Best things to do in Cochin… If you have a cruise visiting India this is a must read…

On Queen Mary 2, my job was to sell tours. It was also answering questions about the tours and the places the tour would visit. Sometimes this meant lots of reading and research as I hadn’t been myself before. On a world cruise there were quite a lot of these ports and Cochin sticks in my mind as a real favourite. Not for the glitz and glamour of Dubai (which all the passengers loved, by the way). But for the modes of transport, colourful sari’s, animals in the road, smells in the air, tastes of a truly enchanted place. Those are the things I remember.

When we had sent all of the tours off from the ship we had a couple of hours free to do our own tuk tuk tour. Generally, this is not recommended by shore excursion people, however I wanted a truly Indian experience. We negotiated hard and found the driver with the best English that we could. Told him the price and currency we would pay him in. Explained we only had 2 hours before we needed to be back and agreed to try to not spend too much time in his cousin, brothers, fathers shop buying things we don’t really want or need.

Our tour started well as we travelled from the port past open train carriages with cows in the road, buses blocking the route and decorated, overloaded trucks. I was smiling already as this is what I really wanted to experience. We saw local fishermen, and the church from the outside. This is compulsory on every tour….

There was a lot of litter and the thing I found most interesting was that everyone was smiling and happy to see us. I hope they didn’t just see us as big fat wallets, coming towards them to be parted from the cash inside! I hope they genuinely are happy with their lives. They certainly seemed to be.

We visited a couple of shops, chosen by our driver…. Which we had a quick look round and tried to leave quickly without a lot of fuss. Time was running out and we drove many of the back streets, crowded with people unloading stock from trucks and waiting for the next customers. I would have loved to try some local food. But in 2 hours this was impossible as the driver had a spice store for us to see and another shop….

My lasting memory in this port was a great 2 hour whistle stop through a typical Indian port and town. Coming back to Queen Mary 2 with all of the luxury inside made me sad for a while. Mainly because the only thing the cruisers saw was, oh how poor and dirty the people were, how much litter there was and what horrid smells they had outside. Not the smiles and cheery souls the people had. Travel will teach you many things and for me this was a lesson on how to always ‘look for the good in every situation’. I hope I always manage to do this. Call me if you have a cruise in mind to Indian or the Far East. 0333 300 2480 Adrian Partridge