January 5th – The long and *winding* road

Again the next leg of our trip was going to be a long one – are you seeing a theme that we are spending a lot of time in the car – so we loaded up and headed out by 11am. As soon as we left the resort we were headed down, down, down a very long, very steep, fairly narrow and very curvy road. Nine hairpin turns to be exact. Traffic rules, lanes, passing zones, etc. seem to be merely suggestions in India and that proved to be the case on this crazy road as well. Uphill on a corner need to pass? No problem!! Huge busses and trucks coming at us in our lane? No problem. Kelly really enjoyed this journey as she gets car sick on far less interesting roads.

Our next stop was Cochin where we were promised another great hotel, Le Meridien – this was Lea’s favorite. The drive in to Cochin was very pretty and we was great to see the coastline again – we’d driven from the east side of the southern end of India to the west. Finding the hotel was a bit of a trick but our wonderful driver, Uday always finds his way and eventually we made it. After checking in and freshening up in our room we headed downstairs for dinner where we were treated to live music – ok maybe treated is a bit of an exaggeration. It was two guys singing American classics – they weren’t bad it was just a little funny to be sitting in this restaurant in India listening to the musical styling’s of Aaron Neville. The food looked great at the restaurant but my stomach was still protesting so I limited myself to mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy. Maybe it was just the lack of food I’d had recently but man those were the best potatoes ever.

The next morning Lea decided to take advantage of the hotels beautiful pool while Kelly and I headed out to find the Chinese fishing nets. We had less than two hours and were told that the drive to the nets could take 40 minutes so we almost decided not to go and I’m really glad we didn’t talk ourselves out of it. The little beach area where we found the fishing nets was full of activity including vendors offering to cook fish that we watched them pull in. The nets are huge and they are hooked up to a lever system of sorts with large rocks tied to ropes to help counter balance. We were invited to join a crew and Kelly and I had a great time hoisting the nets. Unfortunately ours came up empty.

Knowing that we needed to get on the road again we headed back to the hotel to pack up and leave. This time we are looking forward to a very short drive to where we will catch a houseboat for an overnight adventure on the backwaters of Kerala.