p.r.bullen - travelogue

Part 4: Kovalum, Cape Kormoran & Up the Coast

Checked on our onward reservations, and caught a taxi to Surya Samudra Beach Resort, a beautiful place run by a German named Klaus. You get a traditional cottage with its own bathroom. It's on a low cliff overlooking a virtually-private beach. The food is superb. The pool is just right for wallowing around. A staff member ("lifeguard" not that he looked like he'd be able to save any lives in the ocean) was down at the beach most of the day with towels to lie on and beach umbrellas. Cold beer in the room and delicious pre-dinner fruit juice and whiskey concoctions. Cool and shady from the many trees planted throughout. The dinner terrace has a constant cooling breeze from the ocean, as indeed do all of the cottages. A bit expensive, but great fun.

We lazed around on the beach. I carefully stayed under the umbrella, except when in the water (there is a lot to be said for only going into the ocean in the tropics...), but still got quite a bit more sun than I should have (ouch!), so being a place which pampered us a bit was doubly nice. Two nights there, then we moved back up the coast a bit, to Kovalum.

On the way, we hired a car to takes us all the way down to the very southern tip of the subcontinent, to Cape Kormoran. Not much to see there, but we went basically just to go there. The nice surprise was, when we booked the car, the guy in Surya Samudra told us about a palace and a temple on the way. They were worth the trip, with Cape Kormoran thrown in for good measure!

The palace was beautifully maintained (work was being done on some parts while we were there), and was reminiscent of Swiss/Tyrolean alpine architecture -- only because of sun rather that snow! Lots of low overhanging roofs and gables, all fairly steep, that sort of thing. We took the tour (only allowed in with a guide). The place is enormous and very ornate -- finely carved screens to let through air and keep out light, supporting beams on the roof all carved and interesting, ornate teak ceilings, that sort of thing. There were two large halls, one above the other, where the prince would feed 3000 Brahmins every day. A hall of private audiences, of public audiences, and a balcony overlooking the street for really public audiences. Women's quarters, carefully screened off. The treasury. A private pool for water & swimming. On & on. It seemed a palace, which is hard to do when empty. Attached to it was a superb little museum, though our visit there was hampered by problems with the lights. The palace itself belongs to Kerala, but the surrounding district was transferred to Tamil Nadu some years ago as it is almost entirely Tamil-speaking. Kerala, in palaces and museums as in so many things, seems to do things right.

Onward then, skirting the southern edge of the Western Ghats, a mountain range running parallel to the coast (like ?Chile?, Kerala is a long thing strip between the sea and the mountains), to yet another temple. Almost unique in south India, this one lets in tourists! An old man took us around.

The inside of the perimeter wall is a huge hall lined with pillars, with a roof about 3 stories high. Each pillar has carvings around the bottom -- a god or demigod, a shrine, a cow, a mythological creature, a rural scene, an animal, whatever. There must be hundreds of pillars in all, and no two pillars are the same. Formerly, hundreds of Brahmins used to eat there everyday. There were some large and amazingly detailed statues of various gods and goddesses.

In the very center, the sanctum had several groups of pillars holding up the roof, each group being carved from a single large stone. The guide had us place our ears on the pillars and began to hit them. In one group, each pillar gave a different sound, much like wind-chimes or a bell, and a tune could be played; another, each pillar sounded exactly alike. He showed us the huge calluses on his hands from giving these tours for decades, and the indentation in his shoulder from carrying statues on palanquins in holy processions every year.

So, on to Cape Cormoran, a quick look round (it's a pit!), look at the oceans (TO your left, the Bay of Bengal, IN FRONT you'll find the Indian Ocean, and ON the right the Arabian Sea). Brisk breeze, great surf. Back on the road, north back to Kerala and to Kovalum. Nice beach. Where everyone went after Goa became too commercial. In season (which we missed), getting much like Goa. Lovely beach: wide, flat, very fine sand, nice vendors offering fresh fruit and cold sodas (and statues and fabrics and knickknacks and...aaaagh!). Great waves for body-surfing. A lot of serious tanners (how can these people stand that much time under the tropical sun in the middle of the day?? Health factors aside, I simply would go mad from boredom, sunstroke or, most likely, both!)

Aingeal bought some nice jewelry from a Kashmiri. Oddly, there were a lot of Kashmiri shops selling jewelry, rugs, souvenirs, etc. In Delhi, they have quite a reputation for the hard sell but the slower pace of life in the Tropics has had a deadly effect: they seemed positively laid-back! (Some Irish tourists we met said they found those same salesmen in Kovalum very pushy...were we surprised at that!) After two days and a night, we had to leave the beach, so we caught a taxi back to Trivandrum, and the train to Quilon.

After a good sleep in Quilon -- and there's precious little else to do there -- we caught the tourist boat at 10 the next morning for a leisurely 8 hour ride through the Kerala backwaters. The boat wasn't that full, so there was plenty of room for all. On the roof, they'd set out a bunch of chairs, and below there was a long bench down either side of the boat. The backwater trip to Alleppy (Aleppuzha) is partly in salt-water and partly in fresh-water canals, lakes, lagoons, and rivers. I'd thought it was fresh-water throughout, despite seeing some jellyfish ("oh," I thought, "I didn't know there were fresh water jellyfish." Sigh.)

Some of the lakes were very wide, though not so wide you couldn't see across to the other side. At first, which was mostly through lakes, we all felt that the journey was not as expected. Most people seemed to expect something in between the boat trips down river in Heart of Darkness and in The African Queen. I certainly did, and broad sunny lakes with South Pacific-style palm trees and thatched huts around the edges was not in the game plan! That is, in fact, what most of the scenery was: palm-trees and tidy little cottages along the lake/river/canal shoreline, with maybe a view to more trees or fields beyond. And Chinese fishing nets, of which more later. They were everywhere, in the lakes, particularly, but also in the canals. Oddly, many of them didn't have nets. All very picturesque.

In the narrower bits, through the canals, little children would run along next to the boat shouting "Hello!" "Give One Pen, Give One Pen!" "You give me rupee!". And waving, of course. You can, as the guide book says, only look at so many palm trees and cottages, so we did a fair amount of reading and chatting to the other tourists. Exchanged addresses & phone numbers with one of them, a woman based in Delhi who is studying printing on fabric & other graphic arts here. She has a couple of friends who will be selling an Enfield Bullet (motorcycle) in a few months, as well... Also met a pair of Irishwomen, sisters, and a rather odd man from California who is an astrology-psychotherapist. Got a fair amount of sun on the deck, but I was well covered up in my traveling outfit. So, it was a good trip, and one I'd strongly recommend -- leisurely boat trips like that are very, very relaxing.

(Funny story: I'd brought two hats, and as we left the hotel, they'd brought me the one I'd deliberately left in the hotel, so I brought it to the dock and gave it to a man who helped us unload the auto-rickshaw. As it turned out, he quickly converted it into quick cash by selling it to a Frenchwoman who arrived a few minutes after we did, and then she gave it to an old English woman traveling around Kerala with her husband and two half-keralan grandchildren. Where's my battered old cricket-hat now, I wonder?)

Part 4: Kovalum, Cape Kormoran & Up the Coast