Chilling on Allapey Backwaters + nightmare journey part 27-29th December 2010

Found a great hotel in Allapey with friendly staff and good food. The town itself was pretty uninspiring very busy with traffic and the food I ate on the first evening was pretty terrible too, there seemed to be a lack of decent restaurants in town.

I spent the first afternoon there looking into boat trips. Kerala is famous for its backwaters a series of palm lines lagoons and rivers running down the coast. It became clear pretty quickly that I was there at the wrong time of year. My initial plan had been to do an overnight trip on a houseboat but with the holiday season prices had sky rocketed, with a 24 hour trip costing around £140 pounds……well out of my price range obviously + not great value for money for that length of time. Instead I booked a day trip on a canoe with a guide along with a French Canadian guy I met in the hotel….

That evening was pretty chilled watched the South Africa V India test match along with the hotel staff and went to be early after having my first hot shower in almost a month!

Next morning we started earl and got a ferry from town for an hour through the backwaters to our guides village. We were joined by a Scottish and Dutch guy. Our guide was in his early sixties and a bit crazy, had a fondness for eccentric headgear and reminded me a a bit of an Indian Tommy Cooper. (see photo) . We ate breakfast at his house while he told us of the greatness of the local naturally made coconut beer, he seemed to have taken for granted the fact that we would be buying a bottle during the day.

We set out on the canoe around 10 and spent a very relaxed four or five hours cruising through narrow canals sided by rice paddies and palm trees. We paced through many small villages along the way, life here seemed very simple and relaxed, a world away from the traffic back in town. Was actually glad I hadn’t booked a house boat at this point as the canoe offered a much more intimate experience ( see photos for an idea ) .

In the afternoon we arrived back at our guides house and had lunch along with the coconut beer we had chipped in to buy along the way. Our guide drank most of it but in fairness it tasted like bounty flavoured paint thinner …so he was welcome to it .

In the afternoon went for a walk through the village and rice fields….realised at this point I had done far too little nature viewing on this trip….will have to make up for that in the far east!

Got the ferry back toward town and then had to get a local bus for the second half of the journey. By the time we got back to town was hot and tired. Went for a few cold beers in the local bar with the French Canadian guy and had a good chat about politics.

After that went back to the hotel and had dinner in front of Spurs v Newcastle live, which I stumbled upon while flicking channels. What a result ( ha ha Ben BTW). Slept soundly that evening and awoke to another hot shower!

That morning I went into town to try book a bus to the former French colony of Pondicherry on the East coast of India where I planned to spend New Years eve.

After checking around for a couple of hours it seemed all the busses were full, I decided to try my luck in the next major town to the south Kollam, and if not there in Trivandrum a city even further south where I knew there was at least one government bus a day to Pondicherry….big mistake turned out I had totally underestimated how booked out transport get during Indian holidays…..( makes sense though when y9ou consider how many people live here).

I took the bumper bus ( or “super-fast” to give it its official name , “super-painful” more like) down to Kollam, no luck there was told to go on to Trivandrum. Another 2 hours later I arrived at Trivandrum train/bus station hot and tired having just got a good kicking from the bus…..things were about to get worse…. The government bus had been booked out for weeks and wasn’t free until the fourth of Jan, there were no private bus available and the only train going towards Pondicherry was at 3.;45 in a the morning with no seats available ( ie standing sitting on the floor near the toilet blocks ) …….Arrrghhhhh decided this was my lowest point in India…the traffic was doing my head in. I decided to go for the 3.45 standing train option and hope I would be able to sit for part of the journey ( the full trip was 14 hours ). I booked a room in the train station retiring rooms ( actually really nice with ac and clean common bathrooms ) which at least offered me some peace and a place to crash for a few hours. I ate showered and went to be about 9 managed to sleep till 3 and woke up feeling pretty refreshed….”

“its not so bad I thought”…..how wrong I was…….I had been told by enquiries the previous night the train was at 3.45am so I got on the train leaving at that time and managed to find a seat straight away …..but something didn’t seem right….I realised after a while the final destination was in the wrong direction….fuck….no staff on the platform to ask so had to run all the way back to enquiries where I was told my train was actually on platform 3 not 4 and was about to go….legged it over there and there was no train in sight…..bollocks!

Went to the station masters office where I actually got some reliable but disappointing information. The train I wanted actually left at 3.35 not 3.45, for some reason it had not been listed on the departures board and in any case I was told the wrong time to begin with. The next train I needed was at 4.20pm …12 hours away …gutted …gutted …gutted…….felt so angry I was numb to the world. This would mean doing the 14 hour standing ride overnight and would mean sleep depravation also I wouldn’t get to Pondicherry till the morning of new years eve…..

Kerala was beginning to turn into a nightmare…took ages to get here in the first place and since Kochi nothing had gone to plan…..to use an Indian phrase it was “fucking with my happiness” ….I debated going straight to Madras that morning and then trying to head back down to Pondicherry that evening but the only way to do it would be to get a 5am train to Madras that wouldn’t get in until 11.30pm…….

Luckily I still had my room in the station so went back to try sleep for as long as possible finding it hard to believe how bad my luck had been in the last week…..Had such an amazing time in Goa maybe its just the universe balancing itself out again……

Didn’t really sleep much as I had gone to bed so early the night before + I was thinking how much I would like to throttle the staff on the enquiry desk. Next morn/early aft chilled out and prepared my self for possibly the toughest transit journey of my entire travel career…….Pondicherry better be good...........