A passage to Kerala - Our first destination

After getting married, had no time to spend at leisure. So, was waiting for a long holidays from office. Some other circumstances made me take the decision of resigning the office I was working for. I've got another job, that still had 18 days to join. So have got great time to spend, but shall we spend these days at the same house where we see the acquainted faces? Were given an idea by brother to go to any other places like Kerala or Kulu, gave a good thought about it and chose to travel. Started planning the routes to travel using google maps, and googling about hotels to stay, found a big list of hotels for each place in the route we planned.

Above image is the route map for our tour. Our first destination in Kerala is Ernakulam, from there to Munnar -> thekkady -> Alapuzzha -> Trivandrum -> Kanyakumari -> Trivandrum. From Trivandrum is our return journey to  hometown.

All reservations are done according to plan. Our train was at 5:30 in the evening from our hometown to Ernakulam. We've taken our reserved berths. The journey to our first destination in Kerala was about 20hrs, so expected time to reach the destination was next day afternoon 1:30. In our journey next day morning when we got freshened, we found that we just crossed Tamilnadu and entered Kerala. The first junction we reached in Kerala was Palakkad. Suddenly after Palakkad junction the whether changed with very cool breeze and bright looking nature. At some places we saw some peacocks resting under trees. We had some good company through our journey, who were residents of both Andhra and Kerala, they guided and suggested for many places in Kerala to visit.

As expected the train was delayed for 1hr in reaching our first destination, Ernakulam town. As nothing was planned except the main cities we had to travel and staying there, we hired a taxi for Rs.200/- to reach the hotel excellency (www.hotelexcellency.com)where we booked room already. Payed an advance of Rs.1000/- for an A.C.  double room and moved to the room. As the time was about 3:10PM after having some bath, we hardly could find some real food for lunch, we ordered some snacks to just fill our stomachs partly. As we didn't plan any thing to see at ernakulam(present Kochi), After having break for 1 hr at 5:30 we approached the travel desk present in the same hotel. "Except beach there is nothing to see at this time" was the answer we got from the travel desk guys, we took his card for any further assistance. After being guided towards the route to the beach by some waiter of the hotel, we hired an auto to go to beach. To our surprise auto wallah was an educated man, he spoke english very well, he guided us to some places that were passing along the way we were going. 

Finally we reached marine ride on the beach. We directly went to a steamer which was being filled, a person from the steamer signaled us to come and sit in the boat there is no ticket u can directly give the money to the collector. Later the boat started, infact it was our(after getting married) first journey on a boat and first time for both of us to see the Arabian see.

Our first pic of the Arabian see.

The steamer travels through harbor in Kochi and returns to the starting point, Surprisingly we clicked many photos in different lightings in the dawn time.

You can see all our tour photos in the following URL : link to our tour pics

After marine ride we walked on the bank street which had very well developed shopping malls. We had our food at some place which was looking like Mc. D but it was not. We had some chole bathura and some thing else. Then we moved to our room again by an auto rickshaw. There we inquired about travelling options available for Munnar. We have only two options, one was the bus early in the morning at 6:00 AM and the second one was to take a taxi which would be a little expensive. We went to our room and took rest for the night. Early morning we'd have to get up and get ready and leave to Munnar by Bus.