Our first glimpse of Indian land was as the Queen Mary 2 sailed by the old Chinese fishing nets on the coastline at Cochin, it was our first ever encounter with India and we just fell in love with it.

Cochin looked so beautiful with lush green palms and hazy morning sun. It is the Land of the Raj with lovely detailed buildings dotted around Cochin or "Kochi" as it is better known is a city in Kerala State on the west coast of India by the Arabian Sea. The name Kochi means small lagoon and is the place known as the Queen of the Arabian Sea.

We disembarked the ship at 10 am to be greeted by a locals show on the quayside with Indian music and dancers. Our short trip was titled Highlights of Cochin and that gave us some free time in the afternoon to explore on our own. The coach was clean and with the 34 degree heat we were glad of the air conditioning. Our tour guide was called Babu and there was a driver who had a separate helper to pay the bridge tolls and guide the bus for parking. The crew were all very handsome, smartly dressed and had the most amazing shiny white teeth!

The streets of Cochin are very busy with all forms of transport, lots of tuk tuks, taxis, buses and cars, even cows and goats wandering the streets. The many people we saw and met where all so very nice and friendly.

We imagined India to be dirty and had been warned what to expect but Cochin wasn't any more dirty than some of the islands we had visited on this trip, this added to character and it certainly didn't put us off.

Our first stop was the Mattancherry area where we saw the Dutch Palace. This was full of preserved Hindu murials inside but the outside just looked like an old house. We walked into Jew Town to see the oldest Jewish Synagogue in India from 1568, a tiny but delightful building with the floor covered in blue and white cantonese picture tiles all hand painted.

We had some time to explore the local shops. We bought Kerala flower oil and soaps, elephant mobiles and stopped in the antique shop cafe for ginger lime juice and some homemade orange cake! Yum! This gave us a toilet break too and these were very clean and westernised. Onwards we came to the St Francis Church, the oldest European church in India dated 1503. Vaso da Gama was buried here in 1524 and later his remains removed to Lisbon, Portugal.

We then walked on to the Chinese fishing nets and the fish market. These were amazing fishing structures which are lowered into the water and raised to catch the fish. The area was full of locals buying the fresh catch and if you wanted they would cook it right beside you, sort of an Indian takeaway.

Instead of heading back to the ship we asked to be dropped back in Jew Town, from here we got a tuk tuk to visit the spice shops, we bought ginger, masala for meat and chicken and ginger tea. The area smells of the ginger drying and is known for its spices.

We had been warned about eating out but we couldn't resist taking our chances and we found a wonderful restaurant on waters edge called the Ginger House. It was the first and only museum restaurant in India. We walked through museum past a huge long boat and other antiques to find the restaurant at the back. The super clean kitchen was shown to us and everything was made to order. Our gorgeous waiter Vishak helped us choose and we selected, ginger prawns, ginger chicken, poppadoms, chapatees, rice with ginger lime soda and banana lassi. He also brought us some local delicacies of cucumber curry and appam, a doughy bread made with coconut milk. Homemade ginger ice cream finished off a wonderful experience. It was all superb!

A little more shopping and we bought Indian pyjamas from a local tailor. We picked a lovely black and red tuk tuk with a very nice driver who drove us around town and gave us a little local knowledge. We took lots of pictures of the real local life, cows in streets, dog in river, that we couldn't have taken where the coach trip took us.

We stopped at the Indo Portuguese Museum (Bishops House) and across the road saw a sign for the Open Hand Cafe at Ann's Residency, afternoon tea was greenapple refresher and lemon mint fresh fruit smoother with homemade apple pie with ice cream and carrot cake. A perfect finish to our Indian stop. Our tuk tuk driver whisked us through the now rush hour traffic back to the ship with just 20 minutes to spare. A quick stop at Cochin railway station on the way for a picture and our Indian day came to an end.

We know there is much more to India and Cochin was a superb taste for us, we're already planning our great Indian railway adventure with Janis and Simon in November 2012, so we'll be back very soon.