I considered myself lucky again - my train arrived on time in Alleppey, and I had met a couple on the train, Angela from Melbourne and Manel from Barcelona, who also wanted to go on one of the famous houseboat trips in the backwaters. In the guesthouse we picked up Jess from England, and the next day the four of us set out on this incredibly relaxing trip.
The backwaters are basically water streets, people live in small houses lined up by the waterside and grow rice on a lower level behind the rivers. The houseboats seem to be used for tourism only but they are very pretty and it is tempting to stay on them for much longer than the usual overnight trip, which unfortunately lasts only half a day and a night as in the morning the boats rush back to prepare for the next customers.
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After that I went up to Kochi, a nice enough town (especially the part called Fort Cochin, even though there is no fort to be seen), and surprisingly clean by Indian standards. The guesthouses call themselves 'homestay' but usually they are just the same as anywhere else.
I found a nice woman to take a cooking lesson from, so now I know how to make chapati and some other South Indian dishes - the big advantage of this lesson was that I got to chose the amount of chili to put into the dish. So finally I was able to discern what the dishes actually taste like!
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