Let me get into tedious details…
We started from Bangalore Cantt at 10. We includes me, Anupama and PKA (pronounced paka and for very good reasons too). I was positively hysteric for the first few hours, till I went off to sleep, in the morning my enthu did not find any company , whenever I would see a nala or clutters of coconut trees, my delightful pointing them out would be converted into something , I don’t know what It was , but I found it strange that not everybody around me is jumping with excitement.
We reach Cochin, PKA takes control, idhar udhar, eventually we find a place to stay, in a quiet little street in Kochi, and that too very cheap and very good at that (200/-) .Since its much warmer, we enjoy the bathing hell more than we do at Pune or Bangalore. Have a very sorry breakfast at a very quaint restaurant called Colombo, in front of the Lodge. My companions have already started cribbing about sad south Indian food …(double sigh). I discover a new milk shake on the list , it is called Sharjah, and is Banana and bournvita in a milk shake. Anu’s Orange juice tastes like puke, though I didn’t divulge my opinion then to her.
By 1 we head off to the boat jetty, which is just 5 mins walk from here, its really quiet here. The sun is pumping out heat full-throttle, the next ferry to Fort Kochi is in another 30 minutes, for which we stand in queue for 20 minutes. The ticket costs an unbelievable 2.50, I had no idea there ever were modes of transport available, which cost this much. The ferry gives you a nice view of the Cochin coast, then the Cochin Shipyard, crosses wellingdon island, and finally Fort Kochi. I haven’t seen a boat jetty before, but they really cannot be compared to bus stands, as from where you get off from the boat, you generally walk through a narrow street, for a minute before you hit the road, which would be again a street only. So by now we have hit this street, there is a tourist information desk bang in front of our eyes, the moment we come out of the narrow aisle, rather there are lot of these desks all over Kochi.
There are “walking maps” of Kochi available at these desks, which was meant to be my guiding star, but they have run out of it, we make do with a plain city map of Kochi, but this is also good enough. Our stroll begins with checking out a fish dock, there are slimy puddles and flows we hop over, it is as smelly as it gets, but then in Kerala the smell of fish and stagnant sea water becomes your constant companion. Moving on, we have a direction now, we head towards Santa Cruz Basilica. Its closed, we just sit here for a whil, waiting for the clock to strike three, PKA starts hovering around the priest, every now and then , and its hilarious seeing him virtually bend with reverence , even when asking the priest for directions to Dutch Cemetery . Poor “father” as PKA had packed all his reverence in this address, seems uneasily shifty as he clutches his bag of unclean laundry and tries to live up to PKA’s image of his as the spokesperson of God. While we are waiting for the church open, a firang duo also reach here, the guy turns out to be German, but discloses it in the end, as he kept saying he is also from Bangalore. I guess we should have straightaway phrased the question as “Nationality?”. You have to pay 5 bucks to enter the church, I don’t remember who, but one of us was very offended by it. I can never forget Tirupathi, but then its all the same muckiness everywhere I guess, whether they ask for an entrance fee or not.
After having covered both the churches , we do some regular wasted tourist-type shopping, we are now facing the sea, where the Chinese fishing nets are at Kochi, its very nice here, I want to keep sitting here, we sip on hugest coconuts I have ever seen, and instead of malai we get the whole coconut ready to be eaten. We now move to the jewish town and the Dutch Palace. The jewish town might be a shopper’s paradise for anyone looking for quaint stuff, at least checking it out was fun, but my fellow companions are in a hurry to somewhere I don’t know where, when we hit the jewish synagogue it is too crowded and nothing keeps me here for long enough, I guess the major portion of my time here was spent in tying and untying my shoe laces, back in the jewish town streets, we peek into shops, but hurry hurry , (ARGH), Anu likes a cigarette case, which the owner claims is made of rose wood, it has a sheet of wood which rolls all over the box to cover or reveal the contents. We replenish our level of coconut water and head to palace, which seems to me to be nearer to a dak bungalow in comparison to a palace, it doesn’t really fit my perception of a palace, its plain wood, cement, and the stuff of which your and my house is made. We have only ten minutes to see it, PKA stays outside, me and Anu split , me trying to check out as much as possible, in the Japanese murals there are some real unseen before murals of Vishnu putting his multiple limbs to please multiple female goddesses or I I don’t know what, whew! I go tell Anu about the discovery and we remark on what a hypocritical society we have… which we keep building upon a day or two later. We see PKA standing outside a temple on which there is a board in place , which says only hindus allowed. PKA has not thought of making the visit till we arrive and enter the temple protected by us, stand there, all reverence, some firnags are entering the temple with their shoes on, I was just pointing that out to them , I guess all of us mumbled something and at the same moment the woman notices the notice in front of the temple and they leave apologizing to us, and well stupid world what were they apologizing for, and why to us, I felt like as if we for an instance were holding the baton of protecting Hindu religion by not letting anyone else enter the temple.
We head back to Ernakulum, a little lying down in the rooms, then strolling on the streets, looking for a place to eat, we find a bakery, have dinner, nice fish, head back to bakery, buy junk, buy a little more necessities and back to Hotel to sleep.
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