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One of the most memorable experiences for travellers in India - even those on the lowest of budgets - is the opportunity to take a boat journey on the backwaters of Kerala . The area known as Kuttanad stretches for 75km from Kollam in the south to Kochi in the north, sandwiched between the sea and the hills. This bewildering labyrinth of shimmering waterways, composed of lakes, canals, rivers and rivulets, is lined with dense tropical greenery, and preserves rural Keralan lifestyles that are completely hidden from the road. Views change from narrow canals and dense vegetation to open vistas and dazzling green paddy fields. Homes, farms, churches, mosques and temples can be glimpsed among the trees, and every so often you might catch the blue flash of a kingfisher, or the green of a parakeet. Pallas fishing eagles cruise above the water looking for prey and cormorants perch on logs to dry their wings. If you're lucky enough to be in a boat without a motor, at times the peace will be broken only by the squawking of crows and the occasional film song from a distant radio. Day-to-day life is lived on and beside the water. Some families live on tiny pockets of land, with just enough room for a simple house, yard and boat. They bathe and wash their clothes - sometimes their buffaloes too, muddy from ploughing the fields - at the water's edge, while you often pass villagers standing up to their necks in water, far from the banks and busy with impenetrable subaquatic chores. Traditional Keralan longboats, kettu vallam , glide past, powered both by gondolier-like boatmen with poles and by sail. Often they look on the point of sinking, laden with heavyweight cargo with water lapping perilously over the edge. Fishermen work from rowing boats or operate massive Chinese nets on the shore. Coconut trees at improbable angles form shady canopies, and occasionally you pass under simple curved bridges. Here and there basic drawbridges can be raised on ropes, but major bridges are few and far between; most people rely on boatmen to ferry them across the water to connect with roads and bus services, a constant criss-crossing of the waters from dawn until dusk (a way of life beautifully represented in the visually stunning film Piravi , by Keralan director Shaji). Poles sticking out of the water indicate dangerous shallows. The African moss that often carpets the surface of the narrower waterways may look attractive, but it is actually a menace to small craft traffic and starves underwater life of light. It is also a symptom of the many serious ecological problems currently affecting the region, whose population density ranges from between two and four times that of other coastal areas in southwest India. This has put growing pressure on land, and hence a greater reliance on fertilizers, which eventually work their way into the water causing the build up of moss. Illegal land reclamation, however, poses the single greatest threat to this fragile ecosystem. In a little over a century, the total area of water in Kuttanad has been reduced by two-thirds, while mangrove swamps and fish stocks have been decimated by pollution and the spread of towns and villages around the edges of the backwater region.
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