Today we're travelling again, but with a difference. We're getting the ferry through the backwaters from Alleppey to Kollam, a distance of about 80 kms. We get an auto to the jetty where the boat is waiting. Wary of being enticed onto the wrong boat, we initially hold back while we wait for a representative from the company we booked this through to arrive. We have a receipt from them for the trip, but no actual tickets as such. The passengers are entirely westerners - about 50 in total. As we're waiting we can't help but wonder where they've all been in the last couple of days. As we've walked round Alleppey we've hardly seen one white face, now all of a sudden there are 50! Our rep doesn't show up, so we board the boat anyway and, to our relief, our receipt is accepted and we depart exactly on time at 10.30.

The boat has two levels - upstairs has plastic seats with a tarpaulin cover, downstairs is more comfortable, but only just. Most people opt initially for the upstairs. The route takes us through canals and natural lakes some of which are very big. At one point we pass through a lock which separates the tidal from the non-tidal, but at the moment it's not operating and we motor straight through. There are two places where the lakes open into the sea, and one point where the canal is less than 10m from the open sea separated by a stone wall. The activities which go on around the waterways are fascinating; we see fishermen diving for what look like small shellfish, small wooden canoes being punted along laden with salt, and in the larger waterways there are large sea-going craft which are used around the coast. Towards the southern part of the journey we pass by hundreds of 'chinese' fishing rigs. These are wooden contraptions on posts in the middle of the lake, to which is attached a net which can be lowered into the water. Most don't have their nets rigged and are not in use at the moment. Positioned all together in rows they look very strange with their wooden 'legs' raised high out of the water. We see a good deal of work going on to repair damage done by the 2004 tsunami, particularly to bolster the banks of the waterways and re-build bridges and the 8,000 houses that were destroyed.

During the journey we often encounter children calling out for us to given them pens. "Please give me one pen!" they call. One small girl is very persistent and runs beside the boat for quite a way. When it's clear that no-one has any pens, she stops and says "Money?" Everyone laughs.We arrive at Kollom at 6.30. There's a scrum of taxi and bus operators looking to take people to the tourist resort of Varkala. Although this is where we're heading, we're going by train, and our train doesn't leave until 8.35. We jump in an auto and urge the driver to take us to a "good restaurant". He takes us to a place in the centre of town which turns out to be pretty good, and we kill a couple of hours having a reasonable meal while we wait for our train.

There's an Indian couple sitting a few tables away from us (nothing unusual in that). However, as Clive passes their table on the way to the toilet he overhears the woman say, in a broad East London accent, "'Ere, why don't we 'ave some of that raita, y'know, the yogurt stuff?"

The train is about half an hour late, but the journey is a short one and we're in Varkala by 9.30. We disregard the offers of taxis from touts on the platform. We've come to realise that they're usually trying to take you to a particular hotel (for which they'll receive a commission - all added to the bill of course!), or simply trying to avoid the proper queue outside the station so they can try and charge you a higher fare. An auto from the auto rank is fine, and we're at Varkala Beach within 15 minutes.

We've picked out a hotel from a list given to us at our Alleppey hotel. The rate is typical for a mid-range hotel, Rs1000, but we've no idea what it's like. Our concerns are raised however, when we subsequently notice that it's listed in the Lonely Planet guide as a "budget" hotel. Sure enough, when we get there we find the only table is in a communal annex, there's no hot water (except by bucket, euphemistically called "hot water on demand"), the water pressure is so low you'd have to run around in circles under the shower head to actually get wet, and the ceiling fan has two speeds - off and flat out. At Rs1000 a night this is not on, and we tell the manager that we're going to find somewhere else tomorrow morning. The price immediately drops to Rs800 and we're sure we could get it down further, but our minds are made up now. We have a beer at a candlelit table overlooking the beach to celebrate our arrival in Varkala before bedding down for the night under the fan at warp factor 6.