Cochin Cruise

Spreading across islands and promontories between the Arabian Sea and the backwaters, Kochi (long known as Cochin) is Kerala’s prime tourist destination. Kochi is also a wonderful port of call for MSC cruise liners on Grand Voyages cruise itineraries.


In Fort Cochin, spice markets, Chinese fishing nets, a synagogue, a Portuguese palace, India’s first European church and seventeenth-century Dutch homes can all be found within an easy walk. As you approach by cruise ship, the waterfront, with its sloping red-tiled roofs and ranks of peeling, pastel-coloured godowns (warehouses), offers a view that can have changed little in centuries.
Fort Cochin, the grid of old streets at the north-west tip of the peninsula, is where the Portuguese erected their first walled citadel, Fort Immanuel, which the Dutch East Indian Company later consolidated with a circle of well-fortified ramparts. Only a few fragments of the former battlements remain but dozens of other evocative European-era monuments survive: the early eighteenth-century Dutch Cemetery, Vasco da Gama’s supposed house and several traders’ residences.
Kathakali is the best known; other less publicized forms, which clearly influenced its development, include the classical Sanskrit kudiyattam.
Many Keralan forms share broad characteristics. A prime aim of each performer is to transform the mundane into the world of gods and demons; his preparation is highly ritualized, involving otherworldly costume and mask-like make-up. In kathakali and kudiyattam, this preparation is a rigorously codified part of the classical tradition.