Last month, we visited Kerala on
a family tour. Though we went for a cousin’s wedding there, we decided to make
the most of the trip and booked Keralatour packages for family instead of just attending the function. It was so
much fun and we learnt a lot about our hometown which was once the biggest and
richest port of India. My parents belong to North Paravoor which is a small yet
beautiful and peaceful town in Ernakulam district. The place is slowly
developing to accommodate the city’s working class as the nearest outskirt
town. Yet the residential areas still have the old charm and the villages are
quite peaceful. I remember having come here around 15 years back and back then
there was nothing but a beach for entertainment. The movie theatres were in a
pathetic state and we could not even watch a new movie here. For anything and
everything hep, we had to depend on Ernakulam city. For shopping,
entertainment, higher education, advanced medical facilities and everything
else we had to visit the city back then. Now the situation has changed
considerably. Having visited Kochi city recently, the roads in North Paravoor
are in a far better condition than many of the city roads! The place has
recently become a tourist hub with the honourable President inaugurating the Muziris
Heritage Museums. Shopping, education, entertainment and medical facilities
have also improved considerably and many people are considering settling in
this peaceful land and commuting to the city for work as it takes hardly an
hour to reach the city from North Paravoor.
Ancestral House that accommodated 50 people at a time!
Though we youngsters were a
little sceptical about staying in this relatively dry and quiet place, the
options for heritage tourism, backwater cruise and beaches made out spirits
rise high. Though there was no one
staying in my mother’s ancestral house, it was a huge mansion which once
accommodated a big joint family many of whom still keep in touch. I remember
having visited this house long back for a function and the entire house was
full of relatives. I cannot call them guests as many of them were born and brought
up in this ancestral house only. In fact, I was the stranger there! It is
magical to see that 3 generations of cousins, first, second and third cousins
that is, meet up and keep in touch quite often even though they do not see each
other that often. The older ones had so many amazing stories to share with the
younger generations and the younger ones had so many people to take care of
them and take them around to the beach and the nearby ponds. I remember every
room had at least 5 to six people sleeping on the floor with just a bed sheet
laid on the floor and a small pillow! And there were no complaints! I just
tried to count and that house would have accommodated at least 40 people and around
8 children for 10 days of function plus the servants who lived in the outhouse!
And now for this wedding, hardly 10 people would live there as there were no
attached bathrooms or more cots for them to sleep! All these memories passed
through my mind within a few minutes of entering my maternal ancestral house. We
also visited my paternal ancestral house which was now renovated. We used to
play a lot of cricket here back when I was in junior school. It used to be a
cute small house back then with a lot of trees surrounding the house. There
were 2 ponds and my grandma would be scared of me and my cousin playing without
our parents! My younger sister was not yet born then. That’s when I realized
that if I get so nostalgic, think of my parents who have spent their childhood
here! They had the memories of the best times of their lives attached to these
houses and had to detach themselves from all these to provide us a better education
and a better living.
A
cold-storage that almost froze us to ice-statues!
We attended my cousin’s wedding
and enjoyed the visit to Cherai Beach nearby. My parents were quite happy to
visit the place after a long time. They probably had some fond memories of
their courtship days connected to the beach! As I was wandering lazily in the
beach and looking at the younger cousins have so much undiluted fun at the cost
of a 15 minute trip from where we stayed, it struck me that our Kerala family tour package was pretty cheap other than the flight tickets!
Yet the amount of fun we all had there was boundless! It cannot be compared to
any fun we would have had at an amusement park which would have been quite
expensive and full of machines. Though we would have enjoyed the excitement, we
would never have experienced nature! And this was pure bliss we were
experiencing at the beach. Since my parents knew some secluded places near the
main beach, we parked our car there and had a lot of fun enjoying the private
beach with just the family, sand, sea and the cool breeze. We also visited an
ice factory nearby which also had a seafood exporting unit. It was my dad’s
friend’s cold storage and he let us inside the huge freezer which stored the
packaged seafood to be exported. It was quite stingy and we could not survive
the freezer for more than 5 steps into it! It was that extremely cold! We saw
some small octopus which was freshly caught, to be taken for cleaning! We saw
how they madeand stored huge ice blocks to keep the seafood from decomposing. It
was amazing that every inch of the cold storage was well utilised.
Awestruck
by the 16th Century, 101-room Paliyam Palace!
The next day we visited the Old
Paliyam Palace. We had seen glimpses of this palace in a couple of Malayalam
movies and when my dad said he had friends there we badly wanted to visit them.
The families no longer stay here as the properties are now under the Muzuris
Heritage trust and it is a museum now which is preserved and maintained by
them. The palace was an amazing place to visit on our family tour packages in Kerala that came with a priceless
experience. Made in typical Kerala style with a lot of woodwork, the palace had
an amusing structure. The moment you step inside, you will forget all about the
summer heat! There’s no fan or air conditioning but the natural floor and
wooden ceiling keeps the interiors quite cool. Watch out if you are tall, cause
the doors may not be tall enough for you to pass through without bending a
little. There were many amusing places inside the palace museum like the
central room upstairs where if you whisper in one wall you can listen in
another wall. Like an old-age telephone! Another amusing part was the hole in the
kitchen which was perfectly synced to see a visitor in the outer corner of the
house. Remember this was built during the 16th century when there
was no technology! The vessels and structure of the house were pretty amusing.
It had some huge vessels in the kitchen which could be used as bathtubs but we
learnt that these were kitchen utensils used to cook for the large joint family
who stayed there. We also visited another nearby museum which was a typical
Nalukettu house where a family stayed and now it is a museum. It was amazing to
see that the museum incorporated audio-visuals and short documentaries that
explained quite a lot about the architecture, the Paliyam family and the
traditional utensils and tools used by them. We even went on a houseboat cruise
to the nearby Muziris Heritage locations in North Paravoor and visited the
Synagogue there and the one at Kottayil Kovilakam. We also visited the Archaeological
site at Pattanam where many centuries’ old remains of the Muziris port were
unearthed in the last decade.
The entire trip was pretty
amusing and informative. It really changed the way we thought about our
hometown and we now were proud to belong to such a rich culture. We promised
ourselves to visit our ancestral homes more often and meet up with our cousins
there. This incredible and rich Kerala tour packages for family was one we will cherish forever in our minds. Though
we took a lot of images of the wedding and the beaches, half way through our
heritage tour, we got so engrossed and dazzled by the museum and the locales
that we forgot our cameras! We enjoyed seeing things through our eyes instead
of the camera’s lenses for a change. That’s the effect Muziris had on us!
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