Narda in italics and Terrell whatever. Sometimes it seems we say the same thing – however, we are speaking of the same only we say it differently. Choose who you want to hear – I would suggest both of us.

This follows the previous blog of Mumbai to Goa

The next morning the long drive to Madgaon station where we took the train to Kannur.

We booked an Ola from our homestay in Goa to the Madgaon station. As our train was to leave at seven am and the drive was about 45-minutes we left at 5.15 am. We had booked the Ola the night before but for some reason the driver arrived at two am and sat in front of the house. We had breakfast at the station, eggs and toast and coffee; all quite reasonable. We did not record much of the trip just some clips of the countryside. We slept and ate their nice little lunch arriving in Kannur at six pm, an eleven-hour ride.

13432 RAJDHANI train to Kannur in 2AC class.

13 Feb, 2025  Kannur

A town off the tourist route. Our homestay was run by a lovely German woman called Katje who came there and married an Indian man. 4 years ago he tragically died  but she now sees her house in Kannur as home.

He died apparently, with his wife, our host, at his side. The doctor aggressively operated on him and according to our host basically killed him. She tried to report it but got threats and wanting to live peacefully in Kannur she went quiet.

Kannur has a population of 2,346,000, or 2,346,002 whilst we were there give a person or two, according to the internet. We went into the centre of town a few times. Another hectic Indian city, but we like it.

We had a nice stay there, meeting a number of her friends of which she has many.

Lots of Kingfisher was consumed, mainly by her and me actually.

We got into a groove, ordering our evening meal from a place that sent it to us…Our first shot at this. The meals were great and also cheap.

I took a shot at painting the house. Not too accurate but no one will know. 🥹😉

We were on the second floor.

We had lots of nice non tourist experiences.

We liked this place, probably one of our best ever homestays as we got to hangout with locals and I suppose other guests though there was only one other person staying there, who was doing an Ayurveda course, bit of an annoying know it all person from somewhere, I think the UK. But we had good discussions though two-months later I do not remember any of it so obviously it made a profound affect on me. We had use of the kitchen but mainly ordered meals delivered to the house. There were also a few Germans, a guy from Singapore at the house every night sitting around drinking beer and smoking stuff

On our first trip to the supermarket Metreo we were asked to help with the filming of an ad for a store special. We both had to practise saying in Malayalam the tomatoes (Terrell) and the onions (me) were on special. Then it all got filmed and sent out. Not sure where but I don't think it was Bollywood. It was a lot of fun and laughing.

The ad was much longer than this but basically this was our part. We had to re-film it many times to get the words correct, if in fact we ever did. Who knows what we said? A few days later we were back at this same supermarket as it was the only one near by; several people remembered us from the ad. Good golly. (you may need to click on the image below to make it play or perhaps not.)

supermarket where we were recruited from...

I purchased a heat sleeve for my knee. We'll see if it works.

fun fact: two-months later here in Adelaide Narda uses the heat sleeve everyday and it helps her, still has a sore knee from her torn meniscus accident from when we were camping nine-months ago at Bordertown. SA. Trying to find such a device was a challenge, we found images of what we wanted and waved it around people in various shops, eventually a pharmacy place got us a tuktuk who took us to the place above and we paid our $18 for it and happily went off into the sunset or actually a few blocks to where we saw a hair wash and massage so all was good. The device says it has eight settings for different levels of heat but it only does the same level on every number but it's good, who is to complain? We surely won't be taking it back.

We also went for our hair wash and massage treat. The only region in the world where we can afford it and believe me we love to take advantage of this fact.

It's not really a beach town. No tourists here. Pretty though.

There was a small resort there, 14 units. We had a coffee there with the manager and a chat.

Coming back from the beach we rode the bus. These buses are monsters. Complete kings of the road. They give way to no one. So we figured that it's the safest way to travel.

On the way back from the beach there was a road block. Our bus driver made a 10 point U-turn and sped back where he found an alternative route. Not willing to lose time he drove on the wrong side of the road honking his horn non stop. These buses also race each other.(Michael, mate,  I think I have you slated you for this gig 😃

To add to Narda's notes above...our annoying Ayurveda girl told us about a beach we should visit. She even offered to take us, near it - near it because she wanted to have a 'me-day' whatever the hell that is so we all tromped off, taking a bus quite some distance then she went off for her 'me-day' to a beach and sent us in the opposite direction in a tuk tuk to a great beach as she described it. The tuk tuk went quite a distance along a narrow dirt path down hill. I had not realized that we were up so high to go down so low. Sounds like a song doesn't it? We found the wonderful beach. Except for two-western looking girls in the water there was no one within view. There surely was not a restaurant nearby as the annoying Ayurveda girl had said. We walked for awhile then went up to the road wondering why there were two western-looking girls in the water and no other sign of life. A bit of a walk and we came across a resort. We wandered around the Malabar Beach Resort and Ayurvedic Spa hotel and did not see anyone, but we found the toilets which were good. Eventually a man came along, the owner, he said it was off season and just a couple of German girls were at the hotel, which of course we saw were alive and well and swimming alone in the seemingly midst of nowhere. He made us coffee, which we paid for, and chatted then off we went. We walked for half an hour only to be told the particular road we were on ended soon and we needed to go half way back and up a steep hill for awhile then maybe we would get to a bus but hopefully a tuk tuk would come along. We walked on and on, on a very hot afternoon for seemingly an hour plus. We got to what seemed to be a crossroad and fortunately a tuk tuk came along and took us to a bus stop where we caught the bus Narda mentions above. Crazy bus driver. It is in our video above, not to be missed.

Below is the wonderfully isolated Thottada Beach, Kannur.

Below is the long walk to civilization, as we know it, from the wonderfully isolated Thottada Beach, Kannur.

Oh, I forgot to put in our last blog this fish. On one of our random busses in Goa we saw this sculpture of a fish - made of rubbish.

 Folks raved on about The Parassinikkadavu Snake Park. [it doesn't fit here, who cares? but this raved-on reminded me of my almost pet bird at home in Adelaide which I hand-feed in the back yard. When we go away for months he sulks and doesn't come around for a week or two then she is back for a good feed of Narda's left over meat scraps (she doesn't care for my tofu-plant based burgers)...anyway, her/his name - having pronoun issues - is raveon because he/she is a raven]. So we found a bus that took about an hour to get to the groovy and almost worth seeing The Parassinikkadavu Snake Park. Pause the slideshow to learn stuff. They even had a tribute to Australia's Steve Irwin who was killed by an injury caused by a stingray while filming an underwater documentary in the Great Barrier Reef in 2006.

Narda, being the forever teacher, was swarmed by school children

We got lost in this area that had nothing by lawyers for block after block...

Ok so off to the train again. Another early morning start.

18 Feb 2025

16345/Netravati Express to Trivandrum 

And that was our four days in Kannur. Another early morning and we got a car to the train station. Unfortunately, Narda left behind her book she was reading for her next book club that she had bought in Goa, which you would have read about in the previous blog.

2AC again but we got the top and bottom in the aisle, so significantly narrower beds. After figuring out how to climb onto the top bunk we both took 2 decent naps during the 12 hour journey. Not such a bad effort.

Trivandrum 

Our flat was roomy and modern. It was nice to have our own space for four nights.

Terrell found a great computer repair place pretty much next door and got a complete overhaul/update on his computer. It took a few days but he was pretty happy with the result. We made our way to the Fort area by bus, where we stayed on a previous trip.

Narda found a 'gold' jewelry shop. Of course, everything was quite cheap, it was all gold painted. She wanted ear rings, everyone in the shop was quite excited, thinking today they could retire. However, Narda didn't find any 'gold' earrings suitable and on we went. Retirement would have to wait another day for the shop owners.

We had lunch...

then walked around the fort area and to the Shri Padmanabhaswamy Temple...

Shri Padmanabhaswamy Temple. Trivandrum's spiritual heart is this 18th-century temple (closed to non-Hindus) in the Fort area, which fuses Keralan and Dravidian architecture and whose origins go back to at least the 8th century. internet

Once at the temple, we realized how familiar it looked. Of course, we were at this spot years ago. Actually we had an AirBnB just down the street. We tried to find it but couldn't. When we planned this trip we had forgotten we have done this before. Not to worry, we got lots of photos, again, and even photos with people who wanted to have photos with us for whatever reason. see https://neuage.me/2018/03/27/kerala/ for that particular trip.

There was some sort of celebration by the temple and we featured on lots of photos.

Today's understandable story in the local rag...

Sacha gave me his old (new to me) ASUS Rog Zephrus, you beaut, gaming computer. Twice as fast as my, almost new other ASUS, regualr non-gaming laptop. It has 16 Gig RAM which is about the most laptops have had for the past 10-years. I wanted/needed more because I use so much Adobe for video, webpages, photography (I have been using these programs since the 1990s and even taught them both at universities and in high schools in China, Australia, and the USA in my past existence as a teacher). I found some ASUS dude and he stuck in another 8 gig which now makes it 24 which helps a lot. I also put in a new battery and a new one-terabit SSD HD as the 500 gig HD was a bit slow and kept getting full. So now I have an updated laptop of my updated laptop. It was all more expensive than I had hoped for, but now two-months+ later in Adelaide it is all working fine and fast. It all became close to not getting finished as he had to order in the battery from Delhi and it came the day before we left. I then discovered I had some teething issues with it and went back the next morning. Our checkout time was 11 am. He finished the upgrades at 10.45. I rushed home and we got a taxi to our next spot. Reason for going to another place in the same city was because we had left three days at the end of our trip to make it up as we go - thinking after a month in Kerala we would hear of another groovy place to go. Originally we thought of going all the way south to Kanniyakumari, the only place in India where the confluence of three major bodies of water – the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean meet. We read so many negative things about the city we decided to stay in Trivandrum. So off we went to what we had read was a wonderful homestay.
Trivandrum part 2

The second part of Trivandrum was a move to a home stay for 2 days. It was a pretty spot with very attentive hosts who cooked us meals. So we got to try some different food.

It was an hour plus to this next location. The last part was a bit scary as it was a one-lane down a steep hill. The place was beautiful, but isolated, the hosts were all over us, we went into our room to get away from them. They did make us great breakfasts each day. But, we found it difficult to get out of there - we ordered a taxi which got us to the beach..more of that soon, and at the end to the train station.

On our second day there we headed down to the beach. Had a great day and I would love to return here again.

OK. Here is the thing. We were having a wonderful time relaxing at the restaurant in the pictures below. After awhile we looked out at the beach, looked where we were eating and said 'this looks so familiar', then we realized we were at this beach, at this restaurant and the lighthouse in 2018. Damn! we are getting senile. Nevertheless, after a good laugh at ourselves and swearing we won't tell anyone else we spent the rest of the day, once again, enjoying these beaches.

The Chicago pizza came later. (it actually belongs in the Koch part next stay)

We had a few snacks and lunch in a couple of places. Then we took a nap on those beach chairs you rent. Nice.

Before we left we checked out some beach front hotels. Who knows.

There is a light house at the end of this beach. It looked like one we had seen before. It turned out that we had been to this beach 5 years ago.

Are we losing it, now in our seventies. Blimey.

But this story gets worse. The flat I booked for our Kochi stay was attractive to me because we had stayed in one like it 5 years ago. Yes you guessed it. It was. We were actually pretty happy about it; knowing the area is a great start.

Anyway, back to the story. 

We clambered to the top of the lighthouse which was a challenge for those of our age. Toward the top, a very narrow ladder straight up, and the walkabout outside was a very narrow walkway with a low wall which was difficult for those who do not like heights such as Narda, the views were great. See our short clip below.

Feb 24 2025

16346 Nethravathi Express from Trivandrum Central to Kochi. 2AC

A relatively short ride, 4 1/2 hours, but we met an interesting Canadian woman travelling alone for 5 months already. 

We had long conversations with her.

And then on to our flat. 

We had planned to go back to our dentist from last time but could not find his contact details.so we booked a local one. I also had my teeth whitened. The process took an hour and a half. Anyway it's all done now. 

People are very friendly. No other whites are here. Down the street there is a “walking street” where folks come out after sunset and walk and chat. Lots of them . Very gezellig.

We found a small hole in the wall place that makes Momo's. Yum. Our fav is Creamy Momo.

Today we took the Metro Ferry. It's a new thing here designed to take traffic off the road by offering commuting ferries for a very small price taking advantage of the waterways in this area. 

It was great. We took the ferry to Fort Kochi and after dodging the guys selling stuff and tours we took a nice walk through some narrow old streets. Lots of friendly “hellos” from locals.

Pouring tea or coffee - it looks about the same. I have been trying this at home - what a mess, but a shorter distance resulted in better coffee, go Figure.

We found an OK hair dresser place. Not the best, a bit expensive compared to others. Or am I just complaining because they fawned all over Narda and ended up taking lots of photos of her afterwards and none of me. What kind of twisted world do we live in?

The metro is great. We went to the end one day looked around came back another day went to the other end and wandered around this groovy bit of a town...Thrippunithura; Tripunithura was the capital of the Kingdom of Cochin. The descendants of the Cochin royal family still live here, though we could not find them.

We took a random bus.

Then we jumped on a random bus. It was difficult to explain to the conductor that we did not know where we wanted to go. In the end he sold us a ticket for 20 rupees which is $2.40 USD. For the two of us. An hour later we thought maybe we should get off and we found a little cafe where they made us a great fruit salad, something veg wrapped in pastry (it was nice but could not tell you what it was other than ‘ not spicy’

and after an hour or so riding we were quite hungry and seeing some shops got off the bus, having no idea where we were. We ordered what we thought was a fruit salad - no one spoke English and we didn't know what they were speaking, and got a wonderful surprise of a large thing of fruit with ice cream and nuts

 Oh and don't forget the watermelon drink. which is becoming a favorite.

Then 2 buses back and a ferry and auto-rickshaw home followed by a  nap. It's the hot weather! It's exhausting.

It was an interesting day. We don't need tours, just make it up as we go. It's the best way for us.. 

India is starting to get electric tuk tuks/auto rickshaws which is great to start bringing down some of the pollution levels, still the highest in the world, except for Pakistan when we go there. In 2022, 430,000 electric auto rickshaws were sold in India, and we assume more now. We only got to ride in one. The downside is that they are quiet so it is quicker to be hit by one.

One of “those” buses. Don't be fooled by the name. Nothing holy and nothing angelic. 🥹

The Auto rickshaws are much more gentle, though probably blood dangerous for us.

Yesterday we found a market area selling everything and found a nice skirt which I did not need.

Lulu Mall is accessible by the Metro and we managed two trips there, the first to replace my lost book, and the second for a western mea!! Food in Kerela is spicy.  Northern Indian food is much less spicy; easier for us.

We have enjoyed this little flat….again…..I'm reading this book……........again.

Walking distance from our flat, D’Homz Suites, is Streetscape - a great walking street, a rare safe place to walk. It is only about five blocks long and a lot of folks do their evening stroll here including us. As we unknowingly at the time booked the exact same flat that we had in 2018 - realized after walking into it - here is a photo of the same place from 2018 - we didn't take one this time,

then we went for the same walk as 2018; holy guacamole are we nuts? ending up on the wonderful walking street I raved on about in a previous sentence. Here are two photos; one from 2018 one from 2025.

Our host has allowed us to stay until 6pm so it's a nice relaxing few days.

Good bye India, see you again soon, maybe even later this year.

When we went through the border leaving India I asked the border guy whether I could use this new 5 year e-visa going both ways through Wagah in and out of Pakistan by land.. He wasn't sure. Nice guy. He said he would check with his colleague who was an expert on this. So I waited at the counter while he had a conversation with the other guy. He came back and said “yes you can”. Pretty cool.

And that is it for India, for the moment. Looks as if we will be back at the end of this year, 2025, as we are planning for our two-month house-exchange in the Netherlands (Utrecht - Narda's birthshop) and a trip in December via India and Pakistan and with Brendan, Sofia and the baby with his wonderful "Bluey" crocks that we sent from Vietnam in February, we are all going to Thailand in December.

The Kochi airport, or as we say, or Nedumbassery Airport, is really good. It's also famous for being the first airport in the world to be a fully solar-powered one.