Lonely Planet has this down as a must-do before you die, and having spent a couple of days on the backwaters of Allepey, we concur. This is a bird-watchers and fish-eaters paradise. We take a gentle motor through the backwaters, viewing sunken rice fields and people-watching the locals as they go about their business on the famous river banks of Kerala.
Finally, after a year’s absence! Welcome to the brand new followtheboat podcasts!
Podcasts, for those who don’t know, are free mp3 audio files that you may download and listen to on your stereo, ipod etc. They’re the equivalent to a radio show, and we produce weekly radio shows of our adventures. This entire series is dedicated to our travels around the Indian sub-continent. We aim to get under the skin of India, the people and the culture. We’ve got a ton of adventures that take us from the very north in Sikkim to the very south of Tamil Nadu.
In this first episode we take a nice, gentle stroll around Fort Cochin, the area in Kochi where the European adventurers settled after opening up trade routes between Asia and Europe. It’s a typically warm day so Liz hides under the shade of the tree-lined avenues, forever surrounded by the cawing of crows.
As the sun began its rapid descent, the sky began to fill with black kites, some of them tiny specks a mile high. At first we took them to be of the raptor variety, but as we emerged from the undergrowth into wide grassland we saw a hundred boys and men wrestling with long twine stretching into the distance.
One of the problems with not winterising your self-steering gear properly is that 18 months down the line you pay for it. When we started recommissioning Esper at the beginning of the year we were horrified to discover that our Pacific Plus self-steering gear would not budge. Worse still, I had turned the auxiliary rudder round so that it was pointing inwards and therefore made the brass gears inaccessible. Here is a video to the solution.
Judging by the positive response from the last video clip we thought we’d post up another one for your titillation. It seems you lot like instant gratification so for those of you who can’t be bothered to read our more exciting written and photographic blog entries, here’s another clip for you to download and savour. It’s a clip of the Lovely Liz stripping! Better watch it quick before she finds out…
Why haven’t you heard from us recently? Indeed we could ask why we haven’t heard from you too! Well, here’s our excuse:
Having made the decision to get off our asses and go for a sail, which will be our first in TWO YEARS (!), we are having to work our way through a stupid amount of jobs that should have been done before now. What with our land-based travels poor old Esper has been neglected somewhat, so now it’s time to attend to her needs and get cracking with those all important boat maintenance jobs.
I’m not going to bore you with a list of these jobs but I will entertain you with a quick guided tour of Esper and what she looks like after her guts have been ripped open. For those with no idea about living on a boat this is a little insight into what we get up to when preparing a boat for a sail.
Our last blog post on our trip to Sikkim ends with a photo-montage of the Limboo people. As you read in our last post we spent some time with out guide, Perna, and his family. They reside in the village of Darap in an old house passed down through the generations. Perna lives in relative luxury with a TV in his room, but the main house is like something out the dark ages. We were privileged to be allowed to spend a morning with these gentle people, even more so that they patiently allowed us to snoop around their house and photograph them going about their daily chores, which was mainly drinking salted tea and cooking pop-corn.
Ever been to Shangri-la? We have. It’s alive and kicking in Sikkim. Almost anywhere in Sikkim, outside a large town or tourist area, will do. We found our lost horizon in Darap, near Pelling. Two hundred year old houses growing out of the side of the mountain in which tiny people and chickens share their home with you is not something that happens every day. An afternoon getting high on hooch in the Himalayas is something to remember.
Liz has very kindly omitted the tale of our 17km trek to Kechopari Lake. In a nutshell it is the story of a 40 year old man realising his limitations. Realising them in a way that involves clutching the left arm, breathing like a 100 year old, having to walk backwards up hairpin tracks to avoid the constantly seizing leg muscles, all the while watching his girlfriend skip gaily by, light as a feather, hopping from leaf to cobweb like a woodland fairy.
Searching for the best view of India’s highest mountain took us to India’s Shangri-la. Relatively recently swept into the united states of India, Sikkim is like another country: we had to obtain permits to enter the ancient Kingdom of Sikkim.
Sitting on ankle-high stools we ate fresh pork straight from the flames of a dung oven, which we washed down with ‘Tongba’ and home made millet beer. After a few glasses of Rakshi this Arcadian village life became more and more attractive.
There’s a difference between a toilet cleaner and a toilet attendant. A toilet cleaner is someone whose job it is to clean toilets. A toilet attendant, however, is different. Their job is to lurk by the entrance to the convenience and guide you through, as if the ‘Toilet This Way’ sign was not obvious enough, and then point you to a cubical or urinal they believe is most suitable for your requirements. They’ll then mill around close by, putting you off going for a wee.
He knew he would never get out alive, so after twelve days he escaped, taking his mother and father with him. He didn’t know how many miles they walked over the mountains, but he told us it took two months to get here and build their first farm out of the local bamboo.
The entire school was eager to meet us, so we made a point of visiting each of the tiny, cold classrooms. With saucer-eyes, they drank in everything we said. We played games, swapped stories, listened to them sing and watched long and intricate dances.
