Kerala's Backwater Country

Kodamthuruth is about as far away from the big city life of Fort Kochi as you can get. It's a small water town paddeled by punt canoe. We're here for only a few days living with Manu and his family. Hundreds of palm trees, a slight wind blowing at times, ducks quacking, various types of herons and egets and eagles fly overhead.  One partially paved road. Hundreds of miles of waterways with people living on canals instead of streets.

Sugu is our boatman with a PhD in water. He paddles or poles us for hours and hours in the evenings through the smallest canals leading to the rice paddies that do double duty, with the assist of pump houses, as tiger prawn beds. In the early morning hours he paddles us to the newer canals of homes and fishermen who are collecting last nights bounties or early morning fish from the Chinese Fishing nets

People are people wherever we go. While we look into the metal containers to see what kind and how many, fishermen are ready to pose for a photo but first they straighten their shirt or take off their turban or reach in to grab two of the bigger fish to be in the photo.  Women on the shore, just a few feet from us, smile and wave inbetween doing the laundry or watching the kids. Canoes passing us have a word for Sugu and do the Indian head jiggle to us to give consent to a photo. 

This is tranquility times ten. Reflections of the palm trees on the water are only slightly rippling. The 24/7 chanting from the mosque's loudspeaders, hammering from across the lagoon, birds coo cooing, and children's voices are the distant background nosie. And then the phone rings.  In the middle of a canal with eagles soaring and colorfully thick kingfishers posing, the mobile phone rings. We can only guess what's happening since our communication witht Sugu is in single word sentences, so we assume it's his wife asking him to pick up dinner.