Backwaters of Kerala – August 2009

With family connections to India, and having visited it many times over the last 20 years, I could not believe my luck when we all agreed to have our summer holiday there. My sons, Sidney (9) and Frank (8) have travelled quite a lot around the world but it has always been to first world destinations and despite a liking for Chicken Korma and Bombay Mix I was not convinced that they knew what they were in for. I did know that the last time my wife Christa went to India she had cut her trip short as a result of sickness and the hassle of the busy northern cities – there were no fond memories there. It was however too late for everyone to back out when the comfortable Jet Airways flight touched down in Kochi and the warm tropical heat enveloped us. I needn’t have worried as it was smiles and laughs all round and they stayed with us throughout our adventures over the next two weeks!

We went out at the end of August and followed the route of the new amended Backwaters of Kerala trip. Visitors are often worried about travelling to Kerala in the summer months, and maybe we got lucky, but I had had the same experiences before and nobody should be put off by the weather. Yes it is hot all day and night long, humidity is as high as you can get and the sun is very, very strong indeed but the rain did not really affect us at all. Despite seeing some dramatic electric storms in Madurai the umbrella stayed pretty much redundant and while we had to negotiate the odd landslides in the mountains caused by earlier rains the only impact on our plans was that the views clouded over in the hills as the day wore on. The monsoon is actively welcomed in India and combined with the fact that the great Keralan festival of Onam runs through August everyone is actually in a pretty happy and welcoming mood.

Kerala, the Hills and Madurai

Our trip was 2 weeks starting and finishing in Kochi, the great spice trading port and cultural melting pot on the Arabian Sea. It was however pretty clear that when you are travelling with 2 boys the historical background to the region and the finer details of the Hindu holy pantheon were always going to play a very poor second fiddle to elephants, numbers of people on a motorbike/in a rickshaw, mangoes, Keralan Martial Arts, snakes, volume of car/truck horns, swimming pools and the suitability of any given road journey for a Top Gear Challenge.

Elephants were always a joy to see and leaving very early one morning to drive to a training camp imagine our glee on spotting 5 walking slap bang through middle of Kochi (for Mahatma Gandhi Road think Oxford St) carrying their food. Amazing! One hour later we were in the waters of the Periyar River helping to give them a wash down with coconut husks and then watching them being fed their breakfast. In Madurai we got ‘blessed’ by one, we saw them

wild in Periyar Tiger Reserve (including a 10 day old babe tucked away in the middle of a herd)

and then we rode them and bathed with them again later in Thekkady – a power shower with a difference! We even got to feel the belly of a mother to be, 20 months into her 2 year gestation. Massive, quiet, terrifying, gentle, awe-inspiring, swaying – lots of different emotions each time we came across them and they always caused a smile.

The mountains in Munnar and Thekkady regions were stunning with thickly vegetated hillsides and gorgeous views or the beautifully rounded contours of the tea plantations. It was cooler up there, but never cold, and we went searching for the elusive and endangered Nilgri Thar (mountain goat) in Evarikulam National Park. On cue a magnificent male appeared on a ridgeline and showed us his profile before we headed back downhill to try out the local chocolate and see how tea was grown, harvested and processed – never before had the boys thought sweet chai tasted so good. There is always something to see when on the move in India and the views among the Western Ghats were no exception. While the hills on the Kerala side rise gently up through spice and tea plantations on the Tamil Nadu (east) side there is a steep escarpment that drops away sharply and accentuates the dry plains below.

Journeys were always an endless fascination with intricate traffic jams, overloaded lorries, cows and ox carts on the road (only in Tamil Nadu), bizarre signs, highly illegal traffic maneuvers by most vehicles, landslides, photo stops, fresh fruit stalls, blaring horns, friendly waves and that family favourite game – how many people are there in that rickshaw? Travelling round ‘mad Madurai’ by bike-shaw and Alleppey by auto-rickshaw were also real highlights getting in and among the chaos that is many Indian streets.

The Sri Meenakshi Temple is the most famous in India and has been a major pilgrimage centre for at least a thousand years. The four enormous gopuram (towers) loom large over the city centre and can be clearly seen from the surrounding hills. Up close, once you have passed through the old city streets that radiate out from the temple, the amazing colourful scenes on the plasterwork stretch towards the heavens in row after row of gaudy excess. We first visited at night when the shrine of the presiding goddess is carried on the shoulders of the priests to her consort’s side accompanied by flaming torches, musicians, policemen, billowing clouds of incense, pilgrims of all shapes and sizes and, on this instance, two slightly bewildered boys from south-west London who had clearly seen nothing of the sort before. Returning the next day we saw this giant complex in a different light; a huge flower market with dozens of workers sitting cross-legged making up jasmine garlands; row upon row of stalls selling mementoes and keepsakes for the pilgrims; the Hall of a Thousand Pillars; the Golden Lotus Pool over-shadowed by the gopurams; queues of pilgrims following the snaking barriers into the inner shrines (Hindus only); pilgrims from all over India taking photos of themselves and their new friends from London; the massive painted temple elephant who, in exchange for a small offering, would bless the donor by gently placing his trunk on their head!

More to follow on the Backwaters, beaches, Food...