In God's Own Country

Last weekend I spent in Cochin and around...
A classic example of 11th hour planning... Till Wednesday evening we had no plans.
Suddenly we decided that tomorrow we are going for a picnic somewhere...
Initial candidate was Goa. But no flights... no bus... no train....

So we zeroed on Kerala... after some consultation with people in office Cochin was finalized. Now we had to gather peoples for the picnic. Starting from two... we succeeded in adding only one more person and bus booking was done for Thursday evening for Ernakulam for 3 people... (Cochin is island... Ernakulam is nearest Mainland)

The main task after we reached there was to plan for 3 days... fortunately we had done enough research about Cochin. So it not a question of what but about when and how...

Weighing our options we immediately decided to leave for Alapuzza.. a small town famous for house boats in backwaters. It turned out to be a correct decision.
At Alapuzza we hired a small boat for three hours... to roam around the backwaters at our will. It was really great experience... we stopped at places... saw villages and all along the backwaters.... it exposed a whole new world hitherto unknown to us.

A new world without any roads...but canals...I shall write about that later...

The second day we spend on a organized tour of the canals and the villages... this was another good experience... all though this too was a trip through the canal just like first one there was a difference... earlier we went where we wanted... but not whare we should have gone. This time we got chance to see all the rare plants... villege life and all with information and all....

The third day we spent roaming around the Cochin City....
A real old city....with all those ancient houses and all... we saw the Famous Chinese fishing nets... the church where Vasco-Da-Gama was buried and the Jewish Synagogue.
It was really amazing to see those Chinese nets in operation. What disappointed me was the damn dirty beach…

Then came the real punishment for not planning...
We could not get reservation for return journey... no bus.. No flight... no train
so finally got into general bogie and departed for Bangalore...