. Fort Cochin is on a little island and this is where it's supposed to be nice and “serene”. We paid a whole 2 rupees (just over 2p) each for the 15 minute journey. Upon arriving you could tell it was much quieter with nice little streets. Our driver recommended a guest house which turned out to be great! It was a lovely house too! It looked all fresh, new and clean with the comfiest beds! The lady who ran it was nice and smiley and helpful too. Brill! After settling in we headed out for a wonder and some food. Everything was really close by and you could walk from one end of the town to the other in about 15 minutes. Lovely to have nice quiet streets and clean little shops rather than market stalls. All the buildings appeared pretty well kept, they were all finished for a start and some were even quite pretty with nice window frames, clean white washed walls and tiled roofs. The roads were nearly all tarmacked which made everything look much neater too. No piles of rubbish or bricks in the streets either. Palm trees and lots of greenery everywhere which made it quite lovely. It didn't feel as though we were in India! We decided we'd have a proper look into the sights the following day and stopped instead for some beer and chilling :). 
 
As we knew the place was so small we knew we could cover everything in a pretty short space of time. We visited the Indo-Portuguese Museum. A little bit dull but made marginally more interesting by the extremely smiley enthusiastic guy who followed us around and gave us little snippets here and there about what we were looking at. We went to the beach. It wasn't great. Lots of rubbish and foliage washed up. It was very small and you couldn't exactly go and sit on it because it was so dirty. We saw the very small dutch cemetery. Consecrated in 1724 it contained the very dilapidated and worn graves of dutch traders and soldiers. Then there was St Francis Church, believed to be India's oldest European-built church and Santa Cruz Basilica. A quick stop off for some Café Frapés (discovered yesterday and delicious!) and we then headed to the water again to see the Chinese fishing nets. We somehow managed to get right through until 4:30pm without any rain and had some sunshine too, hurrah!

Most places in Fort Cochin don't have a license to sell alcohol. They can still sell it to you if you ask however and we had heard that quite often they serve it to you in a teapot to avoid making it obvious. After quite some searching we sadly couldn't find anywhere that would serve it to us in a teapot. We had to settle for the usual method of using pint glasses, oh well!