Where the Backwaters and the Beach Come Together: Cherai 

While travelling to the South, have you ever been confused about what to see and where to stay? The serene backwaters or the bustling beach? What if you found a place that gives you both?

Hello,

After our 3 day love affair with Wayanad (Read our blog on Wayanad), we left it to our car to decide where to take us.

On cruising through the coastline for a while, we randomly decided to go to Cherai for the next leg of our journey. Wayanad to Cherai is around 230 km which took us about 9 hours to complete (with our oh-so-chill pit stops). Cherai, the smallest town located in the north of Vypin island, Kerala is as unique as it is beautiful. Beaches on one side and the backwaters the other, need we say more?

Since it was going to be late by the time we reached (again!), we decided to book a hotel just for a night. Eventually, around 9pm, we ended up in front of this peculiar stretch which looked like an almost never-ending road, running parallel to the Cherai Beach. That entire stretch only had resorts, homestays, budget hotels and restaurants. Our hotel for that one night was the Cherai Natural Beach Hotel located right at the beginning of this stretch.

We hate staying in standard and quintessential hotel rooms and felt really disappointed with our hotel. Our rooms need to have either a view or at least some character. Well, this one had neither, apart from this particular chair that Tarun that fell in love with!

Three beaches in one

The next morning we took it upon ourselves to explore that stretch first and get ourselves a unique stay experience. While walking, we noticed that the stretch, called the Beach Road (of course!) was divided into 3 beaches:

1. Cherai Beach

2. Ambedkar Beach and

3. Kuzhupilly Beach

After a fair bit of research, at the Kuzhupilly Beach, we found just the kind of place we were looking for! The Chameleon Beach Lodge not only had loads of character, but also a pretty good view of the beach. Amazingly enough, the hotel was in front of a part of the beach lined with rocks which made it feel that it was our own private beach and boy did we enjoy that feeling!!

The backwaters

To our surprise, right behind our hotel, we discovered the gorgeous and oh so famous, backwaters of Kerala. The two scenes are worlds apart and feel just as different as they look.

The best part is that there are these thin village in-roads that one can take (with a vehicle or without) to explore each path even more. The network of these village streets is so dense that there was this one time, when we got a bit too lost along the way! But thankfully, the locals are terribly sweet and don’t miss an opportunity to help out and thanks to them, we were soon on the right track again.