Our last week in India
Trip Start
Sep 18, 2011
1
9
11
Trip End
Dec 19, 2011
Fort Kochin, Kerala, India
Friday, October 21, 2011
We set sail on our vessel and cruised along the backwaters. The views were nice with lots of wildlife and people to watch. I haven't been to Venice but the advert said it was the Indian Venice. People were living in little houses on tiny bits of land surrounded by water and would travel around on little paddle boats.
A few of the locals were paddling around in their little boats and decided to hitch a ride on the back of our boat like Marty McFly with his skateboard in Back to the Future. I can't blame them because the backwaters are massive and rowing the whole time looked like hard work. I don't think they offered to give our driver any petrol money though, bloody free loaders.
We're staying at a hotel called Grande Residencia which is part of a chain in Kerala called Abad Hotels and Resorts. We think they should re-think the name and call it Agood. It's lovely here. We negotiated the fee down by around 60% - bonus. I'm determined never to pay full price for a hotel again.
Today it's raining and full so we're going to chill out in front of the TV and at this cool little cafe (Kashi Art Cafe on Burgher Street). They do really nice fresh salad (washed in drinking water) and beautiful carrot cake. Mmm.
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30/10/11
It's our last full day in Fort Kochin so I thought I would go through a few things we've been up to this week. We have spend a full week here and have done various things such as visit museums, get a ferry across to an island, visit the beach, and not to break the ongoing theme in India a bunch of men asked to have their photo taken with Chris again.
We went to a waterpark called Veega Land but unfortunately, we turned up on the busiest day of the year. There were over 8000 people there, mainly school children on days out. It would have been fine but we were stopped every other minute with people asking where we were from and what our names were. Which was nice for the first 30 minutes but we got slightly annoyed with it in the end. It was a joke. Went on a couple of rides but were were put off by the lack of hygiene of some of the people there. There were some shocking smells knocking about. And some of the pools of water were questionable.
Another day we took a tuk tuk to a shopping mall. I was wanting to buy a bra but after looking in the shop window I decided I didn't want to look like Madonna in the "Like a Virgin" video. There is nothing attractive about pointy boobs. We ended up watching The Three Muskateers at the cinema. Not the best film.
Our idea this week was to spend very little and do a lot of wandering around aimlessly. We treated ourselves to a slap up meal in a posh hotel one night which was bloody gorgeous. I had a tuna burger and it was delicious. Made a nice change from curry.
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31/10/11
This is our last few hours in Fort Kochin and we are about to get our bus to the airport and head back to Mumbai for our flight to Perth tomorrow. Really wish we weren't going back to that dive.
It didn't surprise us when we arrived in Mumbai that the taxi driver said we had to pay his parking charge for waiting for his next customer at the airport. How rude. We had already pre-paid for our taxi and he was still trying to get more money out of us. The cheek of some people.
