Blog : Kerela (Verkala)

We landed into Cochin in South West India - Kerela state - pretty early in the morning, 8:30am or something and it felt like midday, having been awake for such a long time! The first thing I noticed when we got of the plane was how green it was everywhere and the heat, which for once didn't seem to be stifling! The girls said it was sort of how they imagined Barbados to be, especially when we got outside to the taxi rank and all the cars were that old fashioned shape and painted white. We drove for about forty minutes to the closest train station and tried to work out what trains we needed to book over the next two weeks... It was quite difficult as there was a serious language barrier and no sort of orderly Qing system, so to begin with we tried to just buy our train ticket down the coast to Verkala, where we were planning on staying for a few days. After about a two or three hour wait in the heat, with no food and just having to sit on the concrete bench, the train we wanted eventually came. We were all feeling pretty grumpy and the train was really full, with only a fan to cool us. We were so uncomfortable sitting on half a seat each, the train was so muggy and there were lots of people asleep in the top bunks, with their muggy, deathly cold arms hanging into the aisle, stroking everyone as they passed - so rank! Even though it was only a four hour journey, it was the worst one we've done... Ten times worse than even the 18 hour ones!! At the other end we got picked up by a cab arranged by our hostel and drove the short distance to our gorgeous white bungalow. It was perfect and we fell in love with Verkala immediately... All our plans of exploring the whole of Kerela dissolved and we got excited about sitting on the beach, doing sweet F A and tanning for a little bit, after so much travelling and fast moving between place to place. We wandered towards to beach and along the cliff top, where a small street of restaurants and shops had been built in a local style. It was a bit more touristy than we were used to again like Mumbai but we actually enjoyed being able to be a bit less covered up and although we were just as sweaty, not having to feel the sodden clothes against our bodies! We found a restaurant that LP recommended, that had a nice upstairs area with a good view out to the sea and all the little fishing boat lights bobbing about on the horizon. It was pretty s*** food in the end, I had a very average mixed veg curry and shared some soggy battered vegetables. We were happy that at least the prices were back to an affordable level though, after the astronomical expense in Mumbai! We were so tired after such a big day of travelling that we called it a night pretty early, although we looked like one of the last groups of people still out!

We got up the next morning after a nice lie in and a pretty sweaty start to the night, where wed had a two or three hour power cut, disabling the fan and making the room unbearably hot. by flinging open all of the windows all we achieved was loads of bugs coming inside and swarming around the lights of our phones. We all had stiff necks and backs as well, from the solid beds and squeaked our way to the Juice Shack that morning, which was LP and trip advisor recommended. I had a quite nice grapefruit, lime and carrot juice, with fruit salad and muesli for breakfast. They even served coconut milk for me, which was quite nice :) The breakfast was a little but bland though and the girls sort of felt the same about theirs too which was annoying, but never mind we thought, we'd all been quite healthy and enjoyed a morning off from Indian for breakfast! After a little walk along the little cliff top, seeing the restaurants but also all the Tibetan trinket shops (many of the local people, especially in Verkala, come only for the tourist, summer season to the south before migrating back north to their home states, as the monsoon comes). All the guide books said we were right on the shoulder of the monsoon season and that prices should be much lower than in peak and through negotiation lots of bargains were about! It did feel quite touristy though but admittedly and thankfully there weren't too many other people wandering around. After looking at all the chunky silver jewellery collections and chests of precious stones we climbed the steep flight of stairs down to the beach, which by Indian standards is considered beautiful. I think all our previous travelling has turned me into a bit of a beach snob though, as although it was a nice beach, I didn't fall in love with it or think it was as gorgeous as said. It was pretty wide, with grass growing, where the sand met the cliff face; there were a lot of local people milling around on the beach, mainly young men come to oogle at all the white skin on show; the sand itself was dark and fine, so it got picked up in the wind and blew everywhere which is always annoying and there were dogs all over the beach roaming around and growling at one another... We ended up getting ourselves a lounger chair each, which once set up by four skinny and hasty men looked like army stretchers or something with lots of different coloured bits of elastic woven together and aged about teeny years so done if the straps were sagging and there were big holes in the sides of the bed! It was very hot though and really nice to be on a beach, relaxing and enjoying a spot of sunbathing rather than having to be constantly covered up and rushing between places. We all felt as though we deserved some R and R and a decision was quickly made to spend our six days just in Verkala, not to move between a few beach towns on the Kerelan coast, as once originally envisaged.

Kate and I brought some coconut oil to help us catch one last tan before home time. It was pretty gross though as all the sand stuck to it and the flies liked the sweet smell!! We all lay on the beach, very contently, reading books, dipping in and out of the sea - with its savage undercurrent - and chilling out. It was a very peaceful day until about 3pm when we noticed an absolute mother of a black cloud and started to feel the first big droplets of rain. It was apparently the first to e it had rained in two months and finding that out didn't surprise us, the amount of rain the fell out of the sky over the next couple of hours was astonishing. Nelen, Kate and I dashed to a nearby cafe to cool down and have a nice refreshing coke, just before it started absolutely pouring it down. Al joined us, soaked through to the bone about half an hour later, looking like a drowned rat! We were all in our own little zone in the cafe on the cliff top, overlooking the sea and nose deep in our books. It was a really nice afternoon spent relaxing and to top it off, once the rain had stopped, Nelen and I went in search of a spa that we'd been given a leaflet for, to have our eyebrows threaded and a pedicure for our blackened feet!! We ended up on a bit of a wild goose chase, walking for almost two hours around the whole of the coastal village, until we eventually found it, almost next door to our cafe!! I was very spoilt and sat finishing the last chapter of my book whilst having a foot massage and all my rough skin buffed off... It was very soothing, although my feet weren't rid of all the gross dry and cracked skin. It was funny sitting next to Nelen who was having a manicure as well and had two girls working on her... The girl who did my treatments was really sweet and was wearing a night yellow Indian dress that looked so pretty. She threaded my eyebrows quite thin though, which is always a bit of a disaster, especially being in the sun so much and them being pretty non existent already!

As Nelen was having quite a few more treatments than me, I headed back to the room. It was quite late as I was walking back and already dark out. I could see lightening flashes a way off and thought the distant rumbling of thunder. I walked fast and thought I'd be able to make it home first before a storm came over, if it was moving our way. Then there was a power cut. It plunged the already dark street into complete blackness, just as I reached the three or four hundred meter long, narrow alleyway back to our bungalow. I felt quite uneasy though, being afraid of the dark as it is and thought it was a pretty stupid idea to start walking home, alone in the pitch black, down alleyways I didn't really know, in India. Then I thought of Nelen back in the salon. She'd just had her eyelash dye out on her eyes and would be completely thrown off by the powercut and with the girls not being able to speak very much English, if I was her I'd probably have panicked. I hot footed it back to the salon and found her alone with her due still on, having no idea what was going on! Just as I stepped inside the salon, the heavens opened and it rained harder than it had earlier in the day. We stayed in the small one roomed salon for about another hour whilst it absolutely shat it down, with Nelens dying finished by candle light. We tried to use one of the girls mobiles to call our hotel reception to tell the girls what was happening at our end, thinking maybe that they might be waiting for us, for dinner, but we couldn't get through, the power cut had wiped everything out. In the end we decided the rain was not going to ease up and after persuading the beauty girls we would be ok, we ran to the pizza restaurant we'd spied earlier, hoping the girls might have realised and also headed to the same place. They hadn't. We sat undercover, looking out across the sea and watching the massive electrical storm rage. It was really cool how the multicoloured flashes of lightening lit up the sky and everything around it and I quite like eating by candle light, especially as it was much cooler with the rain pouring down. I had a pizza, which was very un-Indian of me, but we'd all talked about how nice it was to have a little break from the butter and cream laden we curries and daals and our beloved garlic naans! By the time we'd finished dinner, the rain had stopped and the storm passed further out to sea, although the rumbles of thunder were still really loud and reverberated off the cliff side. We started to walk home in the pitch black, clinging to each other and trying not to freak ourselves out and not doing a very good job of it. When we got out our alleyway, we couldn't see a thing and thought we'd ask the nearby restaurant, which was meant to be twinned with our bungalows, if they had a torch we could borrow. Very sweetly they lit a candle for us but it went out almost immediately and after trying to relight it, the young waiter was asked by the old man, who we'd seen earlier at our reception, to walk us home, using the light of his phone as a torch. The girls had waited for us to eat, which meant they were absolutely starving, but it was quite late when we got home and all of the restaurants and shops had shut. We went to bed once again in the stifling and big filled bedroom, looking forward to the next day of sunbathing.

Al and Kate got up and headed for breakfast straightaway the next day, whilst Nelen and I went to the Juice shack and talked with the big fat owner and his son about train times and bookings. We looked on the Internet and saw that load sod the trains we wanted to catch in our last India week were all already fully booked :/ The Juice shack boy was so helpful and knew all the ins and outs of trying to find is available tickets on the trains and dates we wanted but to no avail. For a small service charge he agreed to book all of our trains that we'd settled on for us, which was probably the cost of a taxi to the train station to book them anyway, minus all the aggro of language barriers etc! We then met the other girls, told them about the train situation as agreed we all needed to head to the cash point to pay for them, and thought we'd go that afternoon. We also talked about when we'd do our backwaters trip, which was the thing to do in Kerela and the reason we'd wanted to come. After talking the Juice shack boy though and reading LP we'd decided against an overnight stay on a house boat, because of the cost - £60 odd each! Because of the bad things we'd heard about s*** boats with rats and flooding and also because coming into monsoon season, there wasn't many companies still operating tourist trips. We talked about the pros and cons of going on a house boat day trip versus a canoe trip and in the end decided that a low, punting style trip would be the best as we'd get to go in land around the narrow canals, rather than just one the main river. We took a cab to the ATM an paid for our train and back waters trip and had a good day of noseying in the shops and then decided we'd just have the afternoon soon nothing again on the beach. We found one of the only places that served cocktails as well that night after dinner so we all had a couple and played cards, which felt very civilised!

The next day we tried desperately to get up early but failed! By the time we were up, showered, breakfasted and ready it was almost midday! We had read in LP that we could got to the really posh Taj hotel to pay to use the swimming pool, which we were all game for, as we were not used to having sand absolutely everywhere and we were finding it annoying! We walked along the beach in the scorching sun, trying to find the hotel, and stumbled across the Verkala old town, where immediately we felt very under dressed in just our beach dresses. Finally we found the hotel, which helpfully wasn't actually called the Taj (typical India, we should have guessed!) and as we do in all posh hotels we all immediately ran to use the bathroom! It cost nearly rs1000 to use the pool, rather than the rs300 we thought it would be, which we didn't think was worth it for only the late afternoon of sun before the inevitable rain came again. We carried on walking an ended up at another smaller hotel that agreed to let us use their pool for rs300, but we'd pretty much lost the sun behind the taller buildings by that point. We were all so hot and sweaty, literally drenched, that we all just wanted to just jump into a cold refreshing pool and didn't care about anything else. We were kinda disappointed when the water was warm :( We sat on the loungers though, reading a new Glamour magazine that we'd found in the lobby and pretending to live the high life. There was something that felt kinda weird though, sitting in a hotel complex in the middle of India, after all our exploring in the previous weeks. It was only a few hours until we were all hungry again anyway after lots of walking and with no lunch we thought we deserved a nice early dinner so off we went for oodles of curry and naan. There was another big power cut so whilst we were looking for another bar we'd heard some girls talking about which in the dark was pretty hard and we gave up after about twenty minutes and went for an early night instead as we were up early the next morning for our backwaters trip.

The alarm went off at half past six - ridiculously early for our travelling lifestyle! And we were at the train station to catch the 8:05am train with our sweetypie juice shack guy who'd gotten up early and come to the train station as well, to make sure that we managed to get on it! The train was absolutely packed and sooo hot once again! We couldn't even find seats so for the half an hour journey we had to stand, with our day bags. Nelen actually had to hang out the train door as standing by the toilet was hardly fragrant! There was a dude waiting for us at the train station, who we paid and who organised our rickshaw to Monroe island, where were take our tour. It was so leafy and green, it reminded us all of being in the Lake District or somewhere, just a lot hotter! In the rickshaw we all confessed to our worries about going home and how scared we were of the unknown and we started making lists on what to do to make ourselves more employable when we got home. We arrived to a tiny street, which literally had three of four shops and another man, Joseph, waiting for us in a giant Cambridge punt style boat, which Al was absolutely terrified about getting in, very funny! After we'd had a quick wee back at his place and brought some water, we jumped in the boat and with a massively long bamboo stick we pushed away. The river was very wide and not really how we'd expected... We turned a bend in the water and a small dark tunnel was ahead, a bridge above and a we didn't know what below, but we certainly didn't like the fact that we were heading straight towards it. We had to get off our seats and huddle on the floor of the boat otherwise we'd have been knocked clean out into the water, the tunnel was so low! Pulling out of the ten meter tunnel we emerged onto the true backwaters... They were so narrow, with peeps of everyday life at each turn. We could see into the back gardens of houses and even into some of the living rooms. There was even a TV playing Cartoon Network! It was amazing to see, such, well, rural India. Joseph who could speak only very basic English, but had a hell of a lot of phlegm to hoik up out of his nose and throat and was forever spitting and snorting into the water, it was disgusting! Each of the tiny waters had low bridges and crossings, which we continually had to jump off the little wooden benches in the boat and huddle on the floor to pass beneath them. It's so difficult to explain the tropical peacefulness that we all felt and how beautiful all the backwaters were... I think it was certainly a place we appreciated a lot more having been across south east Asia beforehand, where there was nothing like Kerela! Joseph took us to a rope making farm, where we saw the machines that the women weaves dried coconut husk together into long and very strong twisted rope. The particular farm we went to sold its rope to a carpet and mat manufacturer and we saw them measuring out lengths exactly and folding each section into loops. It was mainly women working, which I thought was interesting! We got back in the boat and persuaded Joseph to take us to wherever we were due to have lunch next, we were absolutely starving, having not eaten all morning - not our usual routine! He took us to a local lady's house, who served us a traditional and home cooked Kerelan lunch, on banana leaves, in her front room! She was a big mumma and enjoyed slapping more and more rice, pickle and curried okra onto our banana leaf plates. Joseph and the husband stood and watched us as we failed miserably to eat with our hands, managing to splas*** all over our faves and chins and I had to tipsy head back so far to actually get food into my gob that each mouthful I was virtually choking on! The food was alright, a bit of sambal, vegetable curry, pickle and something mango-y with an huge heap of rice and pappads. We were really full an satisfied afterwards and all thought we could do with an afternoon nap, rather than getting back into the sitting upright position of the boat. We thanked the mumma very much for the food and whilst we were trying to find her, had a good snoop round her little house. It seemed as though her and her hubby had seperate rooms, the dining room and living room were the same thing, sans a big comfy sofa and a huge kitchen, I mean like the size of ours at home huge! It was amazing to see although quite gross as she had a stack of dirty thali dishes (like school dinner trays) stacked up taller than me to wash, bleurghh!

We got back in the boat and Joseph punted some more. We passed sea snakes in the water and even a bathing cow(!) and saw a shrimp and fish farm which had a clever scarecrow type thing... Across the width of the river area was strung lots of empty plastic bottles, hovering just above the water. If a bird tried to come and eat any of the fish then the bottle string could be rattled causing a noise and splash and this scaring away, Joseph told us in his broken English! We spent another hour or so going up and down the backwaters, which after a whole did begin to look a little same same and once we'd run out of water to drink we were ready to head back to shore. We thanked Joseph and hot back into our tuktuk, George the driver had waited for us bless him all day! We had to ask him to fin a toilet for us on the way back as we were busting and in the end we pulled over at the ferry crossin and had to sneak round the back I someone's house to use their outside toilet. We didn't get caught but if we had it would have been funny as there was no door on the squatter so we'd have been caught in a bit if a compromising and revealing position! We caught the train back to Verkala and stumbled into the bungalow feeling pretty hot, sweaty and knackered! We got Kate as shed spent most if the day in bed not feeling so good, and we went to dinner where I had a pretty disappointing pizza. We had another power cut and so after showering with the door open we all fell asleep pretty much nuddy! We're all friends now!!

On Saturday, our last full day we all pottered around, doing our own thing. I did some hand washing of clothes which was not very successful as there was cold water or cold water and the detergent granules didn't really dissolve properly. We set up a little dryer line on our bungalow porch though, which must have looked very strange with our brightly coloured and lacy knickers hanging all over it! I tried to pack my bag up, which had become increasingly heavier and fuller, to the point now where it requires a special was of packing, else it won't all fit in!! The girls went to the swimming pool again but I headed to the beach, not eating to pay to lie in the shade and then went up to the cliff top restaurants about three to have a cold and refreshing drink and a snoop around all the shops. Many of them were destocking their shelves as they were closing their shops for the off season period which started from the Monday (- We left on the Sunday before and had noticed a significantly lower amount of tourists milling around! I liked a dress that I'd seen earlier in the week so I went to talk to the shop lady about it, she said it was a traditional Tibetian one and I fell in love with it, even though it was a bit grannyish and long! I thought id treat myself to it, as at £8 it was pretty reasonable for a full length cotton dress! I wrote my last postcards and sat and organised the coming home thoughts that had been whizzing round my head into a note book with lots of list headings. I read a little bit on the kindle and waited for the other girls and dinner. Al came after a little while but the other two were like a hour late. Nelen arrived to the restaurant with a huge box of alcohol, gin, rum, beers etc which we were then told we wern't allowed to drink in. Apparently BYOB Indian isn't actually an Indian concept then! We polished of a nice daal, butter naans and a tomato pasta each, before heading back to the bedroom. The girls were on a mission to get pissed, but I was quite content with my two gin and tonics. It ended up being quite a late night, with lots if bug catching and listening to music off each of our iPods. I managed to fall asleep in the middle of it all as I was so knackered, but I don't think the girls were shortly behind me, as we had an early get up the following morning, which we snoozed over, obviously. We got up and packed and by the time we'd had breakfast we were pretty short on time to check out of the room, as well as order a taxi and get to the train station before god forbid we missed the first of our two over night trains to Hampi.