Team Outing in House Boat

Few years back we had a memorable team outing. Some colleagues planned to enjoy the weekend in house boats in Kerala and our good friend, Abdul Raniz really worked hard for that trip. We had a pretty huge team that time and it was quite a difficult job to decide for a travel destination for such a large team. In almost every team outing we had issues with the destination. Some guys would always be interested for hill stations, while few other guys wouldn't bother to listen anything other than beaches but some cool guys usually don't bother much about the destination, as long as they have arrangement for booze.  

So finally it was all set and we looked forward to spend the weekend in the exotic backwaters of Kerala, in a place named Alleppey. Raniz is from Kerala and he did the necessary prior arrangements. As usual, all our female colleagues already backed themselves away from the idea. Well, most of the time they would only be interested for a picnic kind of day trip. We boarded the bus in the evening and all of us were damn excited. While we waited for the bus, most of us enjoyed few sips  to spice up our enjoyment and prepared ourselves to experience the wonderful  night journey. Well for our stay in the house boat, we already over packed our kind of stuffs. Almost half of the bus was occupied by us and as one can understand, we all just felt and behaved like college going guys. At night, one of the bus staff's turned on the TV and played some Tamil movie and that too in load volume. Few of our colleagues requested them to better play some Hindi stuffs but unfortunately they didn’t have any Hindi CD's.  After some initial irritation, most of us actually enjoyed the movie that night. I don’t exactly remember the name of the movie, but it was big Tamil blockbuster. It was quite a long journey and took us almost 12 hours to reach Alleppey. Now a days one can easily enjoy such trips with Cheap Air Tickets from JetLite and Indian Airlines.

Once we got down from the bus in the morning, we had to struggle for quite some time before we could get to our actual destination “The house boats”.  Actually Raniz kept the entire headache to himself, as he was the only local guy, we had out there. Finally we reached our destination and every one had a big smile, as we could see the famous house boats, which we quite often used to see in TV, in those travel channels. The houseboats were quite big and almost like normal houses. Raniz had already booked 2 big houseboats for our entire team. The boats had all the facilities which one could avail in any normal hotel.

The initial few hours were so mesmerizing, as it started to drizzle and we felt the refreshing sprinkles up from the heaven. The cool river breeze, the exotic view and the glass in hand. Wow..  it was some kind of an experience and it was very fascinating. But after sometime it got little monotonous for me, maybe I was a bit sick of water all around us and it reminded me of flood kind of situation in my state, Assam. We traveled through the back waters all day long and just before evening, it stopped near some sort of market, where we bought fresh fish, prawns and few CD's for the night.

Finally in the evening the boat stopped at some remote location and the boat men fixed the boat out there, for our safe night shelter. After dark, we prepared and arranged for the evening blast. The food we had that night in the boat was one of the best I ever had and the entire food was prepared in the boat kitchen itself, right in front of our eyes. 

Overall it was a memorable trip and everyone enjoyed like hell. I personally feel that such kind of house boat trip is more ideal for honeymoon couples, as it's damn exotic and one would have enough time and privacy for romance. Next day, we spent the whole day in a nearby beach. We played volleyball, little bit of cricket, football and some flying disc as well, in the beach.

                                    Some breathtaking bird's eye view of Kerala backwaters.