Day 70, Alleppey, Kerala [Monday 11th February 2008]
Previous day: Day 69, Alleppey [Sunday 10th February 2008]
Next day: Day 71, Kottayam [Tuesday 12th February 2008]
We go down to the boat jetty in Alleppey to check out the houseboats which this town is famous for. They are old converted rice barges and they take tourists out to cruise around the backwaters, a network of miles and miles of rivers and streams running roughly parallel to the Kerala coast.
We are greeted with an endless series of 'hello's as we amble along the water's edge, inspecting each same but different boat. But the touting isn't too heavy-handed. Most of the crews display no interest whatsoever in procuring business, their touting presumably being done for them in the town itself. Instead they lounge around on the overly flamboyant furniture watching DVDs. And there is the main problem with these boats — they're kitted out to resemble middle class Indian living rooms. Large, decorative wooden sideboards adorn the walls, groaning under the weight of display plates and carriage clocks. Huge, plush sofas sit fading in the sun, looking incredibly out of place. Most of the boats have a DVD player and massive TV, a stereo wired up to big speakers. Any remaining space is taken up by a sturdy dining table and set of chairs. One even had a Tata Sky satellite dish angled upwards at the front of the boat. The captain sits amid this cacophony of furniture, emphasising the fact that the only real privacy you can expect on a cruise is inside your airtight-sealed room, thus designed so your air-conditioning will work properly but which otherwise acts like a sauna. It's quite a sad and depressing sight.
We decide not to hire a boat in Alleppey, and maybe wait until we're at the southern end of the backwaters to see what the boats look like there — they don't look very appealing or comfortable here.
So then we get the local ferry to Kottayam, a 2.5 hour ride across the main expanse of water in the backwaters. It turns out to be a great way to observe life in the area. We see dozens of people coming and going at the various stops along the route. People ferrying building materials in small canoes, others with piles of grass balanced on their boats — fodder for their goats. We pass under manually operated drawbridges, the mechanism counter-balanced with rocks to make the job easier. Green expanses of African Moss blanket half of the great lake and the endless, tiny waterways. Mango and jackfruit trees overhang the water.
We had called earlier to book a homestay, and now the owner, George, meets us at Kottayam in rickshaw. After stopping at a supermarket for supplies we arrive at his house a few kilometres down the road. On the way George points out the family house from Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things'. George's house is at the water's edge, surrounded by cinnamon, nutmeg, mango and banana trees. The porch of our room looks out on an endless view of vivid green rice paddy, full of birds and fringed with coconut trees. It's beautiful. We laze on a couple of hammocks hanging between trees, until George calls us into the kitchen for a cheese sandwich.
That afternoon we go out in one of the neighbour's canoes to explore the local waterways. It's the perfect way to experience the rhythm of life in the area. We see household after household kneeling by the water, washing. Swimming children, women scrubbing clothes and cooking pots. We hear 'the fish man' shouting from his canoe as he glides past, his catch resting silvery at his feet. 'The egg man' also drifts by, as does the surreal sight of a man herding thousands of tiny ducklings along the water, all chirruping and squawking away. Most people see us and wave or say 'Hi!'. Sometimes whole families rush to the door, carrying babies, to wave as we go past.
Our canoeist shows us the huge 'snake boat' that won the local Nehru Race last year. It's massive, and holds 65 people, seeal of them drumming to set the rowing pace. A gang of kids jumps around us hyperactively.
After a dinner of paratha and egg curry George gets his rickshaw-wallah to drive us to the big Shiva temple about 15km away, near Ettumanur. There it absolutely buckets down with rain and we watch as they celebrate their temple festival, parading their deity on the back of two huge decorated elephants. The proceedings seem to be running a little late — we got George to check the timings in the Malayalam-language Manorama newspaper, and it said some Kathakali would start at 9pm, but it's 10.30pm and the temple elephants are still circumnavigating, rain pouring down threatening to extinguish their coconut oil candles. Trumpets and drums are blaring. Eventually the Kathakali stage springs into life and starts their own clanging drums, building to a crescendo when the curtain is dropped.
There are 2 performers, almost identically dressed , in green face paint — signifying a noble character such as a God or king — wide skirts and silver talons. They perform an extraordinary synchronised dance, tick-tocking their way through it with elaborate hand gestures and nimble feet. It's livelier and more 'dancey' that what we saw at the Kalamandalam earlier.
But we've kept our rickshaw waiting for long enough in the rain so we leave after not too long. Our drivers puts a kind of transparent raincoat over the top of the rickshaw and buttons down the edges, and we thunder through the lashing rain down tiny dark lanes all the way back to George's house.
Next day: Day 71, Kottayam [Tuesday 12th February 2008]
Previous day: Day 69, Alleppey [Sunday 10th February 2008]