Went to breakfast around 7:30 and after breakfast went for a walk around the property and in the butterfly garden. Our naturalist guide was a young female named Githu, yet another talented and pleasant young person.
Came back to the cottage freshened up and the resort ferry took us to the mainland. As the ferry pulled away they played the drums, a nice touch.
The restaurant staff was not as friendly as all the other places we have stayed but the property, the food, and the ambience was excellent and inviting.
We left by car towards Kovalam around 10:15 am.
Pretty soon we left the lush green and started driving on a high traffic road passing through mundane small towns]. Hope there will be some open patches or this will be a very long 4 hours.
Fortunately, the road became much wider, less traffic, and lush green reappeared.
We stopped for lunch at Ginger, a favorite hangout of the ITs, s Tiruvanamthpur or Trivandrum, at the capital city of the state of Kerala. The menu was Chinese, inexpensive but quite good.
After a short drive we came to the Palace of the present king of Travancore. It was basically a museum displaying some awe inspiring carvings and artifacts.
These were very impressive and valuable but unfortunately were dusty and not well maintained. Still worth the visit.
Adjacent to the Palace was a temple famous for being the richest in India. It is basically where royalty stashed their gold and precious stones. We decided against going inside the temple and proceeded on towards our hotel.
We had decided earlier that we will skip tomorrow's program of going to Kanyakumari which would have entailed 3 consecutive days of 7 hour drive days a 17 hour flight back home.
We chose to just relax and a take a back water boat tour instead.
We booked the trip for tomorrow starting at 5:30 and it included sunset viewing promises to be good, we are looking forward to it.
We arrived at Travancore Heritage, our beach resort for the next two days.
We were greeted with traditional flowers, blessing, and a fruit drink, then things started to go downhill rapidly.
At check in our identity papers that we have always used on all our vacations in India, were not good enough for them and they insisted on our passport and finally settled on the papers and the expiry date of the passport.
We were then shown to our cottage, it faces the sea and is a short walk to the beach. The cottage was the smallest we have seen and although had a queen size bed, the room was not large enough for two people to walk around without bumping into each other.
The promised wifi was non existent and upon asking the front desk was told that it was under repair and that was that.
Couple of the light bulbs were burnt out and the telephone jack was pulled out. The bathroom was separated from the room by an open passage and very small. The wardrobe cabinet was in this open passage.
The lack of maintenance seem to be the modus operandii here.
There was room for only one chair for sitting. This was such a let down from all the beautiful and practical properties we had stayed so far including the Windflower Resort which was inside the Bandipur forest and had limitation on what resources they had available and could provide.
We called our local contact in Kochi and she told us that she will take of everything in the next 10 mins. As promised within 10 mins someone from the resort came and showed a much bigger cottage also facing the sea.
We went for dinner shortly after and ordered a Kingfisher Gold, the beer was chilled but they poured it into hot mugs and ruined the reason for having a chilled beer.
Oh well atleast the staff is nice and the dinner tasty.
We had a fish curry with rice which was excellent as has all food been through this trip.
We plan to sleep in tomorrow and have a leisurely day.
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