Day 91 (Fri 6 Oct) - Kanyakumari / Quillon

Up bright and early and headed off to the train station.

It seems like a lot of Indian holidaymakers had concluded their holidays as they sat miserably in the station waiting for the train their luggage piled round.

As soon as the train arrived we fought our way on and settled down for the 2/3 hour journey. And what beautiful scenery running alongside the Western Ghats ( [1], [2], [3]).

We soon realised that we had sat with a rather vocal Indian family in the berth next door, not that they were speaking! In fact, all over Indian we have experienced people spitting everywhere. To make matters worse this family all seemed to have very bad chest infections as they constantly made real loud noises as they cleared their throats and then proceeded to spit out the window. At one point Sarb thought it was raining; Jo had to inform him that it was actually this family gobbing out of the window.

To distract us, Sarb spent a good hour trying to perfect his Indian head shake, which was hilarious. To help him he even managed to take a video of himself to see how good he was - very sad. Jo joined in but decided she just didn't have the waggle.

Finally arrived in Quillon (also known as Kollam) and got an auto rickshaw, as Jo was feeling lazy, to the Tourist Guest Home. The room is really basic but it only costs Rs 200 per night (cheapest place to date!) with a proper toilet. We were only intending to use it as a base as we hoped to organise a house boat.

We went to the government Tourist office and told them that we wanted a house boat to take us up to Alleppey, further up the coast. They thrust a newspaper at us and told us we couldn't go to Alleppey because there had been an outbreak of chickgenze and already 80 people had died. Well that certainly put us off going.

Instead the chap suggested that we could go on a boat around the backwaters returning to Quillon. This sounded like a plan but we were a bit taken back when he said it would cost us Rs7000 (nearly 100 quid) for one night on a boat. Jo asked if they could check out the boat before they booked. Bearing in mind we are used to paying no more that 5 quid per night we were expecting the boat to be pretty luxurious. It wasn't.

We decided to skip the government Tourist Office and risk going with the numerous private companies. Booked a small riverboat punt for the next morning together with an overnight stay on a house boat starting that afternoon.

Wandered off to the Hotel Sudarsan for a beer and then back to our lodgings, passing through town en route ( [1], [2] ).

For dinner we hit a pizza place called, All Spice. Nice place.

During the night it rained very, very heavily indeed.