Ten days in Kerala: India at half the speed and twice the green

Four nights in Kochi, three in the tea hills above Munnar and two on the backwaters at Alappuzha. All of it by road, none of it in a hurry.

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Length
10 days, 9 nights
Where you stay
Kochi, Munnar, Alappuzha
Places
22 across 10 days
123
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Kerala is a strip of coast about 550 km long and rarely more than a hundred wide, walled off from the rest of India by the Western Ghats. That geography explains almost everything about it. The mountains kept invading armies out and let ships in, so the state has been trading with Arabs, Chinese, Jews, Portuguese, Dutch and British since long before any of them thought of conquering it.

What that leaves is a place that feels less like the rest of the country than anywhere else in it. Fewer forts, more churches. No desert palaces, but a synagogue from 1568 and a beach where Chinese fishing nets have been dipping into the water for six hundred years.

The route below runs from the coast up into the hills and back down to the water, which is the shape the land already has. Nothing on it is more than four hours from the last thing.

Highlights

  • Chinese fishing nets going down at sunset on the Fort Kochi shore
  • A working synagogue of 1568 at the end of a lane of spice warehouses
  • Tea terraces from horizon to horizon at 1,600 metres, and a herd of wild tahr above them
  • Sunrise from a ridge on the old cart road to Tamil Nadu, above the clouds
  • A night moored in the backwaters, with the engine off

Where to stay

Kochi, four nights

Kochi is really two places joined by ferries. Ernakulam on the mainland is the working city, with the shops, the station and most of the hotels. Fort Kochi and Mattancherry, on a peninsula across the water, are the old port: warehouses that still smell of ginger, Portuguese and Dutch buildings, and streets narrow enough that everything is walkable.

Stay on the peninsula. Four nights sounds generous for a city this size and is not, because half the pleasure is having nothing scheduled and walking round it again.

Munnar, three nights

About 86 km from Kochi.

Munnar sits at about 1,600 metres in tea country the British planted in the 1870s and never stopped expanding. The tea covers everything: whole hillsides clipped into a green surface with the occasional silver oak sticking out of it.

The town itself is a scruffy junction and nobody comes for it. Stay outside, on a plantation or a ridge, and treat the town as somewhere to buy tea and leave. Nights here are genuinely cold, which after the coast is the point.

Alappuzha, two nights

About 104 km from Munnar.

Alappuzha, still widely called Alleppey, is a canal town on a lagoon, built by a nineteenth-century minister who wanted a port and dug the waterways to serve it. The coir trade that followed is still going.

The town is not the attraction and two nights is right: one to arrive and see the beach, one for the water. Everything worth doing here floats.

Day by day

Day 1 in Kochi

Fort Kochi, the nets and the beach at sunset

Kochi's airport is about an hour north of the old town and takes direct flights from the Gulf and much of Asia. It also runs entirely on its own solar farm, which was a world first when it opened and is the sort of thing Kerala mentions.

Drop the bags and walk to the shore. The cantilevered fishing nets along the north edge of Fort Kochi are the town's emblem and they still work: four men to a net, a counterweight of stones, and a dip every few minutes for whatever the tide brings in.

The beach beside them is nothing much as beaches go and is the right place to be at six o'clock anyway, when the light goes orange and half the town comes out to watch the container ships turn into the harbour.

  1. 17:00

    Chinese Fishing Nets

    Other

    Brought here by Chinese traders in the fourteenth century and worked by hand ever since. Ask before you climb onto a platform; the crews will usually say yes and will expect a tip.

  2. 18:00

    Fort Kochi Beach

    Nature

    Where the first Portuguese and Dutch fighting broke out in the seventeenth century, now a promenade with stalls selling roasted peanuts. Buy fish at a net and any of the shacks behind will cook it for you.

  3. 20:00

    Dinner in Fort Kochi

    Eat

    The old town has more good places per street than the rest of the state. Karimeen, appam, or a plate of anything with coconut in it, which is everything.

With more time: If you land early, the streets between the church and the shore are the best introduction to Fort Kochi and cost nothing: Dutch gables, Portuguese doorframes, wall murals from the art Biennale, and cafes in warehouses that used to hold pepper.

Day 2 in Kochi

The Portuguese town: churches, a museum and Princess Street

Fort Kochi was the first European foothold in India and the buildings are still standing in the order they were put up. Today is a slow walk between them, and none of it involves getting in a vehicle.

Start at the church that held Vasco da Gama's grave from 1524 until his remains were shipped home to Lisbon fourteen years later. The tombstone is still in the floor. Then the cathedral a few minutes away, and a museum in the bishop's house that lays out what the Portuguese century actually did here.

By early afternoon you will have run out of monuments, which is correct. Fort Kochi is a place for wandering, and the cafes know it.

  1. 09:30

    St. Francis Church

    Religious

    Built by the Portuguese in 1503 and the first place Vasco da Gama was buried. Plain, whitewashed, and about fifteen minutes' worth of looking, which is all it asks for.

  2. 11:00

    Santa Cruz Cathedral Basilica

    Religious

    Founded in 1502, rebuilt since, and reckoned the first European church raised anywhere in Asia, with oil paintings added under the British. Loud, painted and not remotely restrained, which after the church down the road is a surprise.

  3. 12:30

    Indo-Portuguese Museum

    Culture

    Small, well laid out, and the one place that explains how a trading post became a colony. The excavated fort wall in the basement is worth the ticket on its own. Closed Mondays.

  4. 14:00

    Lunch on Princess Street

    Eat

    The one street in Fort Kochi that was never raided or demolished, now lined with cafes in colonial houses. Slow service, good coffee, and a fan overhead.

With more time: The public ferry across to Ernakulam costs a few rupees and takes about twenty minutes. Go over in the evening for the sake of the crossing, walk the waterfront and come back on the last boat.

Day 3 in Kochi

Mattancherry: the palace, the synagogue and Kathakali after dark

Twenty minutes south along the peninsula is the other half of old Kochi, and the better half. Mattancherry is where the spice trade actually happened, and the godowns along the water still deal in ginger, turmeric and cardamom.

The palace here went up in 1568, a Portuguese present to the Raja of Cochin, and was later repaired by the Dutch, which is how a building nobody Dutch ever lived in ended up named after them. The murals upstairs are the reason to go in.

Behind it runs the lane still called Jew Town, where a synagogue of the same year stands at the end of a street of antique shops. Check the day before you set out: it closes for the sabbath on Friday afternoons and Saturdays, and on Jewish holidays.

Finish with Kathakali. The full temple version runs all night, but the theatres in town do a shortened performance with the makeup applied in front of you first, and watching a man spend an hour turning his own face green is half the show.

  1. 10:00

    Dutch Palace

    Historic

    Portuguese-built, Dutch-repaired, and hung with some of the finest murals in India: the Ramayana across several rooms, painted floor to ceiling. No photography inside, which nobody enforces gently.

  2. 12:00

    Jew Street and Paradesi Synagogue

    Religious

    Built in 1568 and the oldest working synagogue in the Commonwealth, floored with hand-painted Chinese tiles, no two the same. The lane leading to it is the old spice quarter and worth the walk on its own.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch in a Mattancherry godown

    Eat

    Several of the old spice warehouses on the water are now restaurants. Ask for the fish of the day rather than reading the menu.

  4. 17:30

    Greenix Tourist Theater

    Visit

    Arrive an hour before the performance for the makeup, which is done in the open. Kathakali is enormously stylised and impossible to follow blind, so read the summary they hand out at the door.

With more time: The antique dealers along Jew Town Road sell a great deal of genuinely old furniture and a great deal that is not. Nothing is priced, everything is negotiable, and shipping quotes vary wildly, so get two.

Day 4 in Kochi

The mainland: a folklore museum, a maharaja's palace and Marine Drive

Cross to Ernakulam for the day. This is the side of Kochi that people live and work on, and after two days of colonial frontage it is a useful corrective.

Two collections are worth the trip. One is a private museum built as three floors of traditional Kerala architecture and filled with masks, bronzes and temple carving, with a theatre on the top floor. The other is the old palace of the Kochi royal family, which holds the largest archaeological collection in South India in a set of buildings you can walk round in an hour.

End on the waterfront promenade in the middle of the city, which is closed to traffic, faces west across the backwater, and is where Ernakulam goes at sunset with an ice cream.

  1. 10:00

    Kerala Folklore Museum

    Culture

    Built in the styles of three regions of Kerala using timber salvaged from old houses, and packed with masks, bronzes and ritual objects. The performance space upstairs runs most evenings.

  2. 13:00

    Hill Palace Museum

    Culture

    The Kochi maharajas' palace, now a museum of more than 500 objects across sixteen galleries, with gardens and a small deer park around it. Closed Mondays. Allow ninety minutes and skip the zoo.

  3. 17:30

    Marine Drive Walkway

    Other

    A two kilometre car-free promenade along the backwater with the shopping district behind it. Walk the length of it in the last hour of daylight, when the ferries are crossing and the sun goes down behind Fort Kochi.

With more time: For a different kind of day, the beaches on Vypin island are about forty minutes north: proper sand, safe swimming, backwater on the other side of the road, and dolphins if you are lucky.

Day 5 in Munnar

Up into the tea: the ghat road, a museum and the first view

The drive to Munnar is four hours and the last part of it is the good part. The road climbs through rubber, then banana, then cardamom forest that smells of it, and finally comes out on a ridge where the whole landscape has been clipped into tea.

Leave after breakfast and treat the drive as part of the day. The waterfalls signposted off the road are worth ten minutes each and no more, but the cardamom forest is worth stopping in properly.

In Munnar itself, the plantation company's museum is the one thing in town worth an afternoon. Then go and stand somewhere high before dinner, because the light on tea at five o'clock is why people take a thousand photographs here and like none of them.

  1. 09:00

    Drive from Kochi to Munnar

    Travel

    Roughly four hours, and the climb starts about two thirds of the way. Sit in the front if you are prone to car sickness, and allow an extra hour for stopping.

  2. 14:30

    KDHP Tea Museum

    Culture

    A working factory tour attached to a small collection of colonial-era oddments, with a half-hour film first. You come out understanding the difference between what grows here and what ends up in a teabag.

  3. 17:30

    Pothamedu View Point

    Visit

    A viewpoint a few kilometres out of town over coffee and cardamom as well as tea. Go for the last hour of light and bring something warm; it drops fast once the sun is off the slope.

With more time: Buy tea at the plantation shops rather than at the stalls on the main road. The graded loose leaf is a fraction of what the same thing costs at home, and cardamom and pepper here are as good as they get anywhere.

Day 6 in Munnar

Wild tahr in the morning, a dam and an echo in the afternoon

The national park north of town is the reason Munnar is more than a view. It protects the largest surviving population of Nilgiri tahr, a mountain goat that came close to extinction, and they graze in full view beside the road up.

Go at opening. Only a short stretch of the park is open to visitors, everyone goes up in the park's own buses, and by ten the queue for those buses is the whole morning. It closes altogether for a few weeks in February and March while the animals calve.

The afternoon runs the other way, east along the Top Station road, past a reservoir with boats on it and a bowl in the hills that returns everything you shout at it four times over. It is unashamedly a family day out and it is very pleasant.

  1. 07:30

    Eravikulam (Rajamalai) National Park

    Visit

    Rolling grassland and shola forest across roughly 97 square kilometres, with tahr close enough to photograph badly. Buses run from the gate; private vehicles are not allowed up.

  2. 13:00

    Mattupetty Dam

    Other

    A reservoir with speedboats, pedalos and horses, in the hills east of town. The dam wall itself is the best view, and it costs nothing to walk out onto it.

  3. 15:00

    Munnar Echo Point

    Visit

    A small lake in a bowl of hills where a shout comes back three or four times. Full of teenagers testing it, which is most of the entertainment.

With more time: Anakkulam, an hour and a half north, has salt pools that wild elephants come down to at dusk. Shared jeeps go from Munnar in the afternoon, and the only thing that limits the sighting is how long you are prepared to wait.

Day 7 in Munnar

Above the clouds at Top Station, then a lake and an evening of Kathakali

Leave in the dark. Top Station is an hour east on the old road towards Tamil Nadu, at the highest point of the ridge, and the reason to be there at sunrise is that the valley below it fills with cloud overnight and then burns off while you watch.

The slopes here carry the neelakurinji, a shrub that flowers once every twelve years and turns the hills blue when it does. Most years you get grass, and the view is the same.

Come back slowly. There is a lake on the way with pedal boats and almost nobody at it, and then an afternoon free. Spend the evening at the cultural centre in town, where they perform Kathakali and Kalarippayattu, the Kerala martial art that trained soldiers here for centuries before anyone put it on a stage.

  1. 05:30

    Top Station

    Other

    An hour out on the Tamil Nadu road, and the best view in the district. Buses run from Munnar; a jeep is faster and worth it at that hour. Take a jacket, it is genuinely cold before seven.

  2. 09:30

    Kundala Lake

    Visit

    A reservoir in thick jungle on the way back down, with pedal boats for hire and nobody at all round the far side. Twenty minutes or two hours, depending on the mood.

  3. 17:00

    Kathakali and Kalarippayattu performances

    Visit

    Kathakali and Kalarippayattu in the same evening in a small hall in town. The martial art half is the surprise: a lot of it is fought with fire.

With more time: The afternoon is the obvious place for a plantation walk. Most estates let you cross them on foot, the pickers will talk to you, and an hour among the bushes tells you more about how tea works than the museum does.

Day 8 in Alappuzha

Down to the coast, and the pier at Alleppey

Four or five hours back down the ghats and out across the paddy to the lagoon. The landscape changes completely: rice, coconut, water on both sides of the road, and the water level frequently above the fields.

Alappuzha is a working town rather than a resort, and the best thing in it is the beach, which is long, flat and mostly used by locals. An iron pier runs out into the sea from it, built when this was a port and now going quietly to rust.

Keep the evening simple. Tomorrow is the day on the water and it starts early.

  1. 09:00

    Drive from Munnar to Alappuzha

    Travel

    Four to five hours down the hairpins and across the paddy. Break it at Kottayam if you want lunch somewhere with a menu.

  2. 17:00

    Alleppey Beach

    Nature

    A wide, flat, clean beach with an old trading pier still standing out in the water. Walk the promenade at sunset, buy peanuts from a stall, and eat at the Indian Coffee House like everyone else does.

  3. 20:00

    Dinner near the canal

    Eat

    Karimeen pollichathu is the local dish: a backwater pearl spot, spiced, wrapped in banana leaf and baked. Order it a day ahead at smaller places.

With more time: If you are here on the right August Saturday, the Nehru Trophy snake boat race is one of the great spectacles in India: crews of around a hundred men to a boat, on a lagoon lined with grandstands. It has run since 1952.

Day 9 in Alappuzha

The backwaters, in a canoe and then a barge

Start in a small boat. A punted canoe leaves at first light, takes about three hours, and goes into canals a metre or two wide where the houseboats cannot follow. You pass front doorsteps, ferry jetties, children going to school by boat and men twisting coir rope on the bank. It is the best three hours of the trip and it costs very little.

Board the houseboat at midday, if you are taking one. They cruise the wide lakes in the afternoon, cook lunch and dinner on board, and moor against the bank at dusk, because the whole fleet is required to stop for the night.

There is an old black granite Buddha south of town, a rare thing in Kerala and unmistakably ninth century, which fits neatly into the drive back if you are staying on land instead.

  1. 06:30

    Dawn canoe through the village canals

    Travel

    Three hours, poled rather than driven, starting around half past six. Book through your guesthouse the night before and take a hat, because there is no shade at all after nine.

  2. 12:00

    Board the houseboat

    Stay

    Check the boat before you pay: air conditioning that runs all night rather than only when the generator does, and a crew of three rather than two, are the two things worth the difference.

  3. 15:00

    Karumadikkuttan

    Visit

    A ninth-century black granite Buddha, damaged and protected, standing under a canopy south of town. Kerala has almost nothing else like it. Ten minutes, and a reminder of what was here before everything else was.

  4. 17:00

    Marari-beach

    Nature

    Sixteen kilometres north, and the beach people actually swim at: wide, quiet and lined with coconut. Buses run from the town stand, or take a rickshaw and arrange the return.

With more time: If you would rather not do both boats, the canoe is the one to keep. A day on a barge is comfortable and a bit slow; three hours in a canal at sunrise is the thing people describe when they get home.

Day 10 in Alappuzha

Last morning on the water

Houseboats cast off around seven and are back at the jetty by nine, so a morning departure works either way. Kochi airport is about ninety minutes north by road, and trains run from Alappuzha station up the coast and south to Thiruvananthapuram.

If there is an hour spare, spend it on the canal bank rather than in the town. The coir yards start early, the ferries run from dawn, and the water at that hour is doing what it does whether or not anyone is watching.

  1. 07:30

    Breakfast on board or at the jetty

    Eat

    Appam and stew, or puttu with banana and papad. The boat crews cook a better breakfast than most hotels manage.

  2. 09:30

    To Kochi airport or Alappuzha station

    Travel

    Ninety minutes to the airport by road, and worth allowing two if you are travelling through Ernakulam at rush hour. The station is ten minutes from the jetty.

Before you go

When to go

November to March, without much argument. December and January are dry, warm and busy; February and March get hotter but stay comfortable in the hills.

The southwest monsoon arrives around the start of June and runs into August, and it is a serious amount of rain. A second, lighter monsoon comes from the northeast in October and November. Kerala does sell the rains as a season in their own right, mostly for ayurvedic treatment, and there is something in that: it is green, empty and cheap. It is also wet all day.

Getting around

Hire a car with a driver for the two transfers. Kochi to Munnar is about four hours, the last ninety minutes of it climbing hairpins through cardamom and tea, and Munnar to Alappuzha is four or five back down. Both are far more pleasant than they sound and neither is worth self-driving.

Inside Kochi, use ferries. The public boats between Ernakulam, Fort Kochi and Vypin cost a few rupees, run all day, and are quicker than the bridge traffic. Alappuzha and Munnar are small enough for rickshaws.

Houseboats, and the honest version

The big rice-barge houseboats are the postcard and they are not the best way to see the backwaters. There are well over a thousand of them, they draw too much water for the narrow canals, and a fleet of them moored side by side at dusk is not the solitude the brochure implies.

Book one for a single night if you want the experience, and take a small punted canoe through the village canals in the morning as well. The canoe goes where the barge cannot: past houses, ferry crossings, school runs and men cutting coir on the bank.

Food, which is a reason to come

Kerala eats coconut, curry leaf, black pepper and fish, and the standard is high in ordinary places. Order a sadya, the vegetarian feast served on a banana leaf, at least once at lunch. Karimeen pollichathu, a backwater fish baked in a leaf parcel, is the dish of the Alappuzha stretch.

Breakfast is its own argument for the state: appam with stew, puttu with black chickpeas, idiyappam. Coffee here is better than tea, even in the tea hills.

Kerala rewards the days with nothing in them. An hour on a ferry that costs four rupees, a plate of rice on a banana leaf at a place with no sign, an afternoon watching rain come across a lagoon from under a roof.

Ten days is enough to see all three parts of it and still spend a whole afternoon doing none of that. Spend it.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is ten days enough for Kerala?
For this stretch of it, yes, and it is the right length. Adding Wayanad in the north or Thekkady and Varkala in the south turns it into a fortnight, which Kerala also carries easily.
Do I need a houseboat, and for how long?
One night at most, and a morning canoe trip matters more. The barges are comfortable but they cannot enter the narrow canals, which is where the backwaters are actually interesting.
Kochi or Munnar first?
Kochi. The international airport is there, the road runs uphill from it, and arriving jetlagged at sea level is easier than doing it at 1,600 metres after four hours of hairpins.
Is the monsoon really that bad?
It rains hard and often between June and August, and again more lightly in October and November. Prices halve, everything is green, and ayurvedic clinics consider it the best treatment season. Whether that is a holiday depends entirely on you.
Is Kerala good for a first trip to India?
It is the gentlest introduction there is. Less hassle than the north, high literacy and widely spoken English, good roads, and food that is easy to like. The trade-off is that it looks nothing like the India of the postcards.
How much of this needs booking ahead?
The car and driver, the houseboat if you want a specific one, and hotels over Christmas and New Year, when the coast fills up. Everything else can be arranged the day before.
Can I change this plan?
Yes. Copy it and shift the nights where you want them. The only ordering that matters is coast, hills, water: doing the backwaters before Munnar means finishing the trip on a mountain road rather than on a boat.