Alleppey - Backwaters of Kerala

We stayed at Snehadhara Homestay in Alleppey. Mr Salim is the owner and is very friendly and helpful. He had arranged our Tempo Travellor from Madurai and other vehicles too. He has an ayurvedic treatment center and we all got wonderful massages. We were a bit disturbed to find out how they cleaned the massage tables but I'll leave it at that for now. The rooms itself are very basic but clean. The bathrooms were very small but seemed new. They also serve breakfast and dinner there and we enjoyed a great dinner with freshly squeezed pineapple juice (with no sugar added) that first night. The kids enjoyed running around as they were cooped up in a car most of the day. Mr Salim saw Rushil's skin and recommended that we go to Trivandrum to meet a senior Ayurvedic doctor so we actually cancelled our Thekaddy portion and headed to Trivandrum. But let's go back to Alleppey as it was the highlight of the trip. The next morning we headed to our houseboat. We thorougly enjoyed watching the beautiful scenery and experiencing life on the backwaters. We saw people watching their dishes, doing their laundry, bathing, conversing with their neighbors, children going to school in the mornings and boat buses. The food on the boat was very tasty and although we just hung around and enjoyed the sights, the time passed quickly, probably because we were two families. They served banana fritters in the late afternoon and string hoppers for breakfast, we really enjoyed the Kerala dishes. Krithiga, I and our boys also went on a canoe ride when our boat docked for the evening. That was also quite fun. Our houseboat had a staff of three people, a cook, a navigator and someone who helped with everything. At night, only one of them stayed back. I think the only negative was at night, there were all kinds of bugs on the boat and it would have been nice if they closed the covers earlier to avoid this. Luckily the bedrooms were closed, so we managed to keep the rooms free of bugs. The girls (Sindhura and Surina) were very spooked by the insects and had dinner in their room. In the morning they returned to the dock at 9AM . I would like to visit Alleppey again and my 2nd time around, stay on the backwaters and take shorter boat rides through the smaller canals, this would complete our backwater experience.

Last stop on this Kerala tour was supposed to be Thekaddy but we made a detour, I'll talk about that in my next post.