Palm trees!

The first long-distance night train takes us from Mumbai to Cochin, Kerala. A 28-hour journey to cover some 1500km and find ourselves in a new India. We leave Mumbai in torrential rain late in the morning. My bed is the bottom one. I generally prefer to sleep on top, but the positive note this time is that while lying down I can peek out of the curtain and look out the window. I fall asleep with a dark landscape of homogeneous clouds from which an occasional star appears. The next morning I open my eyes and the first image that stands out in front of me is the silhouette of palm trees. Palm trees, palm trees and more palm trees against the backdrop of a clear blue sky: here we are in Kerala! Complementing the greenish colour of the coconut palms are banana palms, papaya trees, and many other plants, each contributing a different shade of green. The green is punctuated by colourful flowers: purple-red, bright orange, white and pink and yellow. A dance of colours that keeps me mesmerised for hours. Even the bananas are colourful and varied in this region: small and big, thin and chubby, long and short, yellow and green and red (and who knew red bananas existed?). All delicious!

In Cochin we spend delightful days wandering the narrow streets of Fort Cochin, eating fresh fruit and freshly caught fish. After the desert and the mountains, it is nice to breathe in the sea air. After Cochin we travel to Alleppey to visit the backwaters of Kerala, and here another scenic wonder unfolds. The backwaters are a vast network of interconnected channels, fed by 38 rivers and encompassing five large lakes. Within this dense maze of canals are small towns and villages. We decide to visit the backwaters in a small rowing boat and my mind can only go back to the experience of touring Venice in a Gondola. And I really feel like that: in a tropical (and much bigger) Venice. In addition to the paessaggistic masterpieces that the coconut palms draw against a blue sky, during the 'gondola' ride we can observe the daily life of the villages: children washing on the banks of the canals, men fishing, women scaling fresh fish by rubbing them on the stones at the edges of the canals. For lunch, we eat typical dishes made of rice from the many rice paddies that grow in this network of canals, fresh fish, coconut curry, and we also try the typical todi, an alcoholic beverage made from the natural fermentation of coconut.

After Alleppey we move a little further south to Varkala. We are tired and need a couple of days' rest. We book a small bungalow a stone's throw from the beach, from our balcony we can admire the sea and the sunset with the sunlight leaking through the many coconut palms. Every day at sunset the last rays of the sun intertwine with the clouds creating a dance of intense colours from yellow to purple. The most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen in my life, each day a new spectacle that mesmerises us. "I dream or am awake?” Hard to say. Because leaving Varkala is like waking up from a dream, quiet, long and restful.

After arriving so far south, we decide to continue on to the 'Land’s end': Kanyakumari. This is the southernmost tip of India, where the three seas meet (the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea). It is considered a sacred place among the Indians and many people come here to bathe in the waters of the three different seas that converge. We join the thousands of people on the beach and bathe in these sacred waters. Kanyakumari is also the only place in India where one can watch both sunset and sunrise over the ocean. Our visit to Kanyakumari is really just a touch and go, then we head north again to Kerala and its palm trees.

They call Kerala 'God's own place', which can be translated as 'God's land' but I think it makes more sense to translate it as 'the land that God has chosen for himself' because if I were ever to imagine a paradise it would be like this, an idyllic landscape with lots of palm trees!

The friendliest person: the owner of the guest house in Alleppey, he greeted us with a smile and a cake, helped us organise a visit to the backwaters and made sure we had an experience we enjoyed. As there was a small hitch (the return boat broke down and we had to take a private boat) he made up the difference in price. He was very willing to help us with the problems we encountered in the room (see 'Lowlights of the trip')

Food: bananas!!!

Music: Gallan Goodiyaan by Yashita Sharma, Manish Kumar Tipu, Farhan Akhtar, Shankar Mahadevan, Sukhwinder Singh

Highlights of the trip: The breathtaking sunsets over the ocean

Lowlights of the trip: The guesthouse where we stayed in Alleppey put us to the test. The owners were lovely, and the room all in all wasn't bad. Too bad it was chock full of mosquitoes that plagued us all night (despite the layers of repellent we slathered on). Moreover, we were not alone in the room, but in the evening we were greeted by a large family of HUGE cockroaches that had clearly made their home in our bathroom.