What I tell guests who ask if the room is actually comfortable

Someone asked me last week, over the second cup of tea, whether the rooms were “actually comfortable or just nice for photos.” Fair question. You’ve seen the listings. Every place looks comfortable at golden hour.

So let me answer it properly, because it’s the thing I’d want to know too if I were the one stepping onto a boat with a suitcase.

The rooms, honestly described

There are four rooms. None of them are big. Two face the lake, two look into the garden and the paddy behind it. The beds are firm — the kind I grew up sleeping on, coir mattress under a cotton sheet — and some guests love that and some ask me for an extra blanket to soften it up. I keep spares in the cupboard for exactly that reason.

The floors are red oxide, cool underfoot even in April. There’s a table, a chair, a fan on the ceiling, and a wooden shutter you can push open to let the whole lake in. That’s the whole room, more or less. I’m biased, obviously, but I think simple rooms age better than fancy ones. Nothing here is trying to impress you.

What I notice most is what guests do in the first ten minutes. They put the bag down, they open the shutter, and they just stand there for a while. Nobody unpacks first. It’s always the window.

Hot water, fans, and mosquito nets

Hot water runs from a geyser in each bathroom. It takes a couple of minutes to heat up in the morning, so turn it on before you go out to the veranda for your tea. That’s the only trick to it.

Every bed has a mosquito net, and I’ll say this plainly: use it. Dusk on the backwaters is beautiful and also full of mosquitoes. They come out around six, right when the light turns gold, and they leave you alone by about eight. Citronella coils on the veranda help. Long sleeves help more.

The fans are the old kind, the ones that make a small clicking sound on the slow setting. I find it soothing. Some guests don’t. There’s a faster setting for you.

Breakfast is included in your stay — that’s how the whole thing works here. It’s not a buffet. It’s puttu and kadala, or appam with egg curry, or idiyappam, depending on the morning, served on the veranda with the lake in front of you. If you’ve heard the phrase homestay with breakfast included Alleppey thrown around, this is what it means in practice. Not a voucher. A plate, a chair, and someone asking if you want more tea.

What we don’t have (and why that’s fine)

No television. No air conditioning. No swimming pool, obviously, since we’re floating on the biggest one in Kerala. No room service, because there’s no corridor to walk down — just a veranda with a few chairs.

What we do have is a six-minute boat ride between you and the road, which means no traffic, no horns, and no one selling you anything from a shop window. The trade-off is that you can’t pop out for a coffee at 11pm. There’s nothing to pop out to. Dinner is at the homestay, or it’s a boat ride, and after dark I’d rather you stayed and ate here anyway.

Look, I know that sounds like a limitation. For most guests it turns into the reason they came.

The evenings, which are the real luxury

Most houseboats switch off their engines by 5:30pm. It’s a small thing that changes everything. After that the lake belongs to canoes and birds — a kingfisher working the edge of the paddy, a cormorant drying its wings on a post, the slow knock of a vallam oar going somewhere. You can hear a conversation from three hundred metres away across the water.

One monsoon evening the power went out entirely. Candles on the table, rain on the tin roof, no music, no lights on the far shore. A French couple who had come to us after four days in Kochi told me at breakfast that the candlelit dinner was better than anything they’d booked in the city. I don’t think they were being polite. There was nothing to do but eat and talk, and they did both for two hours.

In August, the Nehru Trophy snake boat race turns the whole lake loud for one weekend — a hundred rowers, drums, crowds on the banks. Then Monday comes and it goes quiet again, quieter than before, as if the water is recovering.

Things guests usually ask me

Do we get a lake view from every room?

No. Two rooms open straight onto the water, and two face the garden with the paddy behind. The garden rooms are a little cheaper and a little shadier in the afternoon. If the view matters to you, tell me when you write and I’ll hold a lake-view room.

Is the breakfast a fixed menu or can we choose?

It depends on the morning and what’s fresh, but tell me what you like and I’ll work around it. Vegetarian, no problem. Eggs, no problem. If you want to try proper Kerala breakfast rather than toast, just say so the night before.

What if we arrive late?

The last boat ride in is around 8pm, and after that the channel gets hard to read. Tell me your train or flight time and I’ll arrange the boat to meet you. If you’re going to be very late, message me — I’ll keep dinner warm and the veranda light on.

One guest insisted on helping haul the morning fish delivery off the boat. He was here four nights and by the end he was carrying crates like he’d been doing it for years. He still emails me photos of that morning.

You can read more about the rooms and the boat ride over at Evaan’s Casa, and if you want to know whether the lake-view room is free for your dates, just write to me and I’ll tell you straight.

That’s the comfort here, really. Not the mattress or the geyser. It’s that you wake up, open a shutter, and nothing is asking anything of you. Come see for yourself, and bring a book you’ve been meaning to finish.