The Weekend in Kochi

Our trip to Kochi over this past weekend turned out to be quite a well-timed respite. Jenna commented on the first day we got there (Friday), that this was “the first time we were able to really relax in India.”

Truly, Kochi offered to us our first genuine “vacation” atmosphere since arriving in the Subcontinent more than two months ago. It is a popular spot for Western tourists, and we saw gaggles of French, German, and English sightseers throughout the weekend. In fact, at dinner on Friday night in a full restaurant in Fort Cochin, Jenna was the only Indian in the place besides the waiters. (Whether that is a good or bad thing for a place's repute is another matter.)

Colonized by the Portuguese in the 1500s, Kochi still retains visible European influences in its architecture—red-tiled roofs, stucco houses, gothic cathedrals, narrow twisting residential streets. The area is heavily Catholic, owing to the twin impacts of European traders and Christian missionaries throughout the past few centuries. The town also remains home to India’s only notable Jewish enclave, complete with a synagogue dating back to the 16th Century. (It is quite an arresting sight seeing a man of South Asian complexion walking around with a yarmulke and forelocks, as we did several times walking around the alleyways of Kochi’s Jew Town Saturday.)

Kochi itself is an agglomeration of several different municipalities—the largest and most commercial being Ernauklam, which sits on the Indian mainland. This is home to many corporate offices, business districts, and the city’s two main train junctions. In feel and atmosphere, it is little different from the other cities we have been in during our travels. Across a brief causeway, one drives to Willingdon Island—another municipality—home to some upscale waterfront homes and a giant naval base. Hopping along another causeway, you reach further out into the Arabian Sea and come to Forth Cochin (on its own island), the historical and cultural heart of the Kochi district and the place Jenna and I stayed during our weekend. This place again charms visitors with its quaint European atmosphere and, above all, its superb and utterly remarkable quietness. Save the occasional sound of a revving auto-rickshaw, all Jenna and I heard over two days were the cawing of ravens and the brief patter of a intermittent rain showers.

Our guesthouse is the same place we will be staying at again in December when my parents visit. In fact, Jenna and I considered this weekend a kind of fact-finding mission. What we found, left us excited to come back. The guesthouse—a place called Ann’s Residency—is a mere five-minute walk from the famous Fort Cochin shoreline, dotted as it is with fish stalls, Chinese fishing nets, and banked wooden fishing boats. Ann’s Residency sits within the stucco, whitewashed walls of a quaint villa, and the rooms (on two levels) surround a quiet cobble-stoned courtyard complete with a miniature garden of palm trees and a fish tank. The rooms have AC and small cable TVs, mosquito nets around the beds, and rather graphic woodcarvings of the kama sutra on the walls.

Jenna and I surmised that all of these elements—the mosquito net, the kama sutra—were intentionally combined to give visiting Westerners an exotic feel for India. Yet, we jokingly concluded at the end of our weekend that Kochi was “India for beginners”. Or, more pointedly, “India for White People”.

This is not a bad thing. Having spent several weeks now exposed to all the raw life and abundance that India has to offer, it was frankly good (and necessary) for us to get away. Kochi provided that opportunity in spades. Yet, if you come to Kochi on vacation and go nowhere else in India, and it is impossible for you to go home and tell people you have ‘seen India’. It reminds me of my conceit in high school, telling people I had been to California when, in fact, I had only stopped briefly in LAX on my way to Hawaii.

Visiting Kochi and enjoying its tropical quietude is about as close to entering the heart of India as eating at the LAX food court is to seeing the Redwood Forest or the Golden Gate Bridge. Yet, Kochi is indelibly a part of India. A part, in fact, that is talked about surprisingly little in travel literature. Its uniqueness—the vary fact that you do not feel a part of India when you are there—is what makes it and the rest of this country so special.

India is a rather unpredictable country. The Jews of Kochi would agree.