Alleppey: The Venice of the East
The Alleppey Safarnama runs 8 km across 4 monuments, from Alappuzha Beach to Punnamada Lake, part of The Monsoon Trail. Alleppey is known as the venice of the east, here is the story the route tells, one stop at a time.
Alappuzha Beach
Alappuzha itself dates to the Sangam era and was known to Pliny the Elder in the 1st century AD, but the town as it stands was largely the work of one man: Raja Kesavadas, the Travancore diwan who built a working port here in the 18th century and cut canals through the town to move cargo from ship to warehouse. That planned network of waterways is the whole reason this city earned the nickname "the Venice of the East." The beach itself is fronted by a pier over 150 years old, extending straight out into the Arabian Sea, still standing after the trade it was built for has mostly moved on.
Alappuzha Lighthouse
Built in 1862, this was the first lighthouse of its kind on the entire Arabian Sea coast of Kerala, a marker put up specifically because Alappuzha had become busy enough, as a working port, to need one. It still stands a short walk from the beach and pier it was built to serve, doing the same job it always has: telling ships exactly where the coastline is before they get too close to find out the hard way.
Alappuzha Railway Station
A working station on the Kerala coastal line, connecting the old port town to Kochi to the north and Thiruvananthapuram to the south. It marks the point where this route turns away from the Arabian Sea coastline it has followed since the beach, and heads inland toward the backwaters and canals that give Alappuzha the other half of its reputation.
Punnamada Lake
This backwater lake hosts the Nehru Trophy Boat Race every Onam season, vallam kali, or "boat play," in which chundan vallams, long snake boats crewed by more than a hundred rowers apiece, race down the lake to the sound of drums and thousands of spectators on the banks. It is the single event most associated with Alappuzha’s identity as a backwater town, held on the water the whole city was quite literally built around.