South India

This was mainly a trip to Kerala, with a quick stop in Mumbai on the way in and a few days in Hampi (Karnataka) and Goa on the way back up. We went at a great time: it was Navratri, the festival of Durga, and there were music and dance and parades going on everywhere.

Mumbai was interesting, a little chaotic, but definitely a cool place to start a trip to India. It’s somewhat low on actual tourist attractions, but it has an intangible kind of feeling that I really enjoyed. And the food was great. We tried to go to a comedy show, but we were misled by all the promo material being in English — it turned out to be in Hindi. The organizer tried to get us to stay, but we didn’t think we would get much out of it!

From Mumbai, we flew down to Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), Kerala, and spent a couple days there enjoying religious festivities and wandering around town. I really liked Trivandrum, and I think it gave us a good first taste of Kerala. It had elements of the same “Indian city” feel that we found in Mumbai, but it was much more laid back and easier to navigate. There was some excellent old architecture, and we enjoyed the Palm Leaf Manuscript Museum, which ended up being less a museum, more a guided tour of Kerala history — a different museum staff member walks you around each section and tells you about the manuscripts and the history they represent. Many of the manuscripts are in an archaic variety of Malayalam written in the Tamil script, so I imagine even Malayalis wouldn’t get a lot from trying to read them.

Then we caught a quick train up to Varkala, which kind of sucked. Swimming was forbidden, the beach was dirty, the restaurants were mediocre, and our private hostel room was dank and mildewy. Varkala seems to attract a crowd of mainly Indian urbanites and Israeli hippies. I can’t imagine it’s the best option available to either of those groups…

From Varkala, we continued to Alleppey (Alappuzha), which was a very beautiful place. We stayed in a guesthouse run by a very sweet family who cooked fantastic food, and we hired one of the brothers to take us out on the backwaters, where we saw some very pretty farming villages, stopped at a canal-side restaurant for thalis and exorbitantly expensive and delicious fried fish, saw a beautiful rice paddy temple and churches on the water, and then came back to our guesthouse shortly after sunset. We spent some time in the evening walking around the town of Alleppey itself, which isn’t really a tourist draw but was nice (excepting some rain and lack of sidewalks).