Another day dedicated almost entirely to travel as we flew from Kochi to Goa, via Bangalore.  We had to leave our hotel at the ungodly hour of 4.30am to get to the airport for our first flight, which left at 7.30am.  After the farce of our Mumbai connection earlier in the trip, when given the choice of a 50 minute connection or a 5 hour wait for our connection we decided to err on the conservative side and therefore had a lot of time to kill in Bangalore airport.  Luckily this was one of the more interesting Indian airports that we had visited and I was able to plug my phone in and happily watch more Game of Thrones.  Both of the flights were right on time and we arrived in Goa at about 2.30 in the afternoon.  We would be staying in Panjim, the main city in the state of Goa – while we could have stayed at one of the beaches, I planned to make the most of the city’s central location to explore a bit more of the region.  After recovering from the journey a little we grabbed some dinner (Goa has a famous fusion of Indian and Portuguese sea food), then had an early night.

Chinese Fishing Nets

Our hotel outside Munnar

I got up early to watch the sun rise, and as it rose was able to fully appreciate what a beautiful location our hotel was in.  With its back to the mountains, our little lodge looked out south across undulating hills of tea plantations.  Unfortunately, our packed itinerary prevented us from lingering and after a quick breakfast we left at 8.30 (relatively late by the standards of the last few days), our driver took us back west to Kochi on the Arabian Sea coast.  The journey was not particularly pleasant – the air condition strained to counter the temperature that rose sharply as we left the mountains and as we approached the city we found ourselves in a reasonably solid gridlock.  We arrived at our hotel, the ‘Pepper Route’ in the mid-afternoon and after some lunch set about exploring Kochi. 

Jew Town - with the synagogue in the distance

Our driver of the last day had offered to stay on with us – ferrying us around the city for the rest of the day and taking us to the airport early the following morning, and with time tight we decided it made some sense.  Unfortunately, hiring a taxi driver outside of his native town turned out to not be such a great plan and we spent a slightly irritating amount of time asking for directions and making wrong turns.  The city itself was very pleasant.  Depending on who you speak to, the city is known as Cochin or Cochi (with a C or a K) and is located on a handful of spits, divided by a network of rivers.  We started our tour by heading for the so-called ‘Jew Town’ – a rather abrupt sounding term for the Jewish Quarter.  The city came to prominence as a major trading centre, ruled firstly by the Portuguese, then the Dutch and then inevitably by the British - with its golden age occurring under the first two of these.  Our first stop was the so-called ‘Dutch Palace’, which was originally built by the Portuguese but was renovated so completely by the Dutch that they got their name attached to it.  Not much to look at from the outside, the interior is extremely grand and is now a museum displaying various artefacts from Kochi’s history.

St Francis Church

Jew Town itself was full of small shops selling everything from standard tourist fare (scarfs and fridge magnets) through to stuff for the more hardcore home decorators - such as giant statues of lions and elephants.  Myself and Sergei settled for a range of traditional Indian trousers, what with our relatively limited carrying capacity.  Aside from the Dutch Palace and the shops, the main attraction of the area was the synagogue, but unfortunately this was shut for the day - the interior is supposedly very beautiful.  Our driver next took us back towards our hotel and the coast of Kochi where we visited the St Francis Church.  This church is the oldest European church in India, having been built in 1503 and was the resting place of the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama (who died in Kochi) for 14 years before his body was moved to Lisbon - his memorial stone remains inside.  We set goodbye to our driver at this stage (until the morning) and explored the rest of the town on foot - heading to the coast to see the famous Chinese fishing nets.  These nets are a bit of a throwback to a bygone era as modern methods of fishing have made these grand (and fixed) structures outdated and cumbersome - however they remain as a tourist draw.  After watching the sun set over the Arabian Sea (once again) while sitting on Kochi’s unfortunately litter-strewn beach, we made our way to one of a wide range of nice looking restaurants.  While we would be spending less than a full day in Kochi, I was really impressed by what I saw and liked the calm and touristy vibe.  As the gateway to anybody wanting to fly to India to see Kerala, I would really recommend a few days in the city centre itself.

Our driver arrived to collect us from Motty’s wonderful homestay at 6.30am and we set out on our four hour journey inland to the hill station of Munnar.  The hill stations are a series of towns located at a high enough altitude to be significantly cooler than their equivalents on the plains and were therefore often used by the British to escape the heat.  They are also excellent places to grow tea and other plants and crops, so as the scenery became more mountainous it also became far greener.  By the time we arrived on the outskirts of Munnar we were surrounded by beautiful tea plantations and stopped off at a local garden where they grew and sold spices.  I think it was the first time that I was ever able to see the actual plants of some of the spices, fruits and herbs that we are so used to in the supermarkets back at home – I am sure that many people think that pineapples grow on trees, where they are actually very odd looking ground-based fruit.  Other interesting plants ranged from vanilla to papyrus.  We also stuck our head in a garden that was nearby, though this was slightly less impressive – just imagine all the stuff that you would have to see in greenhouses in the UK, but growing outside.

Next on our whistle-stop tour of Munnar was the Madupetty Dam, a large hydroelectric dam with a reservoir behind that is a popular spot for locals to come for boating and pony rides.  By this stage the landscape was totally unlike anywhere else we had been in India – more like the Lake District than the dry and dusty plains that we had become accustomed to, outside Kerala at least.  We spent some time at the lake wandering around, visiting the so-called ‘Echo Point’ from where loud noises will reverberate all around the hills as echoes.  After grabbing a bite to eat we made our way to the Munnar tea museum – little did I know when I signed up to year abroad that I would be visiting not one but TWO tea museums, having already been inside the one in Hong Kong.  What more could an Englishman want… Where the Hong Kong museum mainly focussed on the properties of different tea and the ceremonies associated with drinking it, the Munnar tea museum was more geared towards the manufacturing of tea and was very interesting.  I found out a few real gems of knowledge – for example, tea plants (or trees as they actually are) can live and be farmed for hundreds of years and the plants at Munnar, which were planted by the British, have not been replanted (in China they still use plants that are over four hundred years old).  

Our last stop for the day was to be one of the more unique aspects of our trip - a ‘Kathakali’ performance.  These dramas, originating in Kerala, contain dancing and music but no speaking - the script is entirely delivered through movements and facial expressions.  We were to see an hour-long show, which was split into a thirty minute demonstration and then a thirty minute performace.  We were walked through some of the common expressions used in the dramas and what they mean, which proved to be very useful when the actual performance began.  Luckily, the guy running the group gave us uninitiated members of the audience a walkthrough of the storyline before it started - making it far easier to grasp what was supposed to be going on.  The show was very impressive - it is interesting to see how absorbed you can get by the movements of an actor’s extremely malleable face…  Given more time in India I would have liked to have seen a broader (and higher budget) version, but the little drama group that we visited in Munnar was an excellent introduction to a dramatic style that I had never previously come across.  It was getting dark as we left the theatre and unfortunately, due to its isolated position, that tends to signify the end of sightseeing in Munnar and we therefore made our way to our hotel, an isolated complex of cabins, for the night where we had our dinner.

We arrived in Kochi about half an hour late (which isn’t too bad really) and then decided to get a rickshaw for the hour journey south to the town of Alleppey in the backwaters of Kerala.  We didn’t know how long we would be staying in Alleppey, but had planned to spend four days in Kerala and to decide how to distribute this time as we went.  Our accommodation was to be in a homestay, in a house owned by a man called Motty who was the husband of the cousin of one of Sergei’s old professors.  As tenuous as this link may at first seem, this professor (Abey) had remained in contact with Sergei and urged him to stay at the homestay.  This turned out to be an excellent decision as Motty turned out to be just about the father of the Alleppey tourism industry and had been featured and recommended in numerous publications, from the Guardian newspaper to National Geographic.  Upon arrival we sat with Motty and his wife on the terrace outside their house and planned how we would split our four days in Kerala.  It appeared (as I suspected), that time would be too tight to see all of the major points of interest and that we would have to move at a reasonable pace to at least see the best bits.  We therefore decided to spend two nights in Alleppey to see the famous backwaters, then head up into the mountain tea plantations to a ‘hill station’ at a town called Munnar, before heading back to the coast to the city of Kochi where we would be leaving from for Goa.  It was going to be a bit hectic, but seemed like a good plan.

Rested and lunched, we decided to spend the rest of the day on the backwaters.  Having repeatedly mentioned these backwaters, I realise that I have yet to actually explain what they are.  The coastal area of Kerala is home to a massive network of irrigation canals, used for farming rice and catching fish and home to numerous villages.  This palm-fringed network is famous as a destination to hire a boat and lazily meander around from village to village along the canals.  We hired a motor boat for 400 rupees an hour and spent the rest of the day out on the water.  Tired from the overnight train, we headed out on a slow loop from Alleppey, lying in the shade on deck chairs in our boat and periodically falling asleep.  Half way round we stopped at a café which was sat on an island all by itself – a little shack with some cool drinks and plastic chairs surrounded by palm trees.  It was a place unlike anywhere that I had ever visited and was an ideal way to spend an afternoon of relaxation.  In the evening, having returned from our boat journey, we walked through the town to the west towards the Arabian coast where we ate at a small fish restaurant while the sun set.  All in all, a good start to our Keralan adventure.

With the Indian trip passing the two-thirds mark, we would be heading back west towards the Arabian Sea.  We would start by visiting the state of Kerala, one of the most unique of the states of India – with a very high literacy rate and an almost even amount of Hindus, Muslims and Christians. 

Our journey to Kerala would be by overnight train from Bangalore; however that would come later as we started the day in Mysore with a morning to look around the bits that we had missed so far.  While we had seen the palace, we hadn’t really explored the rest of the city much, so made our way to the central market.  As the smallest city we had visited thus far, Mysore was (relatively) straightforward to walk around – yes, you still had to be constantly on your toes to stop yourself being plastered over the front of a rickshaw, or from falling down a random hole, but the pavements were generally better and the traffic generally lighter than our experiences elsewhere.  The central market is supposedly one of the best places to see in Mysore, but we both found that it paled slightly when compared to the busier and more interesting market in Bangalore – maybe we had arrived at a quiet time.  From here we walked north to a junction where the city’s main church sits opposite the city’s main mosque – with a temple just down the road.  While the religious intolerance and strife caused after the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is infamous and well documented, from what we had seen the country actually now seemed to be a real beacon of tolerance, as shown by the interesting mix of religious buildings at this junction.

After grabbing some lunch we made our way over the Mysore station where we got the same train back to Bangalore as we had arrived on two days earlier.  We had a fair bit of time to kill between arriving from Mysore and departing for Kerala and also would have to change stations, so decided that we might as well go into the city centre, where we eventually found ourselves at the steak restaurant that we had ate at previously.  Our train left from Yesvantpur station in the north of Bangalore at 9.00pm and was set to arrive at Ernakulam (a district of the city of Kochi) the next morning at 8.30am.  We were in the ‘3AC’ class, which was the best class available on the train – the ‘3’ refers to the fact that three bunk beds are stacked on top of each other and the AC stands for air conditioning.  While the train was crazily cheap, it was also reasonably uncomfortable – far less comfortable than the sleeper buses ironically, but it was good to experience and I suspect that many of the other routes on the Indian rail network would have more comfortable trains.

Of all of the places that we were due to visit in our time in India, Bangalore was the only one that our Indian friends had questioned as a tourist destination.  There was, however, no avoiding the city as the third most populous in India and therefore a major transport hub.  Willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, we decided to spend a day exploring the city, while staying in probably the best hotel so far – the Elanza.  Bangalore has achieved fame as a major economic power in India and as the hub of the nation’s computing and electronics industries.  After the chaos of Mumbai and the faded glory of Hyderabad (the first and fourth largest cities respectively), Bangalore actually seemed to be the most ‘normal’ that we had come across – yes, it was extremely busy, but the roads actually seemed clean and not so chaotic.

With only a day to see such a large, spread out metropolis, we decided to hire a rickshaw for the day – it is possible to have a driver for about 5-6 hours for 1000 rupees – about £10.  We started by visiting the Botanical Gardens which happened to be preparing for their annual flower festival and were therefore very busy.  After paying a small entrance fee we were able to wander the grounds and enter the greenhouses – a pleasantly lush oasis in the midst of the big city.  Next up on our rickshaw tour was the bull temple, a Hindu temple dedicated to ‘Nandi’ the holy bull that was ridden by Shiva.  We were given a blessing inside by one of the priests – a red dot marked on the forehead.  By this stage we had been exposed far more to the Hindu religion than I had ever been before and the stories and gods were starting to fit in together – however it is definitely the most difficult religion I have come across to comprehend and understand and I am still none-the-wiser about many of the traditions.

From the bull temple we made our way to the Tipu Sultan’s palace.  We would be seeing a lot about this famous Indian sultan over the next few days as he was one of the last Indian rulers to fall to the British and is therefore worth a bit more explaining.  The son of another great ruler, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan was the king of the Mysore region with its base at the city of Seringapatam.  After the fall of Vijayanagara, Mysore became the major regional power and took part in four Anglo-Mysorean wars.  The first two of these wars were great successes for Tipu, however the third resulted in two of his sons being captured and the fourth resulted in his death on the walls of Seringapatam – more on that over the next few days.  Bangalore was not as important as the city of Mysore at the time, but was still a major city and therefore contained one of Tipu’s palaces – unfortunately the wooden structure has seen better days and the beautiful teak interior has lost a lot of its grandeur.  Opposite the palace is the city’s main market, used by residents to buy everything from fruit to flowers.  Our rickshaw driver came inside with us to show us around and, as with everywhere else in India, the locals all wanted to have their photos taken with their wares.

We grabbed a bit of lunch and then made our way through the old colonial district.  Bangalore rose to prominence under the British and became its main administrative hub in the south, along with Madras (modern Chennai).  It was a popular place for officers to come and Winston Churchill is said to still have an unpaid tab at the Bangalore Club – I have never heard it used, but apparently ‘getting Bangalored’ is a more traditional British term for getting drunk.  The old colonial buildings have been added to by similarly styled Indian administrative buildings, including the main assembly for the state.  Our last stop of the day continued the history of the Tipu Sultan.  After his death at the turn of the 19^th century, the British installed a different family as rulers of the region – the Wodeyar dynasty.  This family were puppets to the ruling British, but had grand palaces built for them – one at Bangalore and another at Mysore.  The Bangalore palace was supposedly based on Windsor Castle and was incredibly grand.  The current head of the Wodeyar house still owns the house but has opened it to the public – while all of the British puppet rulers lost their power after Indian independence, the majority were able to slot easily into positions of power in the new Indian government and the Wodeyars are no different to this.  The palace was being used for a ridiculously ostentatious wedding (which our angry rickshaw driver said was for corrupt politicians) and was therefore very busy.  Entrance was crazily expensive by Indian standards – about five times any other tourist sight, so we spent a long time walking around, listening to the free audio tour to squeeze out the most value from our visit. 

With that, we had finished our tour of Bangalore and stopped on the way back to the hotel at a few local shops for some souvenirs.  In the evening we found a Lonely Planet recommended steak restaurant – which in a country where the cow is sacred seemed to be too good to be true.  As I mentioned above, I still don’t understand many of the local traditions and the restaurant was full of local people eating big beef steaks – the first time I had seen beef served.  It had been a very good day and while we would probably have struggled to fill another day in Bangalore, our one day had been worthwhile.

Today was almost totally dedicated to travel purposes.  As I have already stressed (repeatedly), myself and Sergei were doing our best to avoid using overnight buses and having got around using them fairly well thus far, today was to be the last day where they would come into play.  Luckily, we came across a service that used a sleeper bus but in the day – leaving Hospet at 3pm and arriving in Bangalore at midnight.  As we had already done a pretty good job of seeing Hampi, we had a bit of time to spare and it seemed like a good way of experiencing the sleeper buses while minimising the amount of time driving in the dark (when the majority of accidents happen).  We went with a company called Meenakshi and we were pleasantly surprised by the bus – it was a “2+1” style bus, with single bunk beds on one side and double bunk beds on the other.  Myself and Sergei took a double and our ‘pod’ was amply large for two and came with air conditioning.  It was remarkably comfortable and, having downloaded the entire first series of ‘Game of Thrones’ to my phone, the journey flew by.  A rickshaw took us from the bus stop to our hotel (the Elanza) and we were able to have a full night’s sleep – all in all another excellent day in terms of getting from A to B.

Where our day yesterday had focussed on the religious centre of Viyanagara (within walking distance of Hampi Bazaar), today was to focus on the old royal centre which is further afield.  We had been approached at the tourist information centre yesterday by an official guide who was trying to get a group of tourists together for a cycle tour of the royal centre – which sounded ideal to us, so after an early breakfast we headed over to Hampi Bazaar for 9.30.  Our cycling group was remarkably international – with a single representative from Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, Russia and the UK, ranging in age from a few students to a fifty year old careers advisor on sabbatical.  The journey started off with a big hill climb but from there onwards was flat and the surface was, on the whole, pretty good.  The first few sights were reasonably close to Hampi Bazaar and our guide explained to us the history of some of the temples and shrines – how the broken statues could no longer be worshipped, but that some of the unbroken temples were popular with locals still.  The conservation authorities have had to battle with local residents over preservation of the ruins and there have been some forced evictions of shopkeepers who had set up in the ruins themselves.  Hampi Bazaar is a bustling little settlement and the ruins have already been flagged up as ‘endangered’ by UNESCO.

After this last collection of temples we cycled for about 2 kilometres towards the Royal Centre.  On our way we stopped off at the Queen’s Bath - a building that looked simple from the outside but inside was decorated in a characteristically elegant Islamic style.  This areas was far larger in scope than the religious centre, but was also not as well preserved.  The main reason for this was that while the foundations and lower structures of the buildings here were made from long lasting stone, the remainder of the structures were made from wood and have therefore long gone.  The most impressive part of the area was the old water storage tank – a deep square tank with interesting geometric patterns that is so well preserved that it looks like it is a reconstruction.

The group then made its way to the old female section of the palace, where the wives of kings and high ranking soldiers were ‘kept’ when the men were off fighting battles.  The women’s quarter was apparently guarded by an elite force of eunuchs.  The centre of this section was the ‘Lotus Palace’ designed to look like a lotus flower – the national flower of India.  To the south of the women’s section were the elephant stables.  The royal army would have contained hundreds and hundreds of elephants but these stables only had room for those belonging to the eleven most important riders.  To a westerner, a stable implies somewhere that isn’t particularly dramatic but then, you forget how big elephants are compared to horses – the amazing structure was one of the most impressive that we had seen.  From here our little group headed slowly back to Hampi Bazaar, through beautiful, shaded banana plantations.  We ate lunch as a group – the first time that we had really found other tourists to get talking to, which was very pleasant.  Myself and Sergei felt that we had seen enough of the ruins and therefore took it easy in a café for a few hours with our books.  We wanted to hang around until dusk to watch the sun setting over the bizarre Hampi landscape – a landscape that I decided dinosaurs would look right at home in.  As we sat watching the sun go down we were accosted by a brave monkey that, amusingly, grabbed Sergei’s food bag and stole his Galaxy chocolate bar – proof of how mischievous they are.

With that, we had finished our time in Hampi and I have to say it is one of the best places that I have come across on my travels.  The only ruins that can compare are those at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but somehow Hampi is more impressive due to its surreal, boulder-strewn surrounding landscape.  While two full days were enough to feel satisfied we hadn’t missed anything, we could happily have spent a little bit longer exploring ruins a bit further afield on bikes – or riding down the river on a coracle.  Unfortunately though, time dictated that we had to continue our journey south.