Fort Kochi

I slip and fall down one morning as the manager is showing us her animals, animals all soon to be sacrificed to the dinner table, I fell hard but got up with just a scratch. That evening when we returned to the guest house the manager had covered the driveway and the stairs with a thick layer of powdered white chalk. I felt very assured. Special also. That night Goldie and i dined out on a rooftop not 200 meters from our guest house. Gold and I both dressed up smart. I like the way Indians treat you if your wearing a shirt. They respect you all of a sudden some even complement you on your manner. A little cotton goes a long way. The restaurant was gorgeous dimly lit up in the darkness of 7.30pm. Strange Italian name I forget, the menu predictably international. We ate a very ordinary chinese take out style meal and talked about the fascinating spider which was living in the plant next to our table. The restaurant was clearly the Fort 'overs' dinner joint. We shared the roof top with 6 or so other touring couples all 40, 50+years. We felt youthful for sure.

During the days we tried to get our bearings in the town by walking out into uncharted territory where we found ourselves hopelessly lost on a number of occasions. One time in particular we were searching for a Peter Celli St for so long we thought we would follow the coastline to the tip of Fort Kochi where the tourist sanctuary sort of begins and ended up walking the complete opposite direction for about half an hour at which point we decided to head back into the center of Kochi to find a main road to follow back to tourist town. The result was a mess. The streets were tight and busy and full of motor cycles, kids, dogs and other sorts of Indian stuff. It was dirty and slummy and we were thumbs in it. It was hot and there were these dis orientating canals flowing through the whole deal, but we got our bearings and had a nice walk out. Kids were following us around asking "one pen? You give me one pen?" and "You take one photograph?". Very cute. Quite tiresome maybe.

These kids were boss!


After two nights at the ** inn (annex to the Karma) we uprooted and moved down the road.. a few roads.. bigish ones, to Costa Gamma Inn were through a ma named BENSON we had booked two nights accomodation. We had been emailing BENSON, the manager intimately for weeks now, had even walked over to meet him the day before the move but he was away on business. His landlord Trevor showed us how business was to go down. We moved in that morning with out a BENSON in sight and paid two nights in cash upfront 720 Rupees. The room had more character than the last and matching facilities (less a safe or two. Who needs em) plus some brilliant concrete shelving set into the walls excellent for packs. We set out to explore.


The streets away from the tourist area are a lot different. Very dirty bustling and louder maybe. We walked for half an hour through a colorful rundown 'local' district of Fort Kochi to get to Manicherry, another popular tourist centre where we planned to see Manicherry Palace or the 'Dutch Palace' the Jewish Synagogue on Jew Street, the local Spice Market and reportedly a great many happy swastikas. All of the sights bar the swastikas were their own degree of disappointing. Manicherry Palace Museum was an exceptionally boring museum. Goldie was told to stop drawing pictures by a security man and had a great flip out at him. After a fair amount of battling and harassment the manger had to give us permission to sketch which was by that point a fair amount less inspiring.


We ran into two New Zealanders Goldie already new, insane. Emma and Sammy, the boring museum takes a little win. We knew they were in the country and a few days before we had an email saying they were traveling South to Kerala soon But this was still an uncanny surprise. We experienced the Spice Market with them, underwhelming ( sounds mean but it was just another dolled up tourist heavy street were low season locals sort of beg you to buy stuff you don't need) and walked down Jew St to find the Synagogue was closed for a few days. With that we made a dinner date at famous Dahl Roti with the girls and proceeded to get lost in the tight windy local slums for a few hours before emerging back in the tourist area again with a little time to get changed for our date with Kiwis.