Alleppey

Where it sits. Alappuzha — Alleppey on older maps and most houseboat signage — sits on the Laccadive Sea about 130 km north of Thiruvananthapuram, on a sandy strip of Kerala coast whose average elevation is one metre. Behind the town lies Vembanad, the longest lake in India, into which six rivers spread before reaching the 80 km coastline of the district. The town is cut through by a grid of canals that forms part of National Waterway 3, which is why it collected the nickname Venice of the East from nineteenth-century visitors. Inland lies Kuttanad, one of the very few places on earth where farming is carried out below sea level, its paddy fields held behind bunds and pumped dry each season.

The story behind it. The place appears in Sangam-era references and is generally identified with the Baraces mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the first century. It grew commercially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries trading spices with the Portuguese and the Dutch, but the town as it exists was largely made by one administrator: Raja Kesavadas, Diwan of Travancore, who opened the port in 1762 and cut the canal network that still defines the street plan. He offered incentives to merchants from Surat, Bombay and Kutch, built ships for the Calcutta and Bombay trade, and turned Alappuzha into the financial centre of Travancore. Coir — coconut fibre spun into yarn, matting and rope — became the industry, and it still is: the town's warehouses, factories and the smell of retting husk are not heritage decoration but a working sector. Alappuzha also has a serious labour history; the Travancore Labour Association, founded here, was among the earliest trade unions in the region. The district in its present form was carved out of Kottayam and Kollam on 17 August 1957.

On screen. Alappuzha's most filmed structure is not a temple or a beach but a bridge. The Muppalam, the triple bridge at the junction of the Vada and Commercial canals in the middle of town, has appeared in more than a hundred films across Malayalam, Hindi and Tamil cinema — it is the shorthand establishing shot for "Alleppey" the way Marine Drive is for Bombay. Its recent replacement by a four-lane structure, locally called the Nalpalam, was a genuine civic controversy for exactly that reason. Beyond it, the backwaters south and east of town have supplied Malayalam cinema with location work for decades, and the snake-boat races have been filmed repeatedly for their sheer visual density: a hundred rowers in a single hull, moving in one motion.

What you actually see today. The Nehru Trophy Boat Race is the town's set piece. It began in 1952, when Jawaharlal Nehru visited Kerala and was given a snake-boat race for entertainment; he was so taken with it that he climbed aboard a chundan himself and later donated a trophy. It is now held on Punnamada Lake, usually on the second Saturday of August, with chundan vallam crews of well over a hundred rowers each. The rest of the year the draw is the water itself: kettuvallam houseboats, converted from rice barges with curved roofs of bamboo and coir, moored in rows at Punnamada jetty. A day's cruise runs through Kuttanad's canals past duck herders, church spires and paddy bunds; smaller shikara boats reach narrower channels the big hulls cannot. In town, the beach has a pier built in 1862 and now half-collapsed into the surf, and the 1862 Alappuzha lighthouse can be climbed. Pathiramanal, a small island in Vembanad reached by boat, is a birding stop. South of town, Ambalappuzha's Sri Krishna temple is famous for a thick milk payasam served daily and for the chess-and-rice legend attached to it, while Mararikulam — Marari to everyone who goes there — has the long, quiet, unbuilt beach the town itself does not.

Getting there and timing. Alappuzha is on the coastal railway line, roughly 55 km south of Ernakulam and 155 km north of Thiruvananthapuram; Cochin International Airport is about 85 km away. The state water transport department runs cheap public ferries — the Alappuzha–Kottayam service crosses Vembanad in around three hours for a tiny fraction of a houseboat fare and is the better ride for anyone who wants to see how people actually travel here. November to February is the comfortable season, dry with manageable humidity. August brings the Onam festival and the boat race, along with heavy rain. April and May are hot and sticky, and the June to September monsoon floods parts of Kuttanad most years.