A trip through the Kerala backwaters

KERALA, India — An overnight trip through the backwaters on a houseboat is the highlight of a visit to Central Kerala.

Each boat comes staffed with a captain, an assistant and a cook, and from noon one day to after breakfast the next, you've got their full attention.

A cool drink of coconut juice? It's there. A beer? By your side in an instant. Lunch, dinner, tea, snacks ... your cook knows his way around a galley.

The houseboats are reworked kettuvallams — rice and spice barges once used to transport harvests from the backwater islands to the mainland.

Today, about 400 houseboats, mostly new ones, travel the waterways around a town called Alleppey, about an hour's drive from Fort Kochi.

The cost for an overnight with three meals varies from $100 to $130, or less depending on the age and size of the boat.

Some travelers go to Alleppey and shop around, but that's a hassle we avoided by connecting with Jos, our homestay host in Fort Kochi.

He arranged our next homestay, Emerald Isle, a 150-year-old villa on a rice farm on a secluded island eight miles from Alleppey, where the owner's cousins operate a fleet of kettuvallams that call at the lagoon right outside the door.

Pankaj, the taxi driver we hired for the week we're in Kerala, drove us to a town just outside of Alleppey. There we went by canoe across a lagoon to Emerald Isle.

Emerald Isle is on an island called Chathurthyakary. The only way to get here is by boat. Most of the villagers are rice farmers, or work in town and commute to the mainland on public ferries.

There are no roads or cars, only neatly swept paths of red clay that skirt the main waterway on two sides, and Venice-like canals connected by little foot bridges. Everyone gets around by walking or bicycling.

A few years ago, Vinod Kuncheria persuaded his father, Job, 63, to open a homestay on the family rice plantation. There are four large, nicely decorated rooms for guests in a 150-year-old villa on 7 acres of land surrounded by banana, pepper, nutmeg, papaya and jack fruit trees. The bathrooms are like walk-in closets with indoor and outdoor showers.

Lunch the day we arrived was pumpkin and peas, a spiced ocean fish, steamed okra, rice and fresh pineapple, all served on a banana leaf.

The food was so good, and the local villagers so friendly, we could have stayed for several days. But we had only one night, and after breakfast and a walk the next morning, Sam, the housekeeper knocked on our door.

"Your houseboat has arrived."

A perfect storm

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but certainly not the 90-foot-long floating hotel that pulled up to the dock.

The boat was built from bamboo and coconut wood, coconut palms and had floors of polished teak.

The bedrooms — two of them — were like staterooms on a cruise ship, each furnished with twin beds, a Western-style bathroom with a shower, a desk, wardrobe and ceiling fan.

At the front of the boat was a dining table and comfortable chairs in the shade for relaxing. In the back was the galley.

Storage batteries provided electricity, and there was a holding tank for running water.

Sabastian, 39, the cook, greeted us with chilled coconuts. He introduced us to the other two crew members with whom we'd be spending the next 21 hours — Saneesh, 36, the captain, and Biju, 38, the engine man.

While Sabastian went to the galley to fix lunch, Saneesh opened a black umbrella to shield himself from the sun and took the helm. Gliding through the palm-fringed lagoon, past stucco houses and men paddling wooden canoes, we felt a cool breeze and stopped sweating for the first time in days.

Our boat had an inboard diesel motor, quieter than some of the others with noisy outboards, and we would hear the thwacking sounds of clothes beaten on the rocks by women doing laundry and music coming from Hindu temples.

Our homestay hosts had treated us to some excellent home cooking, but nothing so far topped Sabastian's fresh pineapple curry. He served it with rice and side dishes of beet root, potatoes and vegetables and a platter of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes.

By the time we settled into the deck chairs to relax with a second beer, it was nearly 3 p.m. and the wind began to pick up. It had rained hard the night before, and there were dark clouds in the distance. The crew expected rain, but not this early.

Biju changed out of his uniform of long pants and put on a lungi, the wrap-around skirt that Keralan men wear.

Then he relieved Saneesh at the helm. Sabastian joined them on deck, and it was clear they were strategizing on a place to tie up and ride out the storm.

Biju steered the boat out of the lagoon into more open waters and headed into the wind.

Our destination was a thin dike lined with little brick homes and a big palm tree in the middle.

The rain came before we got there, and the wind whipped through the canvas coverings the crew pulled down over the open sides and front of the boat.

All three went out on deck. We stayed inside, pushing the furniture around to keep it dry.

Our crew, soaking wet, tied the boat to the palm trees, and came inside to dry off and figure out what to do next.

The storm passed almost as quickly as it came, and before long, we were on our way, cruising idly again past kids walking home from school and parents giving their babies evening baths.

Time to relax

We docked for the night around 5:30 p.m., ate dinner, drank more beer, talked and went to bed around 8 p.m. There's not much to do on a houseboat, but that's the point. This was the most relaxing time we had spent in India so far, and this being India, it wasn't dull.

Saneesh replenished the incense he had been burning on the deck as a repellant, and apparently it was working, because we saw few mosquitoes.

"No mosquitoes," he promised. "Sleep tight. No mosquitoes. Guaranteed."

Some boats have air conditioning, but ours wasn't working. We used the ceiling fan, and it was a hot night, but Saneesh was right, there were few mosquitoes.

All the houseboats converge at the same place at the same time in Alleppey in the morning.

During high season, it can be like a houseboat traffic jam. But only a few of the boats were running, and when ours docked at 9 a.m., Pankaj was there waiting to drive us to our next destination, the tea plantations of Munnar, 5,000 feet above sea level in the Western Ghat mountains.