A day in Cochin - March 31st

With an army of Indian immigration officers on board, the immigration inspection goes smoothly for the almost 2,000 passengers whose documents must be reviewed, and appearances checked against the passports. What do you call a thousand tourists going ashore? While you might think of them as a “plague” (like locusts), they should better be called “a blessing of tourists.” That must be the perspective of the shopkeepers and hawkers who crowd around the buses and busy streets. Hundreds of peddlars offer the same string of miniature elephants on a string, or cheap pens decorated with bright colors and mirrors. Photographs of “Jew town” (the old Jewish quarter) would make one believe that the city is inhabited by Americans and Europeans dressed for the tropics.

Crossing the Backwaters

Shopping in Jew Town

Bus Caused Traffic Jam

St. Francis Church

Tea on the Beach

Chinese Fishing Nets

The streets are narrow - filled with “Tuktuks” in the best of times. (Tuktuks, often called the Indian Volkswagen - are motorcycles built into a shell for carrying 2-3 passengers. They are also called the Indian Ferrari, since the drivers treat them as small race cars.) Add 50 buses to the same road, and soon traffic is snarled as buses get stuck making turns in impossibly small intersections, while the backed-up cars and Tuktuks all honk their horns at once. The heat and humidity are both in the 90s.


We bounce from the container port, where we are docked, to a variety of stops. We have a short boat ride on the “back waters”, which are actually the port area that our ship entered in the morning. Then we visit the old “Dutch Palace”, with a remarkable ivory palanquin. (A palanquin is a bed or box, used to carry nobility through the streets.)  There are also some striking wall paintings. Next we visit Jew town, which once housed Jewish traders, close to water, and the old port. We see St. Francis Church, built by the Portuguese in 1510. The grave of Vasco da Gama was originally here, but his body has since been moved to his native Portugal. We have refreshments by the sea at a small resort - the lawn crammed with plastic chairs to accommodate the many busloads of passengers who have 30 minutes for tea and cake.  There is a lovely breeze at the hotel, which is delightful and more effective than the half-hearted air conditioning on the bus.  From here we visit the Chinese fishing nets - gracefully cantilevered to snatch passing fish from the sea. Nearby the fish are sold and can be cooked right on the beach. We also visit a relatively new Portuguese museum, which showcases the artifacts (mostly religious) from the original Western settlement.

We return to the ship by 5:30 PM for a shower and then dinner. We do some dancing after dinner, we’ll pack tomorrow for our trip across India.