The one place in the backwaters where you can travel the whole region on public boats, and the reason to base here rather than book a night on a houseboat.
Where you actually are
Alappuzha sits on a narrow strip between the Arabian Sea and Vembanad, the longest lake in India, at the point where the canal network behind the coast is at its densest. The town was laid out as a port in the eighteenth century under Raja Kesavadas, and the grid of canals that earned it the Venice of the East epithet was cut for cargo rather than for views: coir, copra, pepper and rice moved from the interior to a pier that ran out into the open sea, because there is no natural harbour on this coast.
That history is why the town reads the way it does. The centre is a working municipal town with warehouses, a bus stand, a beach and a cast iron pier, not a resort. The landscape people come for starts a few kilometres inland, where the canals widen and the fields drop below the level of the water in them. Understanding that gap between the town and the landscape is most of what a first visit needs: you stay in or near the town because that is where the boats, the trains and the roads are, and you spend the day out on the water.
The region behind it is Kuttanad, a delta of four rivers held back by earth bunds, and one of the very few farmed landscapes anywhere that lies below the level of the sea beside it. Vembanad and the Kol wetlands that continue north of it are listed under the Ramsar Convention, which is the closest thing to an objective statement of the region's importance: it is a wetland of international significance that happens to also be a rice bowl and a transport network.
Three reasons to stay rather than pass through
- The public ferries leave from here, and they beat an overnight houseboat on every measure that matters.
- Kuttanad farming country starts at the edge of town: the only place in India where rice is grown below sea level.
- One hour by road from Kochi airport traffic, so it works as a first or last stop.
Take the ferry, not the houseboat
The single most useful thing about basing in Alappuzha is that the State Water Transport Department runs scheduled passenger boats from the jetty in the middle of town, and those routes cross the same water the houseboats cruise. The long crossings towards Kottayam and Changanassery take a couple of hours or more depending on the route and the stops, and the fare is nominal because these are buses that happen to float: the people on board are going to work, to school and to market.
A houseboat is a private hotel room that moves slowly through a landscape where the interest is the traffic, the bunds and the villages. A ferry puts you inside that traffic instead. It also solves the problem the houseboat fleet has created for itself, which is congestion: the moored rows near the main departure points on a December afternoon are a queue, and the quiet water most brochures picture is further out than a single overnight cruise usually reaches.
Timetables are published by the department and change with the water level and the season, so the honest instruction is to read the board at the jetty on the morning you want to travel rather than to trust a printed departure time. Boats can be cancelled outright when the canals are high.
Kuttanad, farmed below the waterline
Inland of the town the land is organised into polders: fields ringed by bunds, drained by pump, and cropped in a cycle that runs against the monsoon rather than with it. The punja crop is grown through the dry months in fields that have been pumped out, and the bunds are the roads, which is why a walk here is a walk along the top of a wall with water on one side and a field lower than the water on the other.
This is the part of the region worth a full day. The AC canal, cut in the colonial period to connect Alappuzha with Changanassery, runs through the middle of it, and the villages along the southern reaches towards Champakulam and Kainakary have the boat yards where the racing craft are built and maintained. The churches there are old and the workshops are working premises rather than exhibits, which is the difference between this and a demonstration village.
It is also fragile. The 2018 floods, the worst in the state since 1924 by the state government's own accounting, put much of Kuttanad under water for weeks, and the bunds and pumps that make the system work are maintained year after year against a sea that is rising. Anyone reading the landscape as merely picturesque is missing the engineering.
What the town itself is good for
The lighthouse, the pier and the beach sit together at the western edge, and the walk between them is the town's best half hour: an iron pier built for a port that never got a harbour, a nineteenth century lighthouse behind it, and a working beach where the fishing boats come in. The Punnamada stretch on the eastern side is where the snake boat racing happens, and crews practise there for weeks before a race even when no event is scheduled.
Coir is the local industry and it is still visible: retting pits, spinning sheds and co-operative societies operate around the town, and the museum and society outlets explain the process better than any photograph of the landscape does. Between the water and the coir, Alappuzha is the most legible working town in the backwaters, which is precisely why it is a better base than a resort island with nothing around it.
The boat race, and why the date moves
The Nehru Trophy race on Punnamada is the largest of the snake boat events, rowed by crews of well over a hundred in chundan vallam that are village property rather than club equipment. It has traditionally been held on the second Saturday of August, but the date has been moved in individual years for weather, water level and public health reasons, so the year's announcement from the organisers is the only date worth acting on.
A race day fills every room in the district and changes the town completely. If the race is the reason for the trip, book long in advance and expect crowds. If it is not, the weeks around it are still worth timing for, because practice sessions are free to watch from the bank and are a better view of the boats than a grandstand at a finish line.
Where inside it to stay
The year, in bands
Getting here
Getting around
What there is to do, and why
What the kitchen does here
August to March reads best on the water. The southwest monsoon is spectacular and wet; the canals are high and the light is short.
What it is not
The case against, in the same voice as the case for. Every destination on this site carries one, because a page that only recommends is not much use for deciding.
Two resorts, two hotels, four and five star
Each property below opens its own booking page on IMPT, not a page of search results. That is the whole journey, destination to property to booked.