Cochin On A Budget - Travels To Goa & Beyond

If you watched The Real Marigold Hotel last night you'll have heard the intrepid band of pensioners marvel at how cheap Cochin is. We got by on an average £22 a day between us - that's all our food & drink, accommodation, transport and sightseeing, pretty much the same as we live on in Goa.

I'm not sure what the budget for the Marigold gang is but it's a world away from ours, after all they're celebrities and we're self-employed market traders. Their accommodation* was just around the corner from ours (so you can imagine our squeals of excitement when we saw it on TV last night) and, by bizarre coincidence, we'd taken a photo of its impressive gateway after we learned that it had once formed the boundary wall of the East India Company offices. We even had a spiced, iced tea in the chi-chi arts café in the grounds of their hotel and got clobbered with "luxury tax", two drinks cost more than most of our dinners did!

*Our 2010 edition of the Rough Guide to Kerala lists the tariff as being between $340-450 a night for a suite, way out of reach for your average British pensioner!

The Real Marigold Hotel gang stayed here

I've mentioned that we'd haggled down the room rate for our homestay. Before we left Goa we'd visited an internet cafe and searched recommendations on Trip Advisor for budget accommodation in Fort Cochin. After checking the room rates we selected a few likely candidates and Googled their phone numbers. As we'd bought an Indian sim card when we arrived in India (around £3.50) our calls were charged at local rate. Although many landlords use internet booking sites, most prefer to cut out the middleman and avoid paying commission to a website so, if you offer to stay for more than a couple of nights, they'll usually come up with a better price - we got a 60% discount.

Paper masala dosa (£1), Mysore masala dosa (80p), cardamon chai (20p) and veg thali (£1) and one of our favourite eateries in the premises of an old pepper warehouse.  

Food prices vary enormously and eating in the tourist restaurants in the trendy bit of Fort Cochin can often set you back more than you'd pay at home. These places are frequented by Westerners and the food is either bland, adapted to what's considered suitable for a foreign palate or the tired old Hakka noodles/fried rice traveller's fare. Who wants to travel halfway around the world, hang around with a load of other Westerners & eat boring food? Not us. We look for places away from the main tourist drag, with signs advertising "homely food" or "Authentic Keralan Cuisine" and if the clientele's mainly Indian we're reassured that the menu's going to be more to our taste. 

Taken from our table at The Seagull Hotel. Surly service but ice cold beers and a great view.

Due to Kerala's higher taxes, beer prices are double those of Goa and only hotels are licensed to serve it. Spirits aren't available in bars and can only be bought in government liquor shops for home consumption. As we'd been to Kerala before we were prepared, buying a bottle of McDowell's white rum in Goa (£2 a litre) and enjoying a glass or two in our room before we went out - Thums Up cola is available everywhere. We'll have water with our dinner and share a couple of large Kingfisher Blues in a hotel bar after we've eaten.

Indian Ferrari, Indian Ferrari.....You want Indian Ferrari, Sir? 

Taxi drivers will continuously stop to offer a whistle-stop heritage tour for around £12 but, if you nip into any of the tourist information points in and around Fort Cochin, you can pick up a free walking map marked with places of interest and do it at your own pace (with plenty of stops for lime soda or chai.)

Here's Vasco da Gama's house - now a homestay and a cafe.

Top of the tourist attractions is the historic area of Jew Town. Get there early before it gets inundated by wealthy, snap-happy Americans straight off the cruise ship.

Jews have been trading on the Malabar Coast since King Solomon's times and settled in Cochin in the Twelfth century. Today only 22 families remain.

The Paradesi Synagogue was constructed in 1567,  and it's the oldest working synagogue in India. 

If you've ever read Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh you'll be familiar with the synagogue. I'd just finished the book when we visited in 2007 but stupidly turned up on a Friday afternoon when we should have know that it would be closed for Sabbath. 

I've waited ten years to see these 18th Century hand-painted Chinese tiles, each one of them featuring a slightly different design, and it was well worth the wait!

Both photos were borrowed from Google as cameras weren't allowed

The Paradesi Synagogue is open from 10 - 1pm Monday to Friday and from 2 - 6pm Monday - Thursday. 

No photos, no talking, dress modestly. Admission £1

The creation of Israel in the 1940s led to a mass exodus from Cochin. Many of the Jews chose to leave their larger possessions behind which lead to a plethora of high end antiques emporiums springing up. Although much of the stock on offer these days is reproduction there's still some incredible stuff. Most places forbid photography and assistants follow browsers round like hawks but looking is free and a wonderful way to while away an hour or so.

Not marked on the map is the Cochin Police Museum which we stumbled upon by accident. Free to visit and staffed by a super smiley and welcoming serving policeman, we admired a exhibition of uniforms throughout the ages, starting with the Raja of Cochin's bodyguard's lunghi to the modern day police uniform of khaki green. These days there's even a specialist Women's Squad, who patrol the streets of Fort Cochin in a Barbie pink van.

The autopsy room wasn't for the feint hearted, 3D reconstructions & gory photographs and case notes of machete attacks, strangulations, garrotings, stabbings and shootings as well as pictures of the unfortunates who'd fallen under trains and been hit by lorries. Particularly haunting was a photo of a family with a pretty young woman in a white blouse and hanging up beside the picture was the actual blouse riddled with bloodstains and holes - her husband had shot her shortly after the photograph was taken.

There's some stunning historical churches in Fort Cochin. St Francis was India's first European church, built in the 15th Century with an ancient Dutch cemetery attached, sadly locked up and no longer open to the public. 

 The Santa Cruz Cathedral Basilica was built by the Portuguese in the 16th Century and rebuilt in the 1880s.

Both churches are still in use but visitors are welcome between services.

Fort Cochin is connected to the modern centre of Ernakulum via Willington Island by passenger ferry. They run until 9pm, take around 30 minutes and a single ticket costs the equivalent of 5p. There's quite a leap from the launch pad to the boat but the staff are on the jetty to hold your hand and help you across.

Once you've disembarked in Ernakulum you can jump in a tuk tuk and visit the Hill Palace, 14 km south of the city centre (a return journey with an hour's waiting time should cost you around £4).  The royal family of Cochin once owned over 40 palaces all of which were confiscated by the state government following independence.

The Hill Palace (£1 admission) now serves as a museum with some truly fabulous stuff on display including a room stuffed with antique jewellery, bejeweled maharajah's turbans, precious gemstones and antique dresses threaded with gold. Frustratingly, as is often the way in many of India's state-run museums, the information labels on the exhibits are rudimentary to say the least, "Bangle" is the tag attached to an incredibly ancient piece of silver tribal jewellery and "Timepiece, gift from the Prince Of Wales" on a finely enameled & bejeweled pocket watch...Who? When? Why? After re-reading the Rough Guide later we discovered that the wonderfully ornate knife bedecked in decorative bells that we'd admired was used for beheadings.

With the huge groups of schoolchildren , more interested in oogling the funny foreigners than the exhibits, it can all get a bit raucous so once you've done the cultural thing go and wander around the surrounding deer park and do as the locals do, have a picnic beneath the shade of the cashew trees.

That contraption with the cage? That's where the Raja would have his enemies hung and left for the birds to peck to death. Lovely!

Fort Cochin is still very much a thriving fishing port and these 15th Century Chinese nets dominate the skyline, watched by an army of salivating cats. Tourists can buy the day's catch directly from the fishermen and have it cooked at one of the many tiny stalls flanking the harbour. Don't worry, at the end of each day, the cats got anything that hadn't sold.

Typically, with our spur of the moment type travel, when we tried to buy return train tickets to Goa we discovered that there were none available for at least a week but, no need to panic, nothing is ever a problem in India. We saw that there were a couple of tickets available on The Malabar Express and, because it sounded wonderfully exotic, we decided to book two sleeper class seats and slowly make our way back to Goa via Mangalore instead.

 With a history dating back to the Roman Empire and named the Estuary of The Wolf  by Moroccan adventurer Ibn Battuta in 1342, who considered it to be the greatest port of the Malabar kingdom, surely Mangalore had be worth a visit?

See you soon!

See more photos of our walk around Fort Cochin HERE.