Arachana Lodge Thrissur

The bus gets crowded and hours later I step off in S. Bathery, the closest town to Waynard Nature Reservation. I get tell that this area hardly gets any foreigners and everyone looks at me like I am out of place. I get a rickshaw and go to the Regency hotel. Talking to reception, they inform me that they have doubled the room rate, and that the only room available is the deluxe room, out of my price range. I get the ...

... Hotel beach? hotel greenview? Other hotel names are thrown at me, in hopes for a hook line and sinker to get commission while rickshaw drivers follow me. Here they all do a thing with their heads, like a dashboard doll wobbly head movement when they talk, which I have labeled as 'chittering'. It is actually quite difficult to replicate, but regardless, in front of me was a sea of chittering heads, each vying for my attention. Trying to break away from the pack, I ...

  Nelli*mp*thi is * popul*r hill st*tion 60 km *w*y from P*l*kk*d in Ker*l* * sm*ll st*te in south Indi*. It is f*mous ...

Nelliampathi is a popular hill station 60 km away from Palakkad in ...

... town so I was quite excited to visit. Oh yes, I could see it now, it would be like something from a Bollywood movie - beautiful people dancing everywhere, children throwing garlands of jasmine around my neck, priests joyfully pressing sandalwood paste on my forehead as crowds carried jolly Ganesh (elephant headed god in charge of removing obstacles) statues through the brightly coloured streets... Ok, so I'm exaggerating but ...

Our housing fell through for Kochi so we are now staying in a five bedroom house near the city of Thrissur in the stat of Kerala. There are about 20 of us, staff and students. There are three Sri Lankan students here, plus myself and the rest are Indian. I share a bedroom and bathroom with two other girls. Our house is quite nice and brand new so there's no furniture. We just have ...

... but if one requires a receipt then one must pay for the receipt. The purpose of our visit to the temple was then revealed; we were ceremoniously presented with a properly written (in English) and officially stamped invitation (every document in India must have at least one stamp to make it official) to the official opening of the new, boys boarding house the following Monday by Princess Viswerswesran; in those circumstances we could hardly refuse, not that we considered ...

... at sunset in the heart of the city, when two troopes of elephants from separate temples faced one another in a crowd of tens of thousands. Each troope competed with the other as they changed as many umbrellas as possible--red, green, multi-colored--in a show of summer color under cloudy night skies. One man explained to me: "today is the one day we believe that Shiva can meet with his two goddesses." The Shiva temple lay in the center of the city ...

... a couple of bags and some silver earrings and a ginger factory. We had our first disappointing meal of our trip in a touristy restaurant where the service was too quick for the food to have been cooked fresh (and it didn't taste it) and we paid more than we knew we ought.

The next day we were up at 7am for our backwaters trip.

As our guesthouse didn't serve tea or coffee or any breakfast we went outside to the Chi seller, who had a wagon by the football pitch ...

... the impressive Sri Padhmanabhaswamy of Trivandrum (see later), it is Fort Cochin's lazy pace of life that is the main draw. Sights which can easily be reached by rickshaw (better known in south-east Asia as a tuk-tuk) include the Dutch Palace in Mattencherry, with its ornate dark wood ceilings and murals (including some rather risqué ones in the downstairs ladies' bedchamber!), the 17th century Pardesi synagogue and the ginger factory, where ginger is dried in the great open hall ...