Arrival Into Alleppey!

After a crazy bus ride with a Kamikaze bus driver who spent the whole trip just barely avoiding rickshaws, cart pullers, cows, people etc, we finally arrived in Alleppey thankful for our lives. At the bus station we ran into a nice young Indian man in his twenties named Ami, who approached us in a very un-Indian way by saying, "excuse me, but if you might be looking for a place to stay I could possibly help you." We went with him to his guesthouse; a ten minute ride with Molly riding on the back of his motorbike (backpack and all), and me, Dev, and Mel squished into a rickshaw for a not so comfortable 10 minute ride. When we arrived at his guesthouse we were pleasantly surprised; it was a big colonial looking house shaded under a huge mango tree, that he had converted into a backpackers place. We took two rooms, settled in, listened to his proposal for a houseboat and canoe trip, then decided to check out a few houseboats on our own.

After being taken down to the houseboat docks and hassled with by this annoying young business man whose ambition in life was to be in the Lonely Planet (which will never happen seeing as this guy relentlessly was trying to rip us off and force us into renting one of his houseboats). It got to the point where as we were trying to get off the boat he was trying to stop us by pretending to receive these phone calls (mind you his phone never rang and he just picked it out of his pocket and started talking) saying that two whole buses of tourists were arriving tomorrow and going to take all the boats, (when there are hundreds of houseboats). He then continued to play his act by giving one specific couple on the phone, who he was supposedly talking to, specific instructions to wire 9,000 rupees into his account for the booking of the houseboat we were looking at right then. The whole thing was just so ridiculous we could not stop laughing; he even chased us off the boat and continued trying to convince us to rent a houseboat from him as we sat in the rickshaw waiting for a ride back to our guest house.

That night Ami gave us some free Indian cooking classes and we made a huge feast with a Canadian couple and twoFrench travelers. It was some of the best home made Indian food we had so far. We went to the store and shopped for all the ingredients including fresh fish and spices; then we helped him prepare a delicious and spicy fish curry and tomato fry along with rice and parotta (a parotta is a thick stringy doughy tortilla.. if that makes any sense). Anyways this was the first night we had eaten parotta and over the next week it turned into our favorite breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner item.