Back on the coast, in Kochi, we stayed one night in the peninsula of Fort Cochin [location]. The highlight there was a visit to the harbor front, where we stopped to help some fishermen work the famous “Chinese” fishing nets – an ancient technology introduced to the area by Chinese fishing fleets hundreds of years ago and still in use today [location]. Read on and check out the photos from Kochi and photos from Kannur.
As we walked there, we passed a street performer: a snake charmer. I must say, I was very impressed as he handled three cobras, each in its own basket, simultaneously! See more photos.
The next day, we met up with my parents and began a long (11-hour) drive up the coast. We arrived late at night at the Kannur Beach House [location]; indeed, the road turned into little more than a narrow dirt track, in the pitch darkness. We were indeed in the right place, a cute B&B right on the seashore. My only regret is that there was no place for Ashok, the driver (many of the bigger hotels have quarters for the drivers), so he had to sleep in the van. In the morning, we had a brief stroll alongside the Arabian sea, a beautiful beach.
At breakfast, we asked our hosts for directions to our next stop: a resort high in the hills of the Western Ghats, more or less due east. They said: there’s the short way, which has terrible roads and is about 75km, or there’s the long way, which has usable roads and is about 180km. Ashok confirmed this advice with some local drivers and decided on the long route. Wow, if those were the good roads, I’d hate to see the bad ones. Twisty, narrow, and rutted. It took us about 8 hours to get there. See the photos from Kannur and the drive to Coorg.
After passing through one tea and coffee plantation after another we arrived at the Orange County Resort in Coorg [location]. More on that in the next installment.
This post was transferred from MobileMe to WordPress in 2020, with an effort to retain the content as close to the original as possible; I recognize that some comments may now seem dated or some links may now be broken.
David Kotz 
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