Kerala Tourist Season Gearing Up

Down south in Kerala we are gearing up for the start of the high tourist season. Hotel fronts are sneakily painted in between cloudbursts that don't want to leave us, staff are sharpening up after the soporific atmosphere of monsoon and the politicians promise us that the road potholes will soon be filled. But will the tourists come this year and if so, why?

The answer is evident. Kerala has outclassed most other states with the sheer ingenuity of its tourism products. If you want to live with the drumbeat of nature, come to Vythiri and have yourself pulleyed up in a rope basket to your treehouse. You want to spend time on the water in the most serene surroundings of palm-fringed paddy fields, then come to Alleppey and spoil yourself with a houseboat cruise. For a glimpse at the past with top-notch modern comforts, stay in a heritage hotel. Fancy sea and sand? There's Kovalam and Varkala. Get to know a Malayalee family? Why not? They will invite you to their homestay. And we haven't even touched on north Kerala yet.

But for all the luscious green landscape, the sandy beaches and indeed the sharp marketing that wins several tourism awards both nationally and internationally, for me as a westerner, Kerala's crowning glory is something so 'normal' that locals pay no heed to it. In fact they have little awareness of it. Because it is themselves. The Malayalees. There is a sensitive gentleness, a willingness to help, unrivalled smiles and most significantly, little of the aggressive selling by unmonitored touts and taxi men that has invaded the magnificent tourism shrines of the north. Ok, so there's a whiff of it in Fort Cochin at times - I'm not wearing my rosy-tinted specs today - but let's keep it at whiff-level. No tourist minds a whiff of anything.