India: Great for Houseboats and Weddings

Weddings are great. I’ve had a blast at every one that I’ve been to, though I’ll admit that’s on the low end for my age group. Great food, music, locations- they’ve all felt like historic parties with a romantic subtext. When we were invited to our friend and colleague’s wedding in India, many things were different, but this fact held true. It was fun and beautiful, down to the last detail. Even our choreographed Bollywood dance and our shoe-finding mission were unlikely successes, but more on that later.

We arrived early with friends to do some traveling before the wedding. We started in Kochi, a city in the southwestern Kerala state. It’s a tropical area, lots of palm trees and nice beaches along the coastline, which is where we hung around. On our evening in Kochi we caught a wildly impressive Kathakali show, a small part of a traditional Kerala performance. It involved elaborate makeup and dancing. The face movements were particularly impressive; the actors had incredibly precise and minute control of their eyes and facial muscles.

On the recommendations of friends, we rented a houseboat for 2 days for the 6 of us. On it, we cruised along the network of canals, known as the backwaters, that penetrates inland from the Arabian Sea. It’s a mix of brackish water, where sea meets river, and serves as transportation routes for the villages where roads don’t go. At the same time, the water is used to irrigate rice, and green paddies stretch along the canals. Where there are roads and footpaths along a canal, they must take to the sky as mini-bridges each time it intersects another waterway.

The houseboat was a totally unique and relaxing experience. I’d never been on a houseboat before, but this was like a quaint guesthouse with a nice view that continuously changed. The canals are calm, so it’s smooth sailing- you barely notice you’re moving. There was a captain and a chef who cooked us fantastic meals, including the highlight: sadhya. Sadhya is a famous dish traditional to the Kerala region. Actually it’s a bunch of little dishes, in our case rice, beets, okra, and others, served on a banana leaf.

(Sadhya)

Day 1 of our cruise was quite busy. We accidentally arrived at the end of a local holiday, so boats were a little hard to come by at first and the canals were pretty active with holidaymakers. Both days were equally relaxing, the kind of leisure time where you can read while looking out at the passing water, palms and rice paddies, drift into a contented snooze lulled by the purring engine, then wake back up and pick up where you left off on the page. My kind of holiday, in short.

After we disembarked from our floating relaxation barge we made our way back to Kochi, stopping for a night at a simple AirBnB on a beach. We had a half-day in Kochi in which we did a quick tour of the town, seeing the iconic, manually powered Chinese fishing nets, and doing some shopping for wedding outfits. We then flew to Mumbai where we spent the next 2 days before the wedding. We wrapped up our outfit shopping, did a little sightseeing, and explored the wealth of niche, often very hip, restaurants, teahouses, and bars in what feels like a fast-growing city.

(Colored powder for incense for sale in Kochi)

On Saturday morning we convened with other colleagues and friends who had also flown in for the wedding, and made a 2-hour bus trip to the venue in Karjat, east of Mumbai. They had rented the entire hotel, and the decorations were impressive and immersive. So much was made from flowers, marigolds in particular. I’d guess over 20,000 marigolds alone were used that weekend. The whole setting was stunning, and made even better by the delicious Southern Indian street food and spreads at dinner. That evening we, the friends and colleagues from One Acre Fund and Kenya, performed our section of a wider dance tribute to the bride and groom. Thankfully we’d practiced a bit ahead of time so we weren’t a complete disaster and it was actually pretty fun. Luckily, or unluckily, someone captured our part on film (video coming soon).

We continued dancing (in a less choreographed manner) into the early hours of the morning to live drummers and a masterful mix of Indian and western music. The next day was the wedding itself, which was actually a couple hours of ceremonies and rites. While our friends were at the center of it all on the platform, the crowd milled around, alternatively watching, clapping, eating lunch, and chatting.  Our group, as friends of the bride, got roped into a shoe hiding / finding tradition, where essentially the groom’s hidden shoes, if found, can be ransomed back to his relatives. I am pleased to say we contributed to retrieving one shoe. We all had such a great time, we would’ve happily stayed for a second night. Sadly, we had to make our way back to Mumbai to head home the next day, though we’re already looking forward to the next visit, hopefully not too long from now.

(Bride and groom!)