Rural life on the Kerala backwaters


Throughout Kerala, education is highly valued. On the backwaters, this makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Children in neat uniforms pass fishing nets and half naked men in canoes on their way to school. In just a couple of hours on a traditional Kerala houseboat (OK, the outboard motors were not so traditional), we got a small taste of what rural life on the Kerala backwaters is like.

To start with, water is a means of transport. We rode in a comfortable houseboat. The locals tend to ride in dugout canoes.


We also saw a little of the local non-fishing industry. That mainly revolves around the coconut. FIber is harvest and turned into coir, among other things. But the main activity on the water is fishing. Even though Ashtamudi is called a lake, it is fed by the sea, so it is brackish. Some men fished from their canoes with nets, setting the nets and then thwacking the water with a big flat stick to scare the fish into the nets. Others swam in the shallows, digging up clams by hand and loading them into their boats. We saw people being ferried by canoes from the tiny two-hut islands on which they lived. We also saw men working on their canoes, transporting sand and bricks, and just relaxing in their canoes. The photos below, taken by Maude, capture just a little bit of what this life is like.


Posted: Thu - January 5, 2006 at 07:48 AM          

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