A Trip to Calicut(Kozhikode), Kerala - Part II
Before the details are lost from memory I want to jot down the thoughts on the rest of the trip to Calicut.
We took an afternoon trip to Kappad Beach close to Calicut. It is a nicely maintained quiet beach, but you have to pay a fee to get in. However the clean beach is worth it. And the fee keeps the crowd to a minimum. We spent most of the time in the water, and took no photos.
In the evenings we would take an auto and go out to a restaurant near our hotel. As I've mentioned in Part I of this series, Calicut is a city for foodies. One evening we discovered this cafe/restaurant where my son had a custom Milo drink. He liked the drink so much we went back there a couple of times. Another find was a cafe/bakery which served excellent drinks and shakes.
So it was good food and lots of small trips. Great combination for a vacation.
One of the longest trips was Kadalundi bird sanctuary where we rented a boat for several hours. Most of the migratory birds were gone, but the mangrove islands are beautiful and there were quite a few local birds. I managed to take a few photographs.
Our boatman was quite a cheerful person and helped setup our family photos at really beautiful spots which he had memorized.
He was also quite knowledgeable about the birds and named several of them, and I later verified those names online.
There were quite a few egrets and they are really photogenic birds as you can see below in some of the photos.
Since we were visiting during the afternoon, I believe these were just resting in the mangroves.
There was a tiny grassy island in the middle of the river where you could see lots of ibis and egrets together.
The smaller birds were harder to photograph as I had just a 300mm zoom on my dslr. But I did get a bee-eater and a kingfisher.
This golden crab was lounging around just as we were about to return to the boat pier. I managed to get down and get a shot before it ran away.
I think this post has again run too long, so I will stop here. I did take lots of photos. I was carrying my old Nikon D3100 and kept my main cameras home. And contrary to expectations the place was so photogenic that I took lots of nice photos.
Hope you liked some of them. Let me know what you liked or didn’t. And perhaps make a trip to this nice place someday.
Have a great day!
-Abhishek (artnoob)