Yesterday was our houseboat trip through the Kerala backwaters. I tried to post to the blog from a blackberry device but since my site was messed up it didn't work. The boats are cool and the views are impressive. These boats are made mostly by hand of natural materials. There are over 500 of them in the area. Some of the boats are very nice. Ours were cool but not top of the line. We were split up onto three boats. Each has two bedrooms. One of the boats was larger so we all cruised on that one and just slept on the others.

One of the highlights of the boat trip was watching a group of duck hearders at work. That's right. Aparently they have a duck farm and the ducks need to be moved from one area to another. There was a swarm of thousands of young ducks swimming near our boat and a man in a boat hearding them. Another man on shore had set up a ramp into the water and then made duck noises to attract the ducks. Eventually they figured out they were supposed to go up the ramp and onto the shore. Pretty soon the whole bunch of them was waddeling up the ramp. One last one had trouble making it and rolled back down a few times. We all clapped when he finally made it.

The boats were awsome, I would certainly do that again.

Here are just some of the 270+ pictures I took on the boat.

One of the other cool things on the boat was a religious ceremony that was taking place on shore. We think it was a wedding but we are not sure. They had a person singing in a sort of a mellow chant song. There were speakers placed along the shore a few hundred yards apart and the music was very loud. It was kind of surreal. The music seemed to come from everywhere at once. It shounded nice but we have no clue what the words were. :)