Having recovered from our stomach complaints in Varkala we felt brave enough to venture onto the train up to Allappuzha, the jump off point for the Keralan backwaters which is one of the biggest tourist attractions in southern India. Basically it's a series of canals and rivers which you can cruise around in vessels of varying sizes.

After checking into a pretty basic hotel we wandered up to take a look at the houseboats. These are big boats that are kitted out in varying levels of plushness which you spend the day cruising around in before a night on the water. Having started off with the intention of sticking to our budget we fairly quickly decided to have a bit of a splurge and go for one of the more luxurious options which was still only 100 quid including all meals etc.

The next morning we joined our boat and pretty much spent the day lounging around on the upper deck and watching the world go by. It was an extremely relaxing day although not really possible to get an idea of village life as the boats are too big to get down the smaller canals so you can only see what's going on in the bigger canals and lakes. Still and nice bit of R and R.