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Other entries in Alleppey

a whole lotta nuthin

beginning to sound too familiar....back to dill's place after the houseboat trip. took one day to laze around (hey - sitting around donig nothing on a houseboat is exhausting work - we HAD to recover), then dill arranged with some friends to take us 'fishing' the next day.

didn't realize we were so close to a beach, but this isn't teh relaxing tourist sort of beach - it's full-on working/fishing central. nix plans to sunbathe - that'd be a freak-show-stare-fest in 2 seconds. we just hung out in the shade watching the action: unloading baskets of fish, guys hauling the baskets on their heads - dripping salty, fishy water onto these wide-brimmed plastic hats they wore just for this job, fish drying in th sun, etc etc. if only BoD had scratch-n-sniff....you'd be hating me right now.

dill finally finds his friend and we head to our boat. turns our, 'our boat' is the one parked like *2 miles* from shore. so everyone picks a side and starts shoving this huge boat over the sand dunes, up a hill, finally into the water. argh! was the most work I've done in days and my whole left side ached for the next 2 days. (clearly I need to spend some time in a gym when I'm done traveling.)

we motored out about 8k to see where the big boats were casting the big nets - all in search of the tiniest (and most desgusting-tasting, I can attest) sardines. guess this isn't the main season, but a boat full of like 20 guys would haul in only enough fish to maybe feed a hungry family of 8...and it took about 30 mins to cast net, wait, pull in net, haul in fish. I'm guessing they work more than an 8 hr day in order to make it worth their while...

along the way, peds got to jump into the clean ocean water only found 8ks away from the eternally-poluted shoreline. I was SO jealous - would love to have done the same. but a boat full of indian guys watching a blond white girl jump off the boat is not my idea of a good time... so I behaved like a proper, modest indian girl would and just watched from above. sigh..... not sure how much more of this india I can take....

closer to shore, we did our own mini-version of fishing with a smaller net. go figure - if a big net only catches tiny sardines, then a smaller net would catch even smaller things - baby crab & prawn to be exact. dill wanted to bring them back to feed the house cat but in the end, we forgot them in the boat. felt a little guilty about that...  we also saw a couple dolphins - my first in the open sea! and one dead one - that was creepy (covered in bite marks). and SMELLY.

our last day we had a henna paint-fest. we were supposed to catch a bus back to fort cochin but were in no hurry so 3 hours later, I'd henna'ed catherine, peds and me, plus painted ped's toenails. hard to leave such a life of leisure, but had a reservation at a homestay in cochin and were craving seafood (tho not sardines).

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