Kicked out of the Shelter
We had promised the Lodge owner to leave his place by 6 am in the morning(as a part of our bargain) but the 4 of us were peacefully sleeping like Bulls until 8. Finally the owner/manager could take it no more and banged on our door and asked us to leave immediately. We had no choice, so without brushing teeth (forget taking bath), we got our bags packed and left for the bus stand downstairs. After waiting for 5-10 minutes, we got the bus for Bekal fort (the largest fort in the state of Kerala, with a number of movies being shot there, notable ones being the TU HI RE song from the Mani ratnam film Bombay).
Bekal Fort
 |
| One of the best beaches probably on the west coast |
Bekal fort is one of the most spectacular forts I had seen so far. Perched smartly facing the Arabian sea and flanked by two Beaches on North and South, its also one of the best maintained in Kerala. Especially the Northern beach is amazing in the sense that its somewhat pebbled in nature while the Southern beach is sandy.
 |
| Entering from the back |
 |
| The front gate from where we actually exite |
After analysing these details (Thanks to the civil engineer Aayush Saxena Ji), we entered the fort by climbing the high walls at the back of the fort like thieves, and exited through the front gate. Such were the strange ways in which we explored places usually and that is what made these trips so unusual yet so memorable.
 |
| View from Inside the fort (can u recall Arvind Swamy with manisha koirala singing to the tunes of AR Rahman in Bombay) |
 |
| Beaches on both side of this fort |
One peculiar thing about Kerala is that the cities and towns never end. There's a continuous settlement all along the roads/highways with one town giving way to another and the towns merely merge with one another without actually ending. Coastal Kerala is thickly inhabited.
 |
| Mahe River estaury at Mahe (Pondicherry's district in Kerala) |
Next we moved along Kanhagad -> Kannur -> Thalaserry -> Mahe (Pondecherry's district in Kerala) -> Calicut (Kozhikode), in short all along the Kerala coastline entering from North and continuing till the Central part of the state ie. the temple town of Guruvayur. Bisen & Apurv had their lunch at Mahe whereas I chose to explore this tiny district of Pondicherry in Kerala (surrounded on all sides by Kerala).
Since its a union territory, stuff like liquor, electronic goods, ceramic, etc was cheaper then the neighbouring Kerala.
Kerala under Football World Cup Fever
On the way around evening time at an unknown town called Kakkad, we suddenly spotted on a roadside a Large screen where LIVE football world cup match was being projected with huge crowd all around , and so we jumped off the bus(to Guruvayur) to catch the Football action between Germany and Argentina (Kerala was reeling under severe Football worldcup fever during that time) . The match was rewarding at least for Apurv and Aayush with Germany thrashing Argentina and I started fuming under the pretext that we had gotten behind the schedule. Soon after having a swift dinner of inedible shoddy South Indian meal in a shabby restaurant, we resumed our journey towards our destination Guruvayur.
Holy Town & no place for the night (What the hell!!!!!!!!!)
Finally, we reached the temple town of Guruvayur at around 1 AM in the night and so began our mission to find a place for sleeping. To our horror, almost every singel lodge, hotel, guest house was booked (what could one expect if he's reaching Guruvayur at the dead of night without prior bookings). I and Bisen were already pissed off after the match so decided to leave the bargaining part to Ayush and Apurv (which until now we were doing so sincerely since the past 5 weeks). Finally we managed a double bed room @ Rs 350. We were so exhausted after all the exercise that we dozed off quietly on the bed without having our usual quarrel for space on the small bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment