The Backwaters of Kerala

Sneaking in homework before class - Francis is on the left

Fishermen

Me in a boat with Ivano, a nice Italian fellow

The view from the prow

School children getting on the ferry

Mud divers

Our guide keeping the sun off

          I was happy to be on the ferry heading out into the backwaters of Kerala leaving Allepey far behind. Lonely planet is fond of exaggerations but describing this polluted and rubbish strewn eyesore as 'almost Venicelike' was totally outrageous.
So things were now profoundly improving. The boat moved from jetty to jetty along picturesque wide canals and traversing lakes, handsome houses and village dwellings hugging the shores. At each stop hordes of school children would embark on their way to one of the dozens of Catholic schools that are dotted along these vast waterways.
Soon a young boy in a blue checked shirt sat down next to me and regarded me with an amused look.
"Where are you from?" he asked after a little time. This is the ever present question that the local always kick off with. I told him, we exchanged names.
It turned out over the course of our conversation that Francis was fourteen, a speaker of three languages, had a boundless enthusiasm for cricker, loved mathematics and computing, and was clearly prodigiously intelligent for his age. In his right hand he grasped a maths past paper. I glanced over it - it was easily to the same standard, perhaps beyond, anything set in England for fourth year secondary. He wanted to be a banker. He thought India would win the Cricket World Cup. I played him some music on my mp3 player. It occured to me after a short while that Francis was used to all this, tourists on his school boat must be a regularity in this Mecca of sightseeing. That he was so relaxed, friendly and expressive spoke of it.
         "Are you married?" he asked cheekily after hearing I was 29. I said I wasn't and he laughed. He fixed me with a look and said with with authority and a hint of pieous pity "You europeans, you have so so many girlfriends. Ha! Me - I will be married by the time I'm 22"
A man infront turned round and nodded with smile on his lips. This was his father. It breifly flashed across my mind he might think I was corrupting his son with my apparently decadent Englishness. But these fears were misplaced. We had a nice chat and then they disembarked after we shook hands.
Later I took a journey round on a small canoe with three other tourists, seeing fishermen and middle aged folks who dived to collect mud for bricks. The area was achingly beautiful, only occasionally the serentiy pierced by the behemothic house boats chartered by the more affluent foreign and Indian vacationers.
On returning to his basic house our guide's wife cooked us an enormous and delicious vegetarian thali and fish fry, while the guide energetically bounced around telling us of his son working in TV, a daughter who is currently a maid in Dubai, another daughter who is a nun in Kenya.
It was a wrench to go back into the dust and mahem of Allepey, but the day was a good one.