Kochi - the San Francisco of Southwest India.

In Trivandrum we met our group, full complement again at 12. Only two males this time, Bernie was getting anxious, especially as the second guy was a bit late turning up! Once again we represent all sectors of the Western world plus one girl from Hong Kong, and a girl from Calgary too. Four of them had just completed the north tour so were already good friends.I have been driving them all crazy, I'm sure, with a persistent post-nasal drip cough. I'm certainly driving myself crazy.

Our first stop was at a very laid back beach resort called Varkala which was just like any Caribbean or central American hangout beach, with stalls and restaurants and "sunset view" balconies strung out along a cliff and a big beach below covered with tourist in various stages of acquiring tans or burns!

The waves were wonderful but the temperature a few degrees above refreshing. Immensely strong, it was really hard to keep your feet so body surfing was almost a survival technique......also gave you a good nasal flush! The beach, unfortunately has a bad reputation for rip tides so it was constantly policed by lifeguards trying to keep swimmers within certain bounds, some people chose to swim out beyond the wave break zone but this was also fraught with the danger of being unseen by the constant flow of fishing boats that motored up the coast and drifted back further out. They fished with nets and the catch was pretty varied : swordfish, snapper (red and black), squid, octopus, prawns, barracuda. These were then displayed on ice outside the tourist restaurants in the evening for you to select you own dinner. Delicious.

Still struggling with the cough I decided to have another ayurvedic massage and a treatment called Nasyam. The massage was relaxing except for the fact that the oil smelt like mutton stew, not my favourite odour all over my body! The Nasyam, as the name implies is a nasal and catarrh flush/purge. That was a mistake. The oils up the nose tasted horrid and purged nothing (thanks perhaps to the wave action yesterday) and the smoke I had to inhale for the cough was acrid and foul and burnt the inside of the mouth, also to no avail. So back to a cough bottle with codeine.

To get away from the "resort" we did go for a walk out beyond the beach area and that was lovely. No buildings or shops, just fishing boats wherever there was a little beach they could be launched from. They are all wooden boats with woven/plaited coir (made from the fibres of coconut palm leaves) as a caulking in the joints. When new they are then soaked for 6weeks to swell the wood and the coir and then stapled together with iron staples. They are a little bigger than a dory but shaped more like a currach and rowed with oars made from poles, bamboo, with round discs tied on at the end. Looks like hard work especially when hauling home dinner for the tourists. I won't say fat tourists, because I have never seen so many skinny young women in my life.

Now we are in Kochi a former Dutch and Portuguese town. Shaped like San Francisco Bay and similar in layout with the bridges etc, it has also the more valuable properties on the peninsula. Vasco da Gama was first buried here but later reburied in Portugal. The Church of St Francis had tombs all around in Dutch from the mid 1600s, mostly ships commanders of course. The rest of the sailors and lower classes are long forgotten. This town is very clean, orderly and uncrowded, this south trip is much more like a holiday and closer to a European feel than the North. It is easy to feel you are not in India at all.

Yesterday was a day off for me until one of our fellow travellers who is an osteopath came to my assistance. Wonderful and Whew.
Whew on two counts, first I can enjoy myself again and whew it is very hot. We will not be coming home tanned since we spend all our time seeking shade. Now Bernie is going for another cooking class ( we are expecting great things!) and I'm going to walk around the coast at the tip of the peninsula where they have a huge number of weird "chinese" fishing contraptions very like those in StPalais on the Atlantic coast of France, or those used by the native salmon fisheries on the BC coast.


Love, Mary