Alleppey, Kerala,
India
Saturday, December 23, 2006
We arrived in Alleppey yesterday afternoon after an easy train journey of only just over an hour. We had booked into a 'homestay' recommended in our guidebook as having a very friendly and helpful owner. However, even before we arrived it didn't seem very well run and we didn't have high hopes. The owner told us to ring him from the station to arrange for him to pick us up but when we get through he said he would just try and get a rickshaw and then kept us on hold for so long (about 10 minutes) that we decided to hang up. We rang back almost immediately and got a lady this time, who told us to just get a rickshaw ourselves outside the station and they would pay for it when we got there. When we got there we were told to wait in the lounge whilst she got the owner. We waited a while and when he eventually turned up he said he had just been to the station to pick us up. What we want to know is, why hadn't the lady (we think his wife, but we're not sure - it seemed like an odd relationship) known that he'd gone and told us to wait there when we spoke to her? So we were far from impressed and things didn't really improve from then on. We really didn't like him and thought that he was quite a strange, suspicious character. A german lady who had also met him and sympathised with our view of him suggested that he had something of the 'twilight' about him, and we thought that was a brilliant description. We won't name him or his guesthouse for fear of him suing us for being libelous! Anyway, he knows of a beach, which he calls a secret beach, although when we got there we realised there are plenty of local people who know about it, so he arranged for his rickshaw driver to take us there. It was nice, although not as amazing as he'd led us to believe. Still, when we left Kochi yesterday morning we had no idea that by the afternoon we'd be sitting on a beach and swimming in the sea, so it was a nice unexpected treat. His rickshaw driver is as shifty as he is, being his 'protege' so we didn't like him either (particularly as he was 25 minutes late picking us up from the beach, meaning we were waiting in the pitch dark). In the evening we had a very disappointing meal of something that was supposed to be Aloo Gobi, but bore no relation to anything we've ever had under that name before. Still, one good thing the guesthouse owner had done for us was to to find us a backwater houseboat for today (apparently most of the boats are booked up because christmas is such a popular time to do it) so we're leaving in a couple of hours and very excited about it.
My sister-in-law suggested the other day that it's sometimes difficult to tell from our blog whether we're having fun or not, and we thought that was interesting and wondered if other people had thought the same, so we decided to mention it. When we started this blog I had wanted it to have lots about how how we felt about things, rather than just what we were doing, but often we're writing entries in a bit of a rush, and there seems to be so much to write about that they end up being more factual than 'touchy-feely'. So anyway, now that the question has been asked, the answer is that we are having a lot of fun. India can often be tiring and hard work and I think that's probably what comes over more in the blog than the fun of it. Most of the time we laugh at the trials and tribulations but they do get to you so it's not fun every minute of every day, and that's probably true of this kind of travel generally - it's very different from a 2-week holiday where everything is about relaxation and fun. We've seen so much though, and really experienced a country that's so different from our own, and that's been really amazing. We feel like every day we're storing up memories for the future and that's brilliant. (R).
01 'Secret' beach
