Kerela

I left Mumbai on Thursday and met up with Erik at the airport where we hopped a plain to Kerela. It was great to see Erik again after 7 weeks of being apart. The rest of the weekend was romantic as we were also celebrating our 18 month anniversary.

Kerela was a very interesting place to visit because the high mountains around the province made it relatively isolated from the rest of India until Europeans began to trade and colonization. The Christian influence on the area is strongly felt. Our first night in Kerela we ate at a fantastic fusion restaurant called History whose menu actually chronicled the history of the region through food. The perfect spot for an aspiring epicure.

The second night we spent in a small mountain town completely surrounded by tea plantations called Munar. While the 3 hours of site seeing we did there did not warrant the 5 hour drive each way, it was beautiful. If we had another day we could have gone for a hike or visited one of the near-by wild life sanctuaries.

We spent our last night in Kerela on a houseboat in the "backwaters" which was a body of water speckled with a series of man made islands of fields ringed by small houses. Like the other boat rides on this trip, the houseboat was a great place to kick back and relax.

The last morning in the Kerela we explored one of the older sections of the capital city Cochin, which included a palace and synagogue that had a strict dress code for entrance that we had to improvise to meet.