It sure can leave you overwhelmed the first time around.

The place where all the houseboats are berthed and where you start & end your houseboat
ride is about 2 kms from the city centre. The moment you reach this place, where the office
of the tourism department is also located, you are greeted by the sight of innumerable houseboats berthed side by side. From end-to-end, all you see are only houseboats.


Infact there are so many of them that there is not space for all of them to be berthed along
the shore and thus some are berthed in a second row, like in the pic below.


So, if it happens that your boat is in the second row, you would have to walk through the
boat in front to reach yours. And yes, you might be asked to remove your footwear and
hold it while walking through the first boat, so as to avoid dirtying a meticulously clean
boat awaiting its customers.

The sight of so many houseboats can just be amazing and overwhelming. We were there
during the supposedly off-season period (monsoons), but still there were quite a lot of
tourists, mostly from North India and Tamilnadu. And ofcourse the foreign tourists.
I was taking some snaps of the berthed houseboats, when I overheard the following
conversation between 2 young men, in Hindi :

X : Hey, why are you so excited about these houseboats ? Have you not seen one before?
Y : I sure have seen houseboats before.

X : Then why so much excitement as if you were seeing one for the first time ?
Y : Man, I have seen houseboats in the Dal Lake in Kashmir. But these... These are just out
of the world, man. They are just amazing.

That is the kind of feeling that anyone seeing the Kerala houseboats for the first time,
would have. I saw that with my elder sister too. She was just floored seeing a proper
home reproduced on a boat - drawing room, bath-attached bedrooms , kitchen, etc.
You even have the option of choosing airconditioned rooms, at an extra cost though.

While we chose boats with 2 bedrooms each, they come in all sorts of configurations
like single bedroom, 3 bedrooms, double deckers, and even mammoths like the one
below. I can count atleast 6 bedrooms on the lower level. Phew!


Some even have conference rooms in them, which I guess are used by corporations for
employee outings/retreats. So, whatever be your need, you can be sure that there is a
houseboat fitting it to a T. All it needs is for you to be there, and to sit back, relax and
enjoy the ride.