We next went to Marari Beach which is near the town of Alleppy. We had only one night there, but it was lovely to be on an ocean beach.
We spent one day swimming there and hanging out at the resort. Again, being monsoon season, we were one set of few guests, so we had the place to ourselves. We stayed at the Turtle Beach Resort, which was lovely, but this is where our reservation trouble began. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you plan to travel Kerala, I recommend the CGH Earth group of hotels over the ABAD group of hotels. The ABADs were very nice, but we just kept running into trouble with our reservations, and the CGH hotels are really nice (and eco-friendly!).
Thus began the rainy part of our trip (click on the photo to enlarge it, so you can better see the rain):
Keep in mind, it was monsoon season. Frankly, it did not rain as much as we expected. As we moved into the interior of Kerala, it rained more and more, but for the most part, we had decent weather considering the season.
The night we stayed at the Turtle Beach Resort, we went to a lake resort for dinner (one that involved a very long drive during which we got lost), which was a very lovely place. We had a delicious dinner of fish and crab.
Here is a cute family picture by a Krishna statue:
The next morning, we headed to our houseboat for a backwaters tour.
The Connecticutian 