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May 16, 2015

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Home » Supplement » India

A romantic boat ride in God’s own country

By Saibal Dasgupta | May 16, 2015, Saturday | Print Edition

THERE are few places in the world where your eyes need to adjust to the natural beauty of the surroundings. Kerala’s deep greenery and the glassiness of its endlessly stretching waterways is one of them. It is a waking dream.

The province of Kerala is located at the lowest tip of India at the point where land meets the Indian Ocean. Dozens of alleyways created by the sea’s backwaters cut through the vegetation covered land.

Ride a boat on one of the backwaters, and you will find yourself relaxing even while enjoying. One of the best places to hire a boat is the ancient city of Allepey, which is the starting point for dozens of vessels that sail the narrow strip of water with mangrove forests, and tall palm trees lining the sides.

The boat crew catches fish and serves you along with an assortment of meats, rice and vegetables. Most of the dishes are cooked with coconut that range from creamy tender ones to mature fruit. The boat rides through the setting sun, parks in a safe place for the night, and takes off as a golden dawn breaks into the sky.

“Kerala is a great wedding and honeymoon destination. We want to encourage young Chinese couples to lose themselves to the joys of nature in different places of Kerala,” says Sheik Pareeth, director at the government-run Kerala Tourism.

For Chinese travelers, it is double bonus because Kerala is one of the few places in India where pork is easy to find. So is beef. Seafood drawn fresh from the Ocean is in abundance. One of Kerala’s most famous resorts, the Coconut Lagoon in Kumarakom, features a wide range of delicatessen meats and cheese imported from different parts of the world, and restaurants filled with Europeans savoring them along with hot, tangy dishes of Kerala.

Pamper your bodies or rejuvenate yourself with deep oil massage, a treatment done by health practitioners from the Ayurvada system, which is somewhat similar to traditional Chinese medicine. In fact, Kerala has emerged as the most important health tourism destination in India because of its Ayurvedic medical treatments, massage facilities, clean air and water and extremely good food.

The province has many names, and faces: Land of elephants, Land of Spices, Land of Coconuts, and as Kerala Tourism describes it as “God’s Own Country.”

It is easy to find out why if you walk through the tea gardens in the hills of Munnar, take the boat ride from Kollam and Allepey, laze in the sandy beaches of Kovalam in the regional capital of Trivandrum, look into spice gardens, visit the churches in Cochin or go around temple hopping. Better still, when you watch the heavily masked dancers play out scenes from legends in the Kathakali dance form.

There are surprises along the way. We came across chefs trained in five-star hotels at a relatively small hotel, Munnar Tea Country Resort, on top of one of the hills. In the Cochin coast, you see vast fishing nets hanging in space as some kind of bamboo and rope crane that can dip into the sea one moment, and jump out with huge quantities of fish caught in the net in the next moment.

For the history lover, there is a church in Cochin where Vasco da Gama, the 14th century explorer and the first European to discover India, was buried. His body was removed and taken to his home country, Portugal, for a second burial.

One of the highlights of Kerala’s sightseeing is living in a forest lodge like Aranya Nivas in Thekkady. It is an exotic experience spending the night in a dense forest filled with the calls and cries of wild birds and animals, and taking the early morning ride in the nearby lake where elephants come to bath and splash water in gay abandon.

Kerala has one of the lowest crime rates, and there is little for tourists to worry about. It is also extremely well connected through an extensive network of bus, train and boat services. Travelers flying from Singapore can get direct airline connections. The other alternative is to fly into India through New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai or Bangalore airports, which are connected to Chinese cities with direct flights, and then move on to the cities of Trivandrum or Cochin by train or air.

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