Friday 6 February 2015

Allepey Part 2, Kayaking and Co-op Coffee (and deep fried bananas)

So it's been a while since working internet was a regular thing: since we left Allepey about 3 weeks ago, actually. Last time I wrote about boating and eating freshwater fish from the canals. The day after that (hello, stupidly late blog post) we went kayaking on those same canals, which was infinitely better than the previous day's lounging in boats because we got to go down all kinds of tiny canals where the bigger boat wouldn't fit. 

Houseboats on the backwaters at dawn

Sampson, our guide and owner of the kayaking business, spoke excellent English and told us he had actually imported the kayaks from New Zealand about ten years ago (I guess no one in India is manufacturing kayaks…) for what sounded like an insanely high fee. He's been taking people out practically every day since. His experience became quickly evident as he was not only an expert at handling a kayak but he knew exactly what information we tourists would want to know. He pointed out various birds, mango trees, cotton trees, the nests of weaver birds, and other interesting sights. He also explained a lot about the village life we were seeing. The canals, he explained, are naturally occurring but have been reinforced and sometimes rerouted by humans over the years. They are divided from the rice paddies by dykes, and apparently each rice field has its own pump so the amount of water in it can be regulated. It wasn't the season, so there weren't a lot of workers in the field, just a few women doing work to prepare for planting, as well as hundreds of egrets and herons eating bugs that live in the shallow water. 

canals on this side, rice on that side


 Kayaking allowed us to see parts of the canal life we would have missed otherwise, because we were able to take routes through narrow canals or under low bridges, where the bigger tour boats wouldn't fit. As it was so early in the morning, we saw lots of people bathing in the canal, doing laundry, cleaning fish, and washing dishes. Kids in their school uniforms ran around and played while waiting for the boat that would take them to school. Some were still brushing their teeth by the water’s edge. We saw a man catching pearlspot (or karimeen)—the fish we ate on our last boat trip, and we saw a couple selling fresh caught mussels from their boat. 




The backwaters are also used for transporting materials to building sites without real road access:

I have yet to see anyone on a construction site in this country wearing a hard hat, or shoes.

After about an hour of kayaking, we had our breakfast break—this was more of an authentic, local affair than our last boating meal. A little building with a few tables, right on the edge of the canal, where we were served a big breakfast of Channa Masala (chick pea curry with gravy), flaky parottas, hard boiled eggs covered in a sauce of fried onions, and deep fried bananas.

Parottas are a bread made by stretching the dough very thinly and rolling it into a many-layered ball, which is then flattened and roasted.  

A feast! Yes, those are deep-fried bananas in the middle. 


The coffee, as usual in India—I don’t know if I've written about this yet—was thick, milky, and sweet, and barely tasted of coffee at all. It’s still a nice drink, if you're cold (when does that happen, to a Canadian in India?) but sometimes (aka always) I crave black bitter coffee.

SPEAKING OF COFFEE, we come to part 2 of this post. This would have been a separate entry but I'm too far behind in this blog to have that luxury...



The Indian Coffee House is a large restaurant chain with an interesting history—it was started in the 1930s as a privately owned series of almost 50 restaurants. In the 1950s, the owners began to close the coffee houses. This was around the time that a communist government was first elected in the state of Kerala—making Kerala the only place in the world to have democratically elected a communist government. In the definitely-not-enough-to-have-an-informed-opinion amount of reading I have done about the Communist party’s history in Kerala, it seems that a lot of Kerala’s successes are in some part due to that party's influence (successes such as having a 100% literacy rate, good public schools and hospitals, and the lowest rates of rural poverty in India). Anyway, the Coffee Houses: it was in the 1950s when the employees of these coffee houses took over ownership and management of the business. The Indian Coffee House is now the largest restaurant chain in Kerala, with branches in the rest of the country as well (almost 400 in total, according to Wikipedia!). It is employee-owned, and is run by several managing committees elected from (and by) employees.

So of course, I had to check it out. 


The menu is your typical Indian canteen-type food, done simply and well. Over the couple weeks we were in Allepey I tried the masala dosa, the masala curry (which is also what they use as the filling in the masala dosa), veg cutlets (sounds weird but are available everywhere--basically little veggie burger patties, often served with fresh mint chutney) parottas (delicious), various fresh juices (they mean fresh: the pineapple juice is about as filling as if you just sat down and ate an entire pineapple, because that is all it contains), and of course, the coffee.

masala dosa, masala curry, coffee, various chutneys and sauces, lemonade, Liam.
Oh and the waiters dress like this. 
This is actually from Kochi, not Allepey, but I like it. 

Sunday 11 January 2015

Water Everywhere: Alleppey part 1

Since my last post, we’ve left Kodaikanal forever—its many many restaurants, its extremely foggy climate, and the bison that frighteningly wandered our front yard many nights. We are now joined by my aunt Linda, who is a photographer and has been blogging about her time in India. We traveled through Madurai, where I started 2015 on the roof of our hotel watching fireworks explode all over the city’s skyline. From there we stopped briefly in Trivandrum (full name Thiruvananthapuram huh wonder why on earth they shortened that) and then through a series of ridiculous train journeys (including crossing like ten tracks and almost literally dodging a moving train—which turned out to be our train) we arrived eventually in Alleppey (aka Alappuzha--in this case, the longer name is definitely more fun). 

Allepey has BEACHES!! The riptides are too strong to swim safely, but the beaches are gorgeous anyway. Right after this photo a wave came and completely soaked me--never turn your back to the ocean.
Allepey, and this area of Kerala generally, is known for its backwaters—a network of naturally occurring (but reinforced and sometimes rerouted by human work) canals, not far inland from the ocean. These canals also connect to a few lakes, and it is possible to travel from town to town through these backwaters. People who live on the backwater canals—rich and poor alike—use the canals in their front yards as a place for bathing, laundry, and transportation.

In many spots, the canals are separated from the rice paddies--this area is also known as the rice bowl of Kerala--by small banks. The rice paddies are actually below sea level, and the way the canals are diked allows the correct amount of water to be pumped into the paddy fields so they aren't too wet or dry for rice to grow. Women who work in the Keralan fields make rs 300 a day--less than $6, but 3 times what women in Tamil Nadu make for the same job.

We hired a Shikara boat, like this one (below) to take us on a tour of the canals.

These boats are hired for day trips, while bigger houseboats take tourists out overnight.


This woman is cleaning fish.

 
Standing right in the water to do laundry on a hot day.
At lunch, the captain of our boat pulled up alongside this restaurant, the owners of which are obviously in cahoots with the owners/organizers of the boat trips because it was exclusively tourists inside, and it seemed unlikely that locals would eat at these prices: we each got a typical thali on a big banana leaf, and then ordered freshly-caught fish and prawns as well: the fish, one for each of us, were Rs 200 each ($4) and the prawns were also Rs 200 each (they were enormous, and extremely fresh, but still…). The prawn was stuck on a stick and barbequed or something—tasty but nothing amazing. The fish, however, was delicious, and we picked it right off the bones with our hands.

Aaaand here is another photo where we see why I’ll never be a famous food blogger: forgot to take a picture before I started eating, and when you’re eating with your hands, off a banana leaf, and the food is dumped onto your leaf from above by the indifferent waiter, it gets messy…

I'm sorry...

WE ARE BARBARIANS

The fish were small, delicious, and tender. It’s a freshwater fish, locally known as Pearlspot, and in 2010 was apparently declared the official fish of Kerala. It’s caught in nets in the backwaters—the next morning on our kayaking trip we actually saw a man catching some. The official name for these little fishies is Green Chromide, which sounds like the name of a spaceship.

photo source: flickr 

From what I’ve seen, we had it the way it is often cooked—sometimes the dish is called “Karimeen Pollichathu” (Karimeen is another name for this fish, and Pollichathu means grilled/charred—first the fish is slit on both sides many times, then marinated in spices and lemon juice and then fried. The other way I have seen it offered on menus, but have yet to try, is cooked wrapped in a banana leaf, in a masala gravy.

That's all 4 now folks. 

 Coming soon: Kayaking in the backwaters and a very authentic breakfast feast. Also: the Indian Coffee House, a restaurant chain that has been run by a series of workers’ co-operative societies since the mid-1950s.

Other fun things if you're interested in my life: some of the art I've been doing in India got published on one of my favourite websites.