Alleppey

Another bus ride landed me in Alleppey, famous for the houseboats you could rent and slowly visit the lush greenery of Kerala. I decided to take an offer from one of the touts at the bus station who had pictures of the place. Of course if it wasn’t nice, I would have just gone to another place. However, when I arrived at my place it was shockingly nice and huge! I was shown my upstairs rooms and I do mean plural. First I had a living room, bedroom, a changing room, bathroom, and a gigantic balcony completely furnished all for the wonderful price of $5US/night.

In essence, the place was a new two-story house rented out to business executives and my room was normally $75US/night. Thank you global economic downfall.

On the bus I met a nice Swedish couple, Klara and Sven, who were also traveling the world and stayed at my fabulous digs. I ended up joining them for a canoe ride through the canals for the day. I was still interested in renting a houseboat and hoped to find some directly to make a more reasonable deal than the $200US+ packages from the tour agencies. Then all of a sudden I passed a row of hundreds of docked houseboats just waiting for some customers.:) Although the idea of a houseboat soon became pointless since I pretty much canoed the same paths and then some.