Kerala

Will update this entry later; need to head to bed. But here's a link to photos from a weekend in Allepy, Kerala.

(If you're subscribed to the feedburner version of my feed, you should already see the pictures)

So last Thursday night, Sindya and I took off for Kerala. We got in a bus at 4:30pm, and reached Allepy at 5:15am on Friday. A car from the resort was waiting to pick us up. We got to the resort minutes before sunrise, and were able to take some great snaps. The resort itself is very rustic. No TV in the rooms, all wood construction, outdoor openair bathrooms, etc. It was so beautiful there that we just stayed up and watched the sunrise and hung out in a hammock until breakfast time.

For breakfast, we had Appams and Stew - a traditional Kerala breakfast. The stew is basically vegetables boiled in coconut milk - it's delicious. After eating about 4 appams and exhausting the stew that we got, I asked the waiter to bring me a bowl of coconut milk and a jar of sugar, and proceded to eat six more appams doused in coconut milk and sprinkled with sugar. That about set the tone for the rest of the trip.

At around noon we took all our luggage and checked onto a two bedroom houseboat (there was no one in the other room so we had it to ourselves). There were three people on the boat with us; a fulltime cook, a dude who steered the boat, and a dude to run the motor. :) The cook made some amazing lunch (shredded coconut in some kind of gourd, some daal, and a yummy kerala fish curry) and dinner.

There was a mattress on the front of the boat where you could just lie under the sun and watch the world go by. That's where we were most of the time. We stopped in the middle of a lake for a while and I went for a swim though was a little scared because the dude told us there were water snakes (non poisonous) in some parts. At around 6, we docked somewhere and went for a walk, had dinner, and went to bed.

We got back to the resort by about 10am the next morning (breakfast was just toast along with an amazing dessert of caramalized unripe banana - why is it that we don't have dessert after breakfast all the time?). At noon we got on another boat to go watch the annual snakeboat races.

Each snakeboat accomodates about 120 people (usually representing one village). There are several heats with 4 boats each; it looked like they rowed about 2+ miles but I'm not sure. It was great fun to watch the first 3-4 heats but it got old quick.

After finally making it back to the resort at 6pm, we hogged some more on the buffet dinner (appams and coconut chicken curry, followed by many more appams eaten with - you guessed it - coconut milk and sugar) and hit the sack.

Sunday morning was spent just chilling in preparation for a 4pm bus back to Bangalore.

Overall it was an amazing trip. Did I mention the coconut milk?