Cochin, India - Day 16

We docked in Cochin, India today. Cochin is located in the State of Kerala, one of the smallest Indian states. There are 30 million people in this state – isn’t that more than all of Canada? Everywhere you look there are people. It was a holiday so luckily traffic was not too chaotic.

We awoke to an incredibly hot and humid day. We docked at 8:00am in the port of Ernakulam, the eastern side of Cochin. Luckily, our tour bus was able to pull right up to the ship and had great air conditioning. We were off to see the Fort Cochin/Mattancheri area by 9:00am. As expected, there is a lot of poverty in India. Passengers not taking a ship excursion were met outside the pier area by literally hundreds of people trying to sell them taxi rides, souvenirs, food, etc. It looked very overwhelming. We watched it all from inside our bus thank goodness.



We first stopped at the Church of St. Francis where Vasco da Gama, the famous explorer, was buried in 1524. Fourteen years later his remains were taken back to Lisbon, Portugal. We have actually seen his very grand tomb in Lisbon. His tomb here was basically a little plaque over a piece of cement. Above the church’s pews, there are cloth fans that are pulled back and forth during services to circulate the air. I wished they were in operation while we were inside as it seemed even hotter indoors than outside. Other than Vasco da Gama’s plot, the church was not particularly interesting.




We then walked down a lane with lots of souvenir stands to reach the Chinese Fishing Nets. This was an awesome sight. Lots of picturesque nets where the people lower then raise the nets to catch a few fish at a time. They use a counter-weight system of large stones to maneuver the nets. I guess if a system works, there is no need to modernize. I don’t think I’d ever buy what they caught as the fish didn’t seem to be kept on ice – yuk!


We then were driven to the Jewish synagogue located in “Jew Town.” That is what the local population calls this area. There are only a handful of Jews left in Cochin as most immigrated to Israel in the late forties. The temple was very interesting. It was Orthodox with a balcony area upstairs for the women. The entire floor was covered in ceramic tiles with blue Japanese motifs, very Delft tile looking. Jeff found it interesting that the eternal lamp was lighted by oil and was placed in the center of the temple instead of above the torah ark. There are not ten men in the congregation to routinely create the minyan. They have to rely on tourists to help out. They did not allow pictures of the interior so I’m sorry that you can’t see this interesting sight.

Our last sight was the Dutch Palace which was originally built by the Portuguese as a gift for the Raja of Cochin and later rebuilt by the Dutch. The main feature is a series of murals painted on the wooden walls. Again, no photography was allowed and it was just as well as it was like watching paint dry. There was no air conditioning and not much light to view the murals. Very hot and miserable inside.




We were back on the ship by 1:00 pm. We closed our staterooms drapes and cranked up the air conditioning to the max trying to grow icicles to no avail. No way were we going to go back in to town on our own to do some shopping. We were supposed to have dinner in one of the specialty restaurants with a couple we had met through cruisecritic.com. The wife took ill and canceled. While we were at the restaurant check-in, we saw another couple we’d met at the sommelier dinner from a few nights previously, so we dined together. She recently retired from American Airlines as a flight attendant and he was a real estate developer. She and her husband live in Carefree, Arizona which is where our favorite hotel, the Boulders, is located. Dinner was incredible. We are really enjoying the specialty restaurants. The chef, who comes out every night to talk to us, made a curry especially for Jeff and the wife that wasn’t on the menu. I had a taste and it was fabulous. Had a great time with the couple and plan on looking them up the next time we visit the Scottsdale area. (Sorry Barbara for our picture. No one else was in the restaurant tonight – they all were up at a BBQ by the pool! There really are 700 other people on this cruise with us.)

We really love this ship. Our cabin is larger than the one we usually get when we are on Silversea, so we are extremely pleased. We have a slightly larger balcony than other staterooms on board which allows space for a table and two chairs plus one lounger. We somehow missed our pastry delivery earlier today (if you are not there to answer the door they do not leave anything, although I’m sure we were in the cabin) so we’ll have to find out if maybe they don’t cater the staterooms when you are in port.