Sri Lanka —> India —> Alleppey

I woke up at 3:30 worried that I wasn’t going to get up or that we weren’t going to be able to get an Uber. After last night, we had very little faith left in Uber and the guys accepting the rides. We both got up at 4am and got ourselves ready, but once again we had an Uber disaster. Drivers were accepting our request to go to the airport, but they were either cancelling or telling us to cancel...they obviously don’t know how it works. They were also asking for us to tell them where we were, which again is pointless as they know from the request. I was all for waking to the Airport, it would take about an hour. We even downloaded the local version of Uber but they were no better, The guy who accepted calling us basically to say he wasn’t coming. After half an hour lost, I said that we needed to start walking, and that we’d just hitchhike to the airport. We set off walking with all our stuff, but ran immediately into a problem. There were dogs, lots of dogs, and not the nice kind; these were viscous and barking at us just for being in the road at 4:30. We had to change our route, but all along it there were dogs making their way towards us on the road and barking right at us. I’m not usually scared of dogs, but when they outnumbered us, it was pretty bad - Jennie would have decided to just miss the flight rather than face them. During all this, Tom has managed to summon an Uber, so we decided to walk towards where he was coming from and eventually found him and got inside...safe from the dogs.

We finally got to the airport at 5am...it had taken an hour to do 3 kilometres. With the recent outbreak of Coronavirus, there were a lot of people wearing masks, both passengers and security staff. We didn’t have such a luxury, but Tom had read that they actually don’t do anything and it was contact, so we kept our bottle of hand sanitiser close by. We got through all security, spent the last of our Sri Lankan Rupees on one piece of Banana bread, which was amazing, and then we did the standard spray ourselves with as much aftershave testers as possible so we’d smell good - even for just a few hours. The flight was only an hour, but it was a massive plane with screens and everything. We made the most of the games on the screens, we even got a snack on the plane and before we knew it, we were landing in India!

For some reason, there was a mad rush by the other passengers (all either Indian or Sri Lankan) to get up and get their luggage, even when the doors were still sealed shut. We walked the bridge to the terminal building and the first thing we were asked by a guard was “are you from China?”....close but no. We went to the E-Visa line and we had a little interview from an officer with all the usual questions and boom, we were in. We’d heard about the ‘selfie culture’ in India and how they love having westerners in their pictures and videos. After we got our SIM cards, the guy in the shop next door asked us if we could be videoed saying “happy birthday Malou”, so we did of course hoping this sort of request wouldn’t be every 10 minutes for the next two months. We got some cash and headed for the bus stop trying to get to Alleppey for the famous backwaters. We managed to get on a bus which was going to Vythilla which we were told we could then change and get to Alleppey. It didn’t take too long to see how much traffic there was in India, but it was as expected. We changed buses onto a ‘Superfast’ local bus which was totally open sided. After a slow start, we then realised where this type of bus got its name...the driver was driving like a lunatic, Weaving in and out of traffic as if in a sports car, not a 10 tonne bus. I decided that it was best to not even look at what was happening on the road, and in truth, we both managed to get a bit of sleep on this bus. After 90 minutes we got into Alleppey and happily got off the bus with our lives still ahead of us, we went to a Airtel store to sort Toms phone out which was relatively painless and then immediately started bargaining for a Tuktuk (something we would have to get used to now we don’t have one 😀🛺). We had been told that anything less than 100 was a good price to our hostel and the guy that stopped agreed to do it for 80...after we had to show him the exact location of the hostel on a map, give him the exact address and even their phone number for him to call... Tom began to get a little short with him, “are you going to take us or not”... and eventually he did. He had a very fancy speaker system built into his TukTuk, which he begun to blast music out of! Firstly he played Indian music, then LMFAO’s ‘I’m sexy and I know it’ and then Snoop Dog’s ‘Drop it like its hot’...as we passed through the busy streets of Alleppey we were mortified and almost embarrassed to be in a TukTuk with this clearly crazy guy who was dancing around at the front of his TukTuk, with no hands on the handles and clearly not looking at the roads. We definitely missed being in control of the TukTuk at that point and certainly missed Greta!

We arrived at Bucket List Hostel, a cool looking place on the edge of the Backwaters and checked in. We met Lily from San Diego, and we all fancied going out for some food close by, so walked along the edge of the Backwaters to a row of little shops. Unfortunately, they were more breakfast places, so we ended up just grabbing some samosas and other things from a tiny place run by and old husband and wife, and the food was really nice. We went back to the hostel and chilled for an hour before we three decided that we should go to the beach for sunset. We jumped in a Tuktuk and made our way there, not expecting amazing things as we’d just had some really special beaches in Sri Lanka, but there was barely any litter, the sand was soft and white and it was surprisingly beautiful. We of course went for a swim and the water was gorgeous, if a little rough. We just chilled here for an hour getting some good tips for the west coast of America from Lily and getting to know her a bit more. She was between jobs so took a month to come to India. Lily was on the hunt for a beer, so we managed to find one but we didn’t feel like one after the day we’d had, so we all had the classic chat about each other’s countries...and if course the conversation came onto both Trump and Brexit - enough said!

We all went back to the beach for sunset, the sun disappearing into the haze on the horizon. We were all hungry, so we decided to try out a recommended place in town which was a couple of kilometres away. The walk was interesting, seeing our first part of a classic Indian street, everything and anything being sold. Annoyingly when we got to the place it had run out of curry! Luckily we had another one to go to which did have curry, so we got rice, curry, naan all for £1.45 each. Exhausted and stuffed, we jumped in a Tuktuk back to the hostel for some well needed sleep. We got back to find a Finnish guy and Australian girl torn between going further south or doing the backwater tour that we had booked onto. They were doing rock, paper, scissors to decide and then changing their minds, so Tom and I helped them by setting out the pros and cons. Eventually they decided to do the canoeing tour. We all went to bed, hoping that the dangerously low ceiling fan wouldn’t cause anyone damage in the middle of the night. It had been a hectic first day in India, but so far we loved it!Read more