Today I arrived in bhatkal at about 11:30am and started to ride to Gokarna. Soon I was great by Western Ghats and the terrain was a a bit hilly than we had encountered so far. But Karnataka seemed more like north India with less but aggressive traffic.

With the heat and windy roady I landed in Gokarna at about 5pm! I did love the ride just hoped the sun was a bit mellow .

In Gokarna check out the Mahabali and Parvati temple and witnessed another awesome sunset! With a bit of backpacker touch to this holy town I’m loving an interesting western and eastern tourist mix!

Tomorrow its about 100km to Canacona or Mashen, Hopefully I’ll start birght and early and not bake in sun!

We started at about 9:30am after getting off the houseboat to Cochin. Since the sun was up and the ride a bit long (about 83km) we got in to Ernakulam at 1pm.

I helped Tullika and Rahul get on their 7pm train to Bangalore from Ernakulam and also made a friend at the railway station.

Since my train was at 11pm i decided to do a bit of more night riding and go check out Fort Cochin. It was awesome to see the spirit of Christmas and New year in this old part of Cochin. It was lighted and had a huge Chrismas tree!!

My train started at about 11:20 pm (on time) to go to Bhatkal. I had a 90km ride the next day!!

We again started bright and early to cover about 80km to Allepey from Amrita puri.

I got to Allepey at about 9:00pm with a 5:30am start and then started scouting houseboats. By 10:30am we had one and after a bit of discussion we settle on it and i got a bunch of beer for us!

Houseboating in Allepey
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This might require a post by itself, I’ll add pictures later but this was an amazing experience. Relaxing to the extent that I recovered from my soar throat which had been troubling me for last couple of days!

We had a captain, a navigator and a cook all to ourselves!! It was nice to sit and order food and look at the open water. We saw amazing sunset from the houseboat!

Next on our stop after 21 hours on the houseboat was Cochin aka Ernakulam!

We started bright and early (5am) from Varkala to reach Kollam at 7:30am.  We covered about 67km in a swiff, well done team! Opprutunitstically we got tatkal tickets for our train travel on 27th, I decide to train from Cochin to Bhatkal giving me an extra day in Kerala!

We took the 10:30am ferry to Amritapuri and arrived at Amma’s Ashram at 2pm!

Amma’s Ashram

We ha a great welcome by helpful volunteers at the Ashram. We also got to see the dedication and devotion of a couple of western followers we had conversation with! Core to Amma’s teaching seems Love and Service, I liked the idea of service especially her initiative to clean India 2kms at a time! Anyways we didnt have luck getting a hug from her because we couldnt get the tokens neither had foreign passports .

A tad bit dissapointment was that the Ashram was not quiet and it didnt portray the theme of love and service that well.

After the day at Ashram we had another early day, this time to go to Allepey!

The rest day at Varkala was amazing! I woke up late caught and then ate a lazy breakfast lunch and then went for a Keralan Ayurvedic Massage!

Ayurvedic Massage:
I’ll write more about the naunces but my massage was essentially being marinated in oil! It was alrite.

The rest day just flew and we were ready to hit Kollam for going to Amma’s Ashram in Amritapuri.