Travelling in God's own country

The three of us at the Padmanabha-
-swami Temple in Trivandrum

Kerala has been on my bucket-list for a very long time. So when Jaynee, my British friend from Leeds, UK, mooted the idea of travelling to Kerala and doing a trip together of the main sights, I was excited. Yesssss! Here are some thoughts on the 10-day trip that Jaynee, her husband Dugald, and I did starting at Trivandrum and ending at Cochin on Diwali day 2024. Our actual travel itinerary* is at the very end. 

For me, Kerala was somehow twinned with Assam, because of the heavy rains, the many rivers, the coconut trees, the bamboo groves, the banana plantations, the national parks, the white two piece attire that women wear, the similarily in terrain, the relative lack of big industries, and much more... But of course there were glaring differences too: they have the mighty Arabian Ocean, we have our mighty Luit, they are geographically much more to the south than Assam, so it is much warmer, and in place of our Sattriya they have the very unique dance forms of Kathakali and Mohini Attam,...Still somehow Kerala felt familiar, even though I have not spent much time there. We knew a few people from Kerala who were more than family, so I knew various kinship terms in Malayalam like Acchan, Valiannan Cheriamma, Appuppan etc. And my one Malayali sentence that I often used to impress: Angene okke ondo? 

The St. Mary's church at Champakuman

But I was shocked how little I knew about Kerala and its history. I did not know that Kerala as a state was formed only post independence in 1956 combining the Malayalam-speaking areas of Cochin, Malabar, South Kanara and Travancore. We knew it was a highly literate state but was not aware how highly urbanised it is. We knew that Kerala had a high Muslim population but had not realised that it is more than 25%, also that the Christians at more than 18% Kerala has the highest number of Christians in the country and probably also the highest percentage of Christians in any state in the country outside of the Northeastern Hill States. We visited the site of one of the oldest churches (built in AD 427) in India at Champakulam (near Aleppey) once considered to be the mother church  for all Catholic Syrian churches in the area. Of course nothing from that time has survived and a relatively new church of St. Mary's stands there today. And in the time we spent in Kerala we saw many lovely churches of many denominations -- Catholics, Evangelicals, Syrian Christians, Pentcostals, CSI-churches, etc. etc. in distinctly different architectural styles, some ancient, some medieval, and others shockingly modern. 

The ubiquitous red flags along the roads reminded us that Kerala is also the only state in the country where the communists are still in government. Although Kerala is no longer a communist stronghold, the strong Marxist traditions that have held sway in the state for so long was evident in the fact that we saw absolutely no beggars on the streets in all. We did not get to speak to many local people but from the little we saw and heard, we understood that wealth is more equitably distributed there than in some of the northern states. And as opposed to elsewhere in India, the streets of the cities in Kerala were really clean! All these are probably fallouts of the high literacy rate, the facts that Kerala has a flourishing tourism industry run by local operators who care about presenting a good image to the visitors, and that there is a large percentage of people working abroad -- in the Gulf states as well as the many Kerelite nurses and Christian priests working in Europe -- who therefore are conditioned to cleaner and less messy environs.

The amazing grounds of the Kuthiramallika palace

The intricate work on the ceilings of the palace

 

What I had absolutely no idea about was the fact that the two royal families we got to get to know during our travels -- the Royal family of Travancore in Trivandrum and the Royal Family of Kochi-- were such progressive people with very modern ideas who cared deeply for the welfare of their people. That we came to know by visiting the two palaces -- the Kuthiramallika Fort Palace in Trivandrum with its extensive collection of family heirlooms and exquisite woodwork and the Matancherry Palace in Fort Kochi, with its incredible wall paintings depicting stories from the epics. Besides many other things, they have done a very good job of documenting their family histories. Yes, they led lives of extreme privilege, but they did not live with their eyes closed to the condition of their people. They introduced many modern ideas into their kingdoms, far ahead of their times, especially with regard to women's education etc. And the Kochi raja showed his religious tolerance by building a synagogue for the Jews right next to the Palace temple. We were amazed to learn that there were Jews in the area around Kochi from as early as the first century AD. It was amazing to visit the synagoue in Fort Kochi and really get a feel of the life of the Jewish community that still exists there today in the area called  Jew Town. But more about Fort Kochi later. 

The astonishing architecture
of the Napier Museum

Let me begin with the capital city Trivandrum. There is the famous and  ancient Padmanabhaswamy temple there (with the large statue of Vishu in the Anantasayanam pose) but the strict dress code for Hindus, and total ban on non-Hindus kept us away from there. The incredible collection of well kept and well documented family heirlooms of the Royal family and the amazing photograph collection in the Chitralayam of the Kuthiramalika Palace complex next door more than made up for it. Just the architectural style of the palace in the old Kerala traditional style was a feast to the eyes. We crossed several beautiful buildings of the university and of the secretariat, no doubt built in the colonial times, on our way to the nice Botanical garden where the building of the Napier Museum (built in a mixture of Indian-Tibetan-Gothic-Islamic style) was a real treat. Apart from these few buildings, most of Trivandrum is a concrete jungle now, where even a few old Kerala style houses with tiled roofs are hard to find. I had hoped to be able to get to see many Raja Ravi Varma paintings -- we did get to see a few in the beautiful Sree Chithra Art gallery near the Botanical garden, but official bureaucracy prevented us from being able to visit the whole collection. 

The picture postcard beauty of Kovalam

But the beautiful Kovalam beach, where we stayed, was still run by small tourist operators and had not been handed over to big corporate tourism giants. We watched fishing nets being drawn in the morning, and went for a long walk along the beach in the evening. Despite the hotels coming up everywhere, Kovalam still felt like a quaint and pretty fishing village. Hope it stays that way. Even in such a tourist area as Kovalam, the use of English and Hindi was limited. But people were friendly everywhere and also not trying to fleece tourists. One thing that annoyed (and also embarrased) me however was the rather stark difference in the prices of entry tickets for foreigners and Indians. But Dugald and Jaynee did not fuss. 

The painting like backwaters

Our next stop was to explore the famous and idyllic backwaters on  board a houseboat in Aleppey. These small houseboats, with two comfortable double cabins with attached toilets, hot-water, air conditioning and all other amenities, are really ingenuously built (and covered with bamboo matting) and ideal for the canals on which they ply. These waterways that criss cross the area function like roads, so there are water buses and water school buses besides private boats -- large and small -- that ply on these waters. But being man-made and hence built along a rough grid, they are nothing like ploughing through the dense, overgrown mangrove forests of the Sunderbans. We were taken on a long loop to the big Punnamada lake (the name for the Vembanad lake in the area around Aleppey) before returning to dock for the night. The two-member crew comprising a pilot and a cook took very good care of us and it really felt like being at home. If it were not for the sudden turbulences and the many birds that we saw everywhere around -- egrets, cormorants, kingfisher, eagles, crane, shags and many more that we could not identify -- we might have even be fooled. 

One can't have enough of the backwaters

We followed it up with another boat ride on a shikhara along the narrower canals in the Kumarkom area. A veritable feast for the eyes. And early the next morning we went for a long walk into the Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary adjacent to the huge Vembanad lake, which is the longest lake in India (around 100 kms long) and spans three districts in Kerala. We did not see many new birds but a few turtles and insects; the walk through the dense and wet vegetation of the sanctuary was quite an experience. That was a nice ending to the backwaters part of our trip.

Inside the Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary

Dugald and Jaynee are avid walkers. So they had hoped to do some serious walking while in Kerala. We had mentioned this to our travel agency but they probably hadn't a clue what serious walking meant.  And it was hard to find nice places to walk in. The 4 km-walk in the Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary was probably the longest we did during the trip. That and the 2 km. walk inside the spectacular Eravikulam National Park in Munnar (home of the endangered wild goat secies called Nilgiri Tahr, not Thar) were the only real walks we did in that entire trip. At that park we also got to learn about a special kind of high altitude terrain called the Shola Forest, made up of evergreen forests and grasslands. But for Dugald and Jaynee, used to walking in remote Scottish islands, walking a few hundred metres along with masses of people seemed like not much of a walk.

The highly endangered Nilgiri Tahr

At Thekkady, our next stop, although walks were advertised, we could not find any at short notice. Even getting places on the morning boat ride in the Periyar Tiger Reserve was a complicated operation, and we did not get much help, either from the driver, nor from the hotel where we stayed. It was raining heavily when we arrived at Thekkady. All the boat trips for the day had been cancelled because of the rain. So we decided to use the evening going to evening performances of Katahakali and the martial art form called Kalariyappu. These are regular performances for tourists and although we got some idea about both from what we saw, it was far from the real thing. We were disappointed. Must performances for tourists have to be so casual and perfunctory? There was no place we could go to see the real thing. It reminded me of our trip to the main cities of Tamilnadu (home of Bharat Natyam) last year where we did not get to see even a single performance anywhere. Perhaps better to have no performance at all that stage a farce, we agreed.

Beautiful Thekkady

We were lucky that rains did not disrupt our travel plans significantly. The boat ride into the Periyar Reserve the next morning was well worth the trouble. We saw lot of birds and the usual animals but it was just nice to go into the reserve and see the animals in their natural habitat. It was amazing to see how many lakes and waterbodies there are in Kerala covering very large areas. We got some great photos of the animals there, thanks to the guards on the boat taking a fancy for Dugald (no doubt because he was a foreigner and would give a more generous baksheesh) and clicking some great photos on his phone for him. But the joy of the boat ride was somewhat marred with the sad news, a little while later, of the death of a dear friend Ucki in faraway Ireland. I kept going but it was hard to come to terms with the thought. All the more because I got the news in Kerala; and Kerala was the place in India where Ucki used to travel every February to spend a whole month in some Ayurvedic resort getting Ayurvedic massages and  treatments and in her own words 'being treated like royalty'. It seemed a rather curious coincidence. 

A type of special ginger plant
 (beehive ginger/zingiber spectabile)

Our trip from Thekaddy to Munnar went via a spice garden where we were given a tour of an amazing garden of medicinal plants and spices, and although our guide spoke at length about the wonders of various medicinal plants in curing various diseases, we settled to buy some spices in the end (sold to us by an Assamese Nepali girl from Tezpur).  While both Dugald and Jaynee are both nature lovers and knew a lot of names of birds, animals, flowers and trees, Jaynee was very keen to know the names of  the trees we saw, and had downloaded a local app to figure out their names. Ayurveda, wellness and oil massages and treatments are advertised everywhere and it is hard to not be taken in. I got myself an Ayurvedic oil massage for my back on the very first day in Kovalam, and although it was rather good, I had a hard time getting all the oil off my hair in the days that followed. 

Stella Maria at her home by the Attukad Falls

The best part about Munnar was our hotel -- Aranyaka Resort. Located in the hills, surrounded by tea gardens, we had a  lovely Attukad waterfall one km downhill from our hotel. Dugald did not miss a single opportunity to walk rapidly down to the pretty falls, through the tea gardens and back. Jaynee and I also did that a couple of times -- for me the best part was having tea with a lovely old lady called Stella Maria, who lived by the falls at the very bottom of the hill. Of course our share of high drama also happened in Munnar on that stretch when Dugald, wanting to take a shortcut through the tea gardens one evening, overshot our hotel and then got lost in the rapidly descending darkness. Jaynee and I took the road and reached the hotel without any problem. We waited for him to return for a long while before ringing the alarm bells and sending out a search party. Dugald might have done his long walk of the trip by the time he finally arrived back in the hotel.

Thick carpet of tea bushes in Munnar

The tea gardens in Munnar are very different from the gardens in Assam, they are thicker, denser and the foliage is more luxuriant that ours. Perhaps the fact that they are younger trees could be the reason. The tea bushes cover enire hills like a thick carpet, and are exposed, unlike the tea bushes in Assam hidden under the shade trees. We also went to a very nice Tea Museum as part of the Kannan Deva Tea Factory where we saw the whole process of tea production and also learnt the history of how tea came to the region. After having visited the Museum I wondered why we do not have a tea museum in Assam which has a much longer and much more extensive history of tea production. We were told that there were walks inside the Eravikulam National Park but all we could manage to get was an incredible bus ride along narrow paths along steep rocky mountain faces to a point up the hill from where one was allowed to walk the remaining one kilometre, in the company of the very friendly Nilgiri Tahrs. The rest of the travel itinerray to some rose garden and then down to the Mattupetty Dam and Kundala Lake were sheer wastes of time as there was no place where one could get down from the car and walk along the lake. It was very frustrating just sitting inside a car. We nearly exploded when our driver suggested a jeep ride instead. Those jeeps, racing up and down narrow hills at amazing speeds with reckless young drivers, seemed to us to be the perfect  idea for those seeking horror and nightmare!

Roadside tea break

The main attraction at a waterfall

A very enjoyable part of our trip were the long drives -- first from Trivandrum to Aleppey, then from Kumarakom to Thekaddy past dense forests, gushing waterfalls, green rice fields, waterbodies and and the very long 10-hour drive from Munnar to Cochin with a long detour to the Athirapalli falls. The Athirapalli Falls on the Chalakudy river was simply the grandest among all the falls we saw in Kerala. It did start raining just as we got to the falls that day, so that was a dampener, as the stony path down to the falls became wet, muddy and slippery. But we did make it to the bottom and it was really quite a sight. But the rains made the air very humid, so much so that it made me feel as we were inside a sauna. That was the day of waterfalls, and we saw at least three big ones that day. We also visited a butterfly park; unlike the rose garden in Munnar which promised roses but had very few, this park promised us no butterflies (this is not the season, we were told), but we got to see many. It was very late by the time we got to the Bolgatty Palace Hotel where we were booked for the last two nights in Cochin. 

Jew town with the Synagogue

The majestic Athirapalli Falls

Only later did we figure that we had crossed a town called Kalady on the way, on the banks of the Periyar river, which was the birthplace of philosopher and religious seer Adi Shankara who lived in the 9th century! We passed by the nine storeyed octagonal tower on our way and I could read from the signboard while passing that it had something to do with Adi Shankara but our driver could tell us no more than 'Shankaracharya sat here!' whatever that meant! We were pretty cross about that.

The magnificent cannonball tree

But what we saw in the island called Fort Kochi the next day more than made up. It was not just the Dutch who settled here, but also the Portuguese much earlier in the 15th century (in fact Vasco da Gama was first buried here) and later the British, not to speak of the local Raja of Kochi who has a magnificent palace in the Matancherry area. Arabian traders had come to this area to trade in spices since antiquity and we also found out that there is still a handful of jews in the Jew Town area around the synagoue. Fort Kochi is an experience in itself with its old Dutch style houses, ancient Cannonball trees, the tuktuks, the churches and museums and the Chinees fishing nets along the seafront give the whole place a very un-Indian feel. Closest to this, in my experience, is the French part of Pondicherry. As we walked about the old part of Fort Kochi, trying to take it all in and to find the Dutch cemetery, I was reminded of our visit to the Dutch cemetery in Pulicat last year. 

One of the buildings in the Bolgatty Palace Complex

No guide book prepared us for this

The bustling and sprawling modern town of Kochi has much more to offer than just Fort Kochi.But we did not have the time for that. We also did not have the time to take a ferry to Lakshwadweep islands. We drove past the very ornate building that houses the Folklore Museum in town, bought massive amounts of banana chips of various kinds and returned to our hotel to take in the beauty of the location and the buildings.  Our hotel, Bolgatty Palace, was built in the mid 18th century and was the residence of the Dutch Governor and later of the British Resident, stationed there. It is a beautiful Dutch style building and we spent our last evening in Kerala, seeing the sunset from the grounds of this historical building. 

Breakfast at Kovalam

Pothu, rice and coconut in bamboo

The sprawling grounds of the Bolgatty Palace

We were generally lucky with our hotels on this trip, and, except for a couple of real problems, I think we had not much to complain about. Food was uniformly good and cheap everywhere... the variety of dishes in Kerala cuisine is simply bewildering and we were struck by by how it is still possible to have a tasty wholesome and full meal for less than a hundred rupees per head. There were many eateries, offering good wholesome South Indian vegetarian fare  at prices local middle class Kerelites could afford. Chains like the India Coffee House, the Saravana Bhawan were everywhere. Even non-veg food -- like Meat Biriyani and Fish items -- were available at reasonable prices.  Welfare of the people going hand in hand with modernisation and development. A good example of which is the Cochin airport, large, very well organised but no-nonsense,  run 100% on renewable energy. 

Our hotel in Kumarakom was excellent

We had booked a trip through a travel agency that I do not want to name since in the end they did not do a great job for the money we paid them. The basic problem was the driver, who we expected would be able to speak reasonable English (and if not then at least some Hindi) and who would be reasonable knowledgeable about the sights we were going to. We had expected the driver to be a kind of guide, because that is how it usually was in the many such trips I have done elsewhere, in Europe and also in other parts of  Asia. But the driver we were given first was a young man with whom we had no common langauge. The problem did not get resolved even after that driver was replaced by another one. He was only marginally better. Our different accents only aggravated the problem. But that was not all -- the first car we were given had no boot as the entire space was taken up by the CNG cylinder. Thankfully that was replaced by a nice Etios which we could keep for the rest of our trip. 

What struck us most in Kerala were the cleanliness of the streets, the absence of beggars and the quiet simplicity yet dignity of the people we interacted with. Everyone was middle class, it seemed to us. The flashy cars, the opulent mansions, the gary clothes, the flashy dark glasses  that one is so used to seeing in the north, were all but absent there. If the big brands were there they had still not succeeded in pushing out the local players... And I do not think we saw  KYC, Starbucks or Dominos Pizza outlets everywhere. And the people, at least most of those we met, seemed to take pride in being Malayali, in their cultural traditions, in their language, in their boat races and nature parks, in their past and also in their present. Our drivers admittedly did not know much, but unlike their counterparts in the north, they did not try to cover up by talking rubbish, they simply told us that they did not know. 

Waiting for the boat at Thekkady

Best of all, was the company of Dugald and Jaynee, my friends from my England days and two of the best human beings I know. Dugald is a mathematician (and a former collaborator), and Jaynee has been involved with English language teaching in the Indian subcontinent and various other places all her life. I know Dugald since the time I first went to England in 1989 to study mathematics. Besides being at the very top in their respective professions, both of them do a lot for their friends and for the community around them. It was simply lovely travelling around in Kerala and spending ten days in their company. They are not only nature lovers and walkers, they are also interested in history. We had many interesting conversations over dinner and during our long car rides about history, politics, God and the universe. It was just nice to be with them. And as I flew back to Guwahati, reading 'The legends of Khasak',  an English translation of a Malayali novel by O.V. Vijayan, that I had bought at the airport, I told myself that although there is a lot still left to discover, another small part of my own country, that too, what the local's call, God's own country, had become a little less blurred for me.

* Our itinerary, from beginning to end:

1. Trivandrum:  Neelakanta Beach Resort in Kovalam:  2 nights

2. Aleppey: House Boat: 1 night

3. Kumarakom: Renai Green Fielnds: Kumarakom: 1 night

4. Thekkady: Holiday Vista: 1 night

5. Munnar: Aranyaka Resort: 2 nights

6. Cochin: Bolgatty Palace and Island Resort KTDC: 2 nights