Kerala Backwaters Houseboat

About this pack

A 5-day premium trip to Alleppey, India, taking in Vembanad Lake, Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary, Kuttanad paddy fields and Alappuzha canals.

Inside the Kerala Backwaters Houseboat trip

Kerala Backwaters Houseboat opens on Vembanad Lake, the longest lake in India and the largest in Kerala, stretching some 96.5 kilometres and covering 2,033 square kilometres across the districts of Alappuzha, Kottayam and Ernakulam. Known locally by different names along its length — Vembanad Lake around Kottayam and Vaikom, Punnamada Lake near Alappuzha, and Kochi Lake around Kochi, where the islands of Vypin and Willingdon Island sit within its waters — the lake is fed by ten rivers, including six of central Kerala's major waterways, and drains an area accounting for roughly 40 percent of the state. Today it forms the heart of Kerala's houseboat tourism, with hundreds of traditional kettuvallams plying its waters alongside numerous resorts along its banks, and each August and September its channels come alive with the state's traditional snake boat races, held as part of the Onam festival celebrations.

On the lake's eastern shore lies Kumarakom, a tourism destination near the city of Kottayam that gained wider recognition when The New York Times featured its backwater tourism in January 2023. The neighbouring village of Aymanam is the setting for Arundhati Roy's novel "The God of Small Things," and the "History House" of that book is based on a real building here, once home to four generations of a British missionary family before its restoration into a hotel; Kumarakom itself has since been declared a special tourism zone under Kerala state legislation and has won international recognition including the UNWTO Ulysses Award for innovation in public policy.

To the south lies Kuttanad, a river delta region known as the Rice Bowl of Kerala and recognised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in 2013 as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System. Kuttanad holds the lowest altitude anywhere in India, with farming carried out as much as three metres below sea level on reclaimed land threaded by the Pamba, Meenachil, Achankovil and Manimala rivers — a practice with roots reaching back to the Sangam period, when the region formed part of the domain of the Chera dynasty ruler Uthiyan Cheralathan. Reclamation of the paddy fields from the lake proceeded in stages from the 1860s onward, aided by the Thottappally Spillway, completed in 1955 to divert floodwaters to the sea, and the Thanneermukkam bund, which allows farmers to close out saline water during the dry season and grow two rice crops a year.

The route closes at Alappuzha, also known as Alleppey, a coastal city mentioned as far back as the 1st century AD by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder under the name Baraces. The town flourished from the 16th and 17th centuries as a hub for the European spice trade before Raja Kesavadas, the Dewan of Travancore, developed it into a planned port city in the 18th century, laying out the parallel canals that still crisscross Alappuzha today as part of India's National Waterway 3. Known for its waterways and its coir manufacturing industry, and serving as one of the principal venues for the annual Nehru Trophy Boat Race during Onam, Alappuzha closes out a route that has already carried the traveller across India's longest lake, through a Booker-Prize-novel village and a rice-growing delta reclaimed metre by metre from the sea.

• Vembanad — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Kumarakom — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Kuttanad — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Alappuzha — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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