The Venice of India

firstly, sorry it took so long to post. the mountains of ooty, while interesting and fun, do not provide many opportunities to use the internet.

on the 23rd, kate and i left kollom on a boat going north to alapuzha through the kerala backwaters. the kerala backwaters are a long series of canals and rivers that are separated from the arabian sea by as much as a few kilometers to as little as a few meters of land. it is an extremely productive area, producing lots of rice and coconuts, and having more fishing capacity than i've ever seen. the area is also extremely populated, having homes, schools, churches, stores, restaurants and many other businesses along the water. the waterway is used as more of a roadway, since it is calm and shallow enough for almost any boat to cross back and forth easily.

our boat left kollam at 1030 am. it was already really hot, but we decided to sit in the sun in the front of the boat anyway, figuring the view would be better. this was a good decision. as we started moving up the rivers, we immediately saw what we would see for the next 8 hours. there were dozens of small canoes with one man rowing and one man working the nets, larger, brightly-colored fishing boats that rose at both ends like viking warships, enormous house boats with grass-thatch walls and smaller flat boats that, like venetian gondolas, were powered by a man with a long pole and ferried people from one dock/sidewalk to the other. there was also one crossing that was a bridge floating on pontoons that could be moved out of the way for boats to pass.

the banks of the river seemed to form a never-ending hallway of palm trees. where the river was wider, there were rows of traditional chinese fishing nets that ran parallel to the bank as far as you could see. the traditional chinese fishing net is basically a long lever rising out of the water with 4 poles lashed into an x at the top, and a net tied to the ends of the x. at night, a light is put at the center of the x and the lever is lowered until the ends of the poles are under the water and the light is just above water. this attracts insects, which attract fish, and then the lever is raised, pulling the net and fish out of the water. there are miles and miles of these nets about 10 meters apart from each other. i have no idea if all or only some of these nets are used each night, but based only on the number of nets, the area looks like it has to be suffering from over fishing.

we stopped for lunch at a little restaurant that looked to be set up for tourists. there were already about 50 banana leaf plates set with 4 different indian sauces on them. as we came in, waiters came around with rice and fried shrimp or fish. kate and i were seated across the table from a young chinese man who amazed us. during our short stop for lunch, he somehow managed to eat three huge plates of rice, yelling to the waiter for more as soon as he finished each plate.

at about 530, the sun started going down and the landscape changed dramatically. instead of being surrounded by palm trees and businesses, there were rice paddies stretching as far as we could see in all directions. there were also more single homes with cows and chickens around them.

we arrived in alapuzha, a little sore and sun burnt, at 630 and headed to the train station to catch the train to kochi. the station was small and so when a train pulled up at the time ours was supposed to leave, we thought surely this must be our train and got on. as soon as the train left i felt like we were going south, not north like we should have been, but credited the suspicion to the fact that we were sitting in the seats that looked backwards and that was messing with my internal compass. after about 45 minutes, the train stopped. we weren't in kochi, we were in some other middle-of-nowhere town that wasn't even in the guidebook. we'd travled 45 minutes in the wrong direction. we decided that was enough for the day and we'd try our luck tomorrow, so we bought a ticket heading north to calicut, leaving at 7 am and headed out to find the nearest hotel.