Suman's 6 days trip to Kerala
3 months agoThis was my second trip to Kerala and I booked a package for 5N 6D with Postcard travels which costed me around 62K for 4 adults and 1 child.
1.My trip started from Munnar and we were booked at a hotel Atwood which was at Pottankadu which is atleast 15 kms from main attractions at Munnar which is I think OK as in the main city of Munnar we don't have pretty good hotels. But the room provided to us at first was horrible as it didnt even have any window. which after a few discussions with the manager at the hotel, they were kind to change it to 2 suite rooms for 2 nights which I am very thankful for. but the food there was very BAD. you get only 2 options in breakfast, either idli-sambhar or set dosa and bread(not toasted)and butter which tasted sweet. at dinner on first night , we ordered dal fry, phulka and some chilly dish(i dont remember), the phulkas were like the size of a puri and the dal fry was not good at all. so the second night, we preferred to get our dinner from outside.
2. On our 3rd day, we went to Allepey where we reached our houseboat where the only the captain of the houseboat knew some english and was able to understand but the cooks weren't able to understand us. the lunch was seved right away and it was OK-ish as we were pretty hungry at 3 Pm and had our food without any issues. but the houseboat has a policy that the ACs will only work from 9 PM to 6 AM which I understand because the boats work on generators and hence they won't be able to provide that much electric supply. but there wasn't even a good table fan or wall fan to sit and relax. there was only one stand fan available at the common sitting area which was almost broken and didnt work properly to cover the range of 5 people sitting in front of it on 2 sofas. at night, we were provided chicken curry in dinner which was so spicy that the adults in our group had a hard time having it, let alone there was a 5 years old child in our group. I informed about this to the cook but he just made a face(probably didnt understand what I meant, I dont know). the AC worked at night but it constantly made noises all the time like a cricket insect.
3. on our 4th day, we checked out of our houseboat at around 9:15 AM and unfortuntely, our driver's car got some issues in its brakes and we had to wait for almost 40 mins at a garage until the car got fixed, which I understand is nobody's fault as these mechanical issues can always happen. we reached Kovalam and after taking the turn from the main road at Kovalam it took almost 20-25 mins to reach our hotel, that bad was the hotel's location. Though the hotel staffs were very polite and helpful, they didnt understand much english so we had a hard time ordering food from restaurant which also didnt have much options even if they said they had so many items in their menu card. Though their was a walking path that directly went into the Lighthouse beach and it just took 5 mins walking to reach there, but by car, the hotel is pretty interior to reach.
4. on our 4 th day, we had out Kanyakumari trip scheduled and driver said we need to leave by 10 AM but as were not well after the long drive from Allepey to Kovalam the day before, we left at 11 AM but asked the driver if we could skip waiting at Poovar and directly go to Kanyakumari but he said there's a 1.5-2hours waiting time to get the permit at Tamilnadu border and so we had out boatride at Poovar during that time and then we stopped for lunch midway to Kanyakumari. Throughout all this time, driver didn't mention once that the ticket window for the ferry to Vivekananda Rock closes at 4 PM and so when we reached the gates at 4:15 PM, we found the window closed and weren't able to visit Vivekakanada rock and instead watched it from the shores itself.
5. After the Kanyakumari disaster, we planned to get ready on time and asked the driver when do we need to leave from Kovalam to visit the Padmanabhaswamy temple at Trivandrum, so he mentioned that the temple closes at 12 PM and we need to checkout from hotel and leave Kovalam by 10 AM the next day. So we were ready in time, checked out from our hotel and reached the parking(which was around 200 m from the hotel reception) at 10 :15 AM but the driver had already texted me on Whatsapp at 5:40 AM that he is leaving for his home due to an emergency and he arranged for a separate cab for airport drop after temple visit, but the new cab somehow arrived at the parking where we were standing at around 10:50 AM and this new cab's driver didnt understand a single word of english except 'OK'. we somehow reached the temple at 11:40 AM , entered the temple with our dhotis on but the queue was long that the temple closed its main gate where we do darshan at 12 AM and we weren't able to do our darshan. we left from the temple after looking around for sometime at 12:15 PM and went to have lunch at a hotel midway and asked the driver to drop us at airport at around 3 PM.