I recently visited the beautiful state of Kerala and it gives me a great pleasure to tell you all about it. Kerala is tucked away in the south western India. I visited, along with my family and parents, the southern part of it. Kerala is a relatively narrow strip of land surrounded by the sandy Arabian Sea beaches and the awesome mountains of the Western Ghats. Kerala is also very unique within India because it is comparable to the USA in terms of certain standard of living indicators such as literacy rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc.

We started our journey in Kerala from Cochin, which is a lovely seaside town with so much history dating back to more than two millennia that you can spend days just studying the history part of it. To see what is essentially a living history, we went to the Old Jew town section where there is an active synagogue for just a handful of Jews still living there whose ancestors may have arrived in India about 300-400 AD. And then there are the Chinese Fishing Nets that were a gift from the famous Mongol Kublai Khan.  Finally, we visited St Francis Church where the great explorer Vasco Da Gama was buried. Cochin harbor is very scenic and there are plans to soon develop this into a great destination for the water sports lovers.

We drove from Cochin to Guruvayoor to see a very old traditional Krishna temple and a nearby village where the temple runs what is perhaps the world’s largest herd of captive elephants (60 plus). It was on this road that I realized why Kerala is known as “God’s Own Country”. I saw what might amount to 50 or so Mosques and about the same number of churches dotting this narrow highway. Add to that all the temples and the Jewish story and you have a land where all God’s children – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews - co-exist in a way we the humans can do God proud and all this in the land ruled by the Marxists!

Next day we traveled to Munnar, a hill station that is far prettier than the better-known Nilgiri hill stations of Ooty and Kodaikanal. I found it to be a pleasant surprise since I was expecting it to be like others. What really got us hooked on Kerala was the spectacular sight of the tea plantations stretching from the top of the mountains into the deep valleys at least 100 Kilometers long!

From Munnar, we drove through the Nilgiri Mountains all the way to a world famous wild life sanctuary known as Periyar sanctuary. The setting to see the wildlife is a sprawling lake in which you move around in a boat to see all kinds of animals including elephants living in their natural habitat. Another fascinating thing we found about Periyar is that it falls within the Iddukki district whose spice plantations helped make Kerala world famous. We visited a spice garden where we saw the plants of every kind of spice we knew and quite a few we had never used.

Our next leg of the journey brings us to the centerpiece of Kerala tourism. We stayed in a town called Kottayam to take a boat ride through the backwaters of Kerala. You go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, to Delhi to see the Muslim and Moghul monuments, to Rajasthan to see the Rajput forts and to Kerala to see the backwaters. We started out in a small canal alongside which there were homes and we saw people using the water for all purposes except drink. They use it for traveling between places, for washing utensils and clothes, for bathing, etc. After you travel through a village where you will see a number of walkway bridges that are manually operated to let the boats go, the canal joins bigger canals along which they cultivate the land and ultimately these canals join a big lake. It is a very intricate network of lakes, rivers and canals. These backwaters, while a great inland thoroughfare on water, offer an alternative lifestyle.

From the backwaters we drove south to the sandy and sun soaked beaches of Kovalam. The natural setting in Kovalam was quite different than what I had expected. It is very hilly along the beach and makes it a perfect place for a lighthouse. The beach was everything one reads about but I was quite unprepared to see 80-90% of the place oriented towards the European visitors. I kept thinking I must be somewhere in Europe because of all the shops and restaurants along the beach catering to the European taste.

Our final destination was Kanyakumari, in Tamil Nadu but quite close to Kerala. We were there to see the famous Vivekananda Rock memorial and to be at the very edge (at least symbolically if not geographically) of India. As we were traveling away from this edge where the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean are meet, one gets to contemplate about India, the land you love, lying right in front of you in its entirety. The rock memorial itself helps us introspect about India just like Vivekananda meditated on this huge piece of rock for two days. It was here that he made the historic decision to come to the United States to further the cause of lifting the teeming masses of India. One other fascinating thing to see here is an extremely tall statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvallavar that is built on an adjacent rock.

All in all, Kerala, relatively a small state, offers a lot for the visitors of all ages and inclinations. Kerala is a good package consisting of several different and interesting places making it a great place to visit. There is that 2500 years old history, there are the temples, there are the beaches, there are the stunning backwaters and there is that impossible mountain greenery accentuated by the tea plantations. The Kerala people are extremely polite and friendly.  No wonder then that the National Geographic Traveler has selected Kerala as one of the “50 places of a lifetime” among its millennium destinations. I strongly recommend that you check this state out if you get a chance.

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