Fort Cochin - fine as long as you don't move

Our second flight with Jet Airways from Mumbai to Kochi(Cochin) was as good as the first one - Mr O'Leary of Ryanair would no doubt not approve of the real cutlery, free food and excellent on the ground service. And the comfortable brand new budget airline terminal was great - and we enjoyed reading all the papers which without exception had the front page and much of the inside devoted to the success of Slumdog - plenty of good natured discussion on how British or Indian the film was but mostly they were celebrating the partnership and the success of their music man in particular. As we taxied out we passed one of those slums, hard against the airport perimeter wall, packed solid boxes of corrugated iron, wood and other building materials, not apparently an inch of space left - but presumably people were moving about in there (and being deafened by the jets).

Kochi is hot, I mean real sauna like, the taxi ride from the airport was fine and the ferry across to Fort Cochin was fun but as soon as we started walking into the town we realised that any movement leaves you wringing wet. We found a place to stay for two nights with AC and stood in front of the cool air until we had the strength to go outside again. It was dark and we noticed blue lights zooming up above the road and then floating down - we soon came across the boys selling 'Indian technology' - blue light on some kind of catapulted parachute, there is something every place we go!

After a stroll by the sea we had a meal in one of the road side places - this is a tiny place of small roads and full of Dutch, Portuguese, French, British and other foreign names and buildings, quite unlike anywhere else we have been - as you approach most eating places a whispered 'Wine? Beer?' greets you, and in the place we ate the beer was brought to us in a teaport and two mugs for drinking. On the bill we were charged for 'Special Tea'. They have no licence of course (and even the poshest place we stayed in Mt Abu went to lengths to disguise the availability of beer) but you might think that the presence of Kingfisher beer umbrellas and napkin holders might alert the local authorities to the prohibition breaking! Oh and on the adjacent tree an eagle sat and watched us ('Its our pet'). I should say its also an extremely friendly place and full of travellers, its another chill out place like Dahab only with a lot of Indians here as well - but chill out is hardly the right term when a nights sleep depends on a blast of the AC every few hours!

We have already told you of how we booked twice for our first flight on the way here. In fact we got Rifaq to take us out to the airport on the evening before we were due to fly to try to sort it out with the Kingfisher airline office. A young woman Garima (I think that is spelt correctly) checked our booking
'Here it is you are four people"
'No, we are two people but booked twice by accident, we need to cancel one booking. We need to then catch an afternoon flight to Kochi'
'But this is an evening flight, we have no morning flight, its 8.30pm not am'
You can imagine our crestfallen faces followed rapidly with a stream of invective against the web site not using the 24 hour clock - nor actually including the pm. Seeing our faces Garima sprang into action - I will help you, I will sort this out!
Then despite all the phone lines being down (like power cuts a constant problem) she got on her mobile for a long discussion and negotiation, culminating in a big thumbs up sign as she got both sets of now useless tickets cancellend for only a small fee. Then she went into the airport to the Jet Airlines check in desk and got us cheap seats on their flight in the morning - and all she asked was that Tess wrote a good comment - we would have struck a medal for her and given her the freedom of Cambridge we were that grateful! So Garima is front runner for the most helpful person we have yet met.

We are off for a short ferry ride to Vypeen Island and then up to a beach about 25km away shortly and are due to leave here in the morning for the mountains - a nature reserve where we will not need AC to survive!

Brian