Captain Rahul sits cross-legged on a wooden block and uses one hand to steer the houseboat and the other to prop up a rainbow umbrella. But it’s not raining. 

It’s just me, and a three-man crew cruising the Kerala backwaters in a thatched houseboat made from bamboo and coconut fibre. These houseboats are unique to the area and drag slowly through the fresh water like long fat slugs. With 8000 houseboats travelling the narrow channels and flat lakes, they are as pleasant to look from as they are to look at. And with so many about there are many opportunities to gawk.  

The captain sits like a boating Buddha with his sunshine umbrella and this zen-like approach to life is typical of the Indian state of Kerala. Shaped like a shrivelled chilli, Kerala is hemmed in by the Nilgiri mountain range to the east and the Lakshadweep Sea to the west, which has acted like a tandoor oven – slow cooking the region’s distinctive culture over millennia.  

Kerala has been pulling in the crowds since 3000 years before Christ. As a spice trading port, its place along the India’s west coast linked it to ancient empires. Connections can be traced between Kerala and Rome, Africa and Arabia.  

Travellers could only come on particular monsoon winds however, which meant that a journey lasted four months in India’s spice city.  

This exposure to travel and trade has created a dynamic in Kerala unlike anywhere else in India. The most prosperous state in the country, it also boasts a 94% literacy rate. There is also a language difference – the people of the southern states speak with a nuanced affectation. It also feels safer, cleaner and more tolerant than other parts of India. Known as God’s country, Kerala was one of the first places in the world where citizens converted to Christianity and Islam.  

When the houseboat moors for the night I explore a small village as sunset gives way to darkness. The call to prayer mingles with church bells against the beat of Hindi music. Nuns robed in pale blue live next to a house painted the same green as Pakistan’s flag, which, as Rahul explains to me, is the sign of a Muslim household.  

The settlement is like a paint company colour display with external walls of duck-egg blue, saffron orange, chilli red and unripe banana green. The walk around the village takes an hour and the return to the houseboat is lit by a mobile phone torch app. Every household brings a different dinner smell and from my houseboat an aroma of seafood and spice wafts out. As soon as lunch is over, cook Shiva spends the afternoon preparing dinner, sitting on the floor to peel and cut vegetables taken from a hessian swaddle. 

After three meals on the overnight houseboat stay, I discern that food intensity is proportionate to the time of day. Breakfast is sweet and consists of papaya coated in sugar and a Kerala pancake – dough stuffed with cardamom, sugar and coconut meat boiled in a banana leaf.  

At lunch, the flavour accelerates in the form of spice, but it is tempered by milder dishes such as curd curry. The fresh caught pearl spot fish is dusted with spice while the mixed vegetable dish is sweet with coconut pieces. Okra provides a bitter palate cleanser.  

Dinner is the meal with real spice gusto; an array of vegetable curries and prawns with turmeric, curry leaf and chilli. It diverts all my energy to digestion, leaving little else to do but sleep under a mosquito net bed that sways with the rhythm of the lapping lake. 

The fish we eat are all caught from the backwaters we sail through. The fishermen’s rejected catch causes a frenzy as small birds flock and flap. Speaking of avian life, during the day the backwaters are a bird watcher’s haven. Cranes fly overhead with their zigzag necks slowing down their flight path. A Krishna eagle swoops over the bow, showing off its caramel feathered underbelly. Black cormorants are like periscopes in the water – you can only see their top half as they fish and cool off. 

In Kerala, you know the time of day by watching men’s hemlines. The traditional cotton sarong is hoisted and tied before lunch as the heat rises. Women and men walk down narrow roads with wet hair after a bath at midday. Even the fans of Kerala are easy-going, with the traditional houseboat fan being a wicker window that pushes outward to permit the breeze.  

The view from the houseboat is as flat as the horizon, disrupted by the fronds of coconut trees whose trunks form a 90-degree angle, casting a shadow over the backwaters. 

Maybe it’s the rainbow umbrella, but time on a Kerala houseboat will have you feeling that you have found your own pot of gold.