Today I travelled to Kochi (Cochin) on the train.
It was a lovely journey, only an hour and a half, with a good seat and a fantastic view. And only ₨10 per person! The second leg of the journey was even nicer, by boat and only ₨2.50 each!
After arriving in Kochi I decided to go straight over to ‘Fort Cochin’ and find a hotel so that I could get out and explore/take a nap. The journey was nice and easy, hop off the train, hop on an auto-rickshaw, hop off the auto-rickshaw and then onto the ferry, hop off the ferry and then into another auto-rickshaw, then I was at the hotel: The Princess Inn.
It is very backpacker and has a cute little ‘common room’ area where I ended up talking to a Spanish couple (Lorenzo and Angela) for AGES. It was nice to chat to people. We all booked on to an Elephant excursion in the morning, 6.30am to be precise!
After chatting to the Spanish couple, a group of us went out for a spot of lunch to the nearby café: Kashi Art Café. It has loads of really interesting art installations around you as you sit and eat your lunch. Following this I went for a walk along the beach (well I say beach…) and through the areas of large old school houses (or should I say mansions). Some of the buildings look so huge, and as they’re not built in the typical Indian style you can tell that they’ve been built by other people. It seems crazy to think that these massive houses would have sat cheek to cheek with the original Indian buildings until the Dutch/Portuguese/British decided to build their type of buildings everywhere. You literally walk down the street and you could be forgiven for thinking that you were somewhere in Europe.
The next morning I rose early to go to the Elephant Training Centre. It was overall quite interesting to see, but I have my doubts about the legitimacy of why they’re there. It’s branded as a place where orphaned elephants go to live when they have lost their mothers and that they are looked after, but I’m not sure.
Powered By Fondant Fancy 