COCHIN Workers Playtime

A quick bus from Alleppey to our Ernakulam hotel, John's Residency, home of eponymous hotelier John, who is also the local meat and fish cold storage manager, plus various other jobs he alluded to.

He was a good crack and very well opinionated.

We learnt quite quickly he thinks Marxists are 'parasites', which must make him less than popular with the next door neighbours in the Party's Central Local Committee Office.

There are a lot of them about, 'the workers', going on marches, holding strikes, putting fancy graffiti around the place while, er, working hard and running excellent canteens like the local Indian Coffee House, where we breakfasted.

There was one in Alleppey too, at the bus station, where the bus drivers had their union offices and various staff rooms.

It was all very 1970s 'up the workers'. Made me proper nostalgic for Stan and Jack on the buses, it did.

So, Ernakulam, a small working town with a bus station and a ferry port, plus some other interesting bits and pieces we never found time to visit, as our main plan was to see Fort Cochin over the water.

Fort Cochin, taken by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then us, then allowed to run down, but only to the point where it is now, a picturesque place of Chinese fishing nets and fish stalls, theatres and dance, cafes and restaurants, churches and cathedrals (pretty light on templage).

There's also a synagogue (closed on Saturdays, huh) in the bluntly named Jew Town, home to a million antique and curio shops and well-stuffed emporia.

On our first evening we went across to see a demonstration and performance of Kathakali theatre at the Greenix Village.

This is a beautifully mannered form of dance, relying on expressive face and eye movement to convey mood and emotion, hand gestures to narrate further and fabulous make-up and costume to dazzle the eyes and bring the characters (even more) alive.
 

Next day, we escaped the convection oven heat of our room to take a good long walk 'round the main section of Fort Cochin.

We took in the Mattencherry quarter and the back streets, a much more local, working area, where the business of commerce was going at full pace and the tourists clearly weren't being guided.

With precious little help from the colourful but useless tourist map (like a jigsaw with all the pieces in the wrong place) or Lonely Planet 'diagram' (low on detail, as usual) we did well to get back to the Seagull for a beer then the ferry home.