EPTI managed to get away from the beach in Palolem at the 11th.
Had met a couple of nice people there, especially a number of longtimers who had interesting stories to tell and still chatted about the usual everyday-everywhere problems like anybody...
My train took of from a empty and almost completely dark platform at midnight and arrived in Varkala in Kerala 18h later. Varkala is a nice city, no that would be wrong the village near Varkala city which is the touristic center is pretty nice. It consists of a huge number of hotels and restaurants that start right at the top of the cliffs for which Varkala is so famous. I had found a nice hotel behind this scenery under the palmtrees with a nice old man that owned the bungalow and with whom i spent a couple hours of talking every night. Apart from that I met an english guy from Hampi again and chilled around with him for 2 days.
After that I hopped on a train on the 15th Independence Day in India, but the expected crowd was nowhere to be found in the train. The train took me a couple kilometers north again to Aleppey, where I Met a Canadian I had met in Goa to go to the famous Backwaters.
He had found a nice guesthouse where they started a jamsession every night. That was one reason why we did not do one of the Houseboattours you normally charter in Aleppey. We instead did a 5h canu-trip through some small channels the first day and arranged to go to a homestay on one of the islands the next day, where we got lunch and did a small walk and later joined a guided walk over the island and also got a nice dinner in the end: beef-curry... yeah in Kerala things are different ;D
The third day we took a ferry to Kottayam and some busses to reach Munnar.
Munnar is a cold place in the Western Ghats. There are a lot of tea plantations and spice plantations surrounding the area and you can do some really nice treks, so thats what we did the next day.
Afterwards I took a bus to Cochin. Cochin is a nice town, well actually only the Fort Cochin part is, which is the oldtown so to say, where the Chinese started trading spices, the Portugese under Vasco da Gama landed (who also died there) and later Dutch and English took over. It has some nice historical buildings there but its really not so huge and would have been really boring after more that 2,5 days. But after that I had to take my train back to Delhi anyway.
Th trainride took me 51h, yet for this time I took First AC, which is the highest class to travel and it was kinda worth it, I had to share my compartement with a Colonel from the Indian army, who showed me where to smoke although it was forbidden etc. Also the berths are a bit bigger and i could sleep quite good for the first time on the train. Food was excluded from the price though, which I did not like too much yet paying ca. 5$ for alle the meals is not so expensive in the end.
Now I stay in a nice room in a hotel in the Tibetian Colony in Delhi which is a nice microcosmos, tomorrow I will do some shopping in the city and the day after I will finally do some sightseeing in Delhi :D
Maybe I find time for one more post, otherwiese I will sum up the whole trip, put pics etc in it and post that (may take some time).
