event of snake-boat racing, held on the 2nd saturday of August every year, I was surprised
to not see even one snake-boat during our cruise around the backwaters.
Ofcourse the snake-boats participating in the event come from various corners of Alappuzha
and each belongs to a local community that shares the costs involved in maintaining the boat.
But, still some of them would be from the neighborhood and so I was surprised to not see
even one of them. The captain of our house-boat happened to be a regular rower for the local snake-boat team and he showed us the place where the races would be held next month.
But we were finally rewarded with the spectacular sight of a snake-boat the next day when
we were winding up our 24-hour houseboat stay. There she lay majestically, stretched along
the shore, with a special canopy erected to give her some respite from the elements.
I tried to take a single snap covering her full length, but it somehow did not look good.
So took these 2 snaps to capture her beauty in 2 parts.
The rear of the snake-boat. See the raised hood, resembling a snake, which led to the name.
The front of the snake-boat, aerodynamically designed for speed.
And then I attempted a hotch-potch amateur stitch job, which looks like this.
Even the stiched snap fails to bring out even a fraction of the mind-boggling phenomena
that a snake-boat is. Measuring anything between 100-140 feet, with close to 100 people
on board of whom some 70 row the boat, sitting two in a row along the length of the boat,
a snake-boat never fails to wow you.
Given below is a better picture of the snake-boats in action during the Aranmula boat race,
in the Pampa river.
Courtesy wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chundan_Vallam).
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