My Experience On A House Boat! Ruby

Yesterday Me and my family went on an amazing trip in Alleppey, India. We stayed on a house boat for a night! We left our accommodation at around 12:00 in the morning, and left the boat the next day at 9:00 in the morning, the boat had one room that had a double bed and a double mattress inside. The boat had a kitchen in the back and a living space in the front near the captains seat. We got breakfast, lunch and dinner, they all were delicious but ill tell you more about them later. :)

The bathroom was connected onto the bedroom and has a shower, toilet and basin. Some of the other tour house boats were massive but this boat was a good size for us!

The backwaters is fresh waters from a lake that is used for paddy fields when needed. The water also connects to the ocean in Kochi! Many canals run through the paddy fields to provide water to them!

On our trip we went down backwaters that passed many of the local houses and we got to see how some people live their lives here and how different they are to our ones. The first thing that we saw was that people were washing them selfs in the river, there were lots of women and men up to waist height in the water, washing themselves with a bar of soap. They were still wearing clothes but were getting right into the water, even washing their hair!

Somethings else that we noticed was that all the women were wearing dresses, we didn't see ladiesjust wearing a T-shirt and jeans. They all wear wearing long dresses that reached their ankles! I also saw lots of people doing their washing in a very interesting way. First,they would wash the item of clothing in the backwaters, then they would wack the clothing on the concrete path near them and finally hang it up on the line! I bet you have never seen washing being washed like that before!

We spent lots of our time on the boat out in the front, which was a very open living space that had dining table two padded benches along the sides and two comfy armchairs the middles of the front. We got served all of our meals at the dining table, which lured a lot of mosquitoes ad other annoying bugs to us at dinner when it got dark. That ruined my appetite a bit but the food was still very yum at all of the meal! At dinner and lunch we got served, currys, vegetables, breads and rice!

For breakfast we got served something called Idli, it is made from rice flour and Mila loves them! Me and hazels aren't big fans of it but it is great that Mila had found something she loves as they are found all around India! The Idli is dipped into currys which is why we were also served some curry with the Idli. Other than that we got some eggs, toast, jam and butter.

Before dinner we got to see a amazing sunset that reflected on the water creation the perfect picture! After we ate our dinner we went straight to our room because the mosquitoes were really attacking us now! We had some showers and changed into our warm cosy pjs. By then it was around 8:30 and we were all pretty tired, after about another hour we turned off the light.

I woke up again in the middle of the night, I was sleeping on the mattress with Mila and we only had a sheet to cover us. It was really cold and a sheet isn't very warm, it took me ages to get back to sleep but I managed to wake everyone up (Don't ask me how) and mum turned down the air conditioning, making it a bit warmer. I did manage to get back to sleep and had some crazy dreams!

When we woke up, we all got dressed and had breakfast straight away! We then packed up our stuff and waited for the boat to park back up. We had had such a great time at the boat and i really enjoyed it! It was super relaxing and i would have definitely stayed there for another day. But I must admit that sometimes it got a bit boring when there was nothing to do but other than that it was super cool and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who's going to India!

Before we knew we were parked up and waiting for our tuk tuk to come, We grabbed our bags and jumped of the boat! As we were saying our thank yous to the captain and chef the tuk tuk drove up behind us wait for us to load our bags in. We had such a great time and I definitely learnt a bit more about the way people live here and some of the ways that their lives our different than ours!

By Ruby! :D