Kerala

After leaving Goa, we headed south for Kerala, driving most of the night. We’d looked up a beach or two in advance which seemed to have accommodation right on the beach, but when we arrived there at 5am, it turned out not to be the case. The roads were dreadful and what little accommodation there was wasn’t anywhere near the beach. We headed south and eventually came to Kozhikode, which looked like it had a nice long beach and plenty of accommodation along the promisingly named Beach Road.

Sadly, almost all the area between Beach Road and the actual beach was so densely packed with housing that you couldn’t even see there was a beach at all. And the few breaks in the housing revealed that the beach wasn’t really that nice at all. The accommodation was too expensive to be worth it and so we decided to keep heading south and find somewhere out of the city. By then we’d been up for well over 24 hours (with just an hour or so nap around 6am) and driving all night and were dead tired so we decided to stop at a hotel, sleep, shower and then decide where to go from there.

Gopal told the guys at the hotel that we’d been looking for nice beaches but Kerala didn’t seem to have any, and they all pretty much agreed that Kerala’s beaches aren’t very good. So after some lunch (best room service ever – the food was delicious) and a sleep, we decided to head inland the next day instead of down the coast.

Those plans had to be put on hold though because the dinner we had that evening (also room service at the hotel) gave me food poisoning. I assume it was the chicken as that’s the only thing I had that Gopal didn’t, but in any case, I woke up at 1am and vomited. And at 2am, and 3am. By 4am I had diarrhoea as well. The vomiting stopped around 8am but the diarhoea would continue for the next couple of days. I spent most of the day in bed feeling awful. Gopal was wonderful, going out and fetching me water in the middle of the night, getting some unflavoured electrolyte stuff, since the sachets I had were sweet orange and not very nice. He went out and bought all the things I’d enjoyed over the past two weeks: guava juice, mango shrikhand, 5 grain biscuits as well as some other yummy coconut ones, and some bananas and water. I really couldn’t eat much that day though – I could eat the bananas, and I forced down some biscuits, but I couldn’t stomach much guava juice or the shrikhand – it was too sweet for me.

I felt a bit better the next day, so we hit the road, heading inland to a place called Silent Valley up in the hills in Kerala. It was a beautiful drive up on a twisty ribbon of road through gorgeous rainforest. Actually going deeper into Silent Valley National Park was a major production involving securing permits in advance, renting a jeep and hiring a guide, so we decided to continue on. We had the idea to take the Nilgiri Mountain Railway from Mettupalayam to Ooty in two days time, so we were looking for somewhere convenient to stay. Gopal called his brother-in-law who is from this area and he suggested the hill resort of Coonoor, so we decided to drive through and spend the next couple of nights there.

We’d stopped for breakfast that morning, but the only thing I could manage to eat was some omelet. I still couldn’t really face much in the way of food but I tried to force down what I could. If I’d known at the time that we wouldn’t make it to Coonoor and that brunch would be the only meal I’d eat that day, I might have made more of an effort.