Backwaters

by mikka


One of the main tourist activities in Kerala seems to be boat tours of the Backwaters, or the network of canals and rivers connecting towns and villages throughout the state. I had mixed feelings about going on a cruise - I always feel a little creepy going on tours where the main attraction seems to be staring at locals just trying to go about their daily lives, and the motorized tourist boats are polluting the rivers - but to be honest, there isn't a huge amount to do in Fort Cochin, and my curiosity won out (the boat I went on, as it turned out, was rowed by two guys rather than motorized, so at least I could feel less guilty on the environmental front).


The morning of the tour, I woke up to the sound of the heavy rain drumming on the roof: the first day of the monsoon, which just yesterday my hotel guy had sworn was due in two weeks. (This turned out to be the first of many lies I heard about the monsoon; others include: it only rains in the morning, and it only rains for two hours at a time). Fortunately, our boat was covered, unlike the much tinier boat in the photo above.



above: doing laundry in the rain

Though I didn't take too many photos of it, a cruise along the backwaters puts you literally in the backyard of the people who live along the rivers, and it was definitely interesting to catch glimpses of people waiting for their ferries to the mainland or kids playing cricket along the shore. Hopefully they didn't find our boat's presence too intrusive. Most people who saw us waved, though there was one man who'd hung a stern NO PHOTOS sign over his window and who came outside to glare at us as we went past. 

The rain was so heavy that a lot of my photos are kind of blurry from it, but as you can hopefully tell nonetheless, the backwaters were really beautiful, even in the monsoon: