Reading a River from the Water

Rock and teak

Day 1, 2 October. River km 0 to 8.

The Chaliyar rises far up in the Nilgiri hills, and at Nilambur it has only just come down from them. The water was so clear you could count the stones under the hull. It ran shallow and braided around grassy islands and shelves of grey granite, splitting into channels and joining again, and with the river low this year, the bottom of the kayak found most of the stones. Dragonflies hung over the water in their hundreds, and bamboo stood in great clumps along the banks.

The first 8 km took us about 5 hours. Fallen trees lay across the channel, and every few minutes we stopped, read the water and picked a way through the branches and boulders. It was slow, careful work, and there was no rhythm to be had. Not far in, the Kuthirapuzha slipped in from the left to join us, the first of many streams that would swell the river on its way to the sea.

There was no rhythm to be had.

This is teak country. Not far from the right bank, within the first hour, a small footbridge leads to Conolly's Plot, planted in the 1840s and said to be the oldest teak plantation in the world. Nilambur teak was the first forest produce in India to receive a geographical indication, and a museum in the town is devoted entirely to it. In the past, the timber floated down this same river to the boatyards at its mouth, and a railway was later laid to Shoranur largely to carry it away. The sand here holds a little gold too, fine and scattered, a fraction of a gram in every cubic metre, and families have washed it for generations. The forests behind the town are part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, and home to some of the last forest dwelling communities in South India. Even this quiet upper river has long been tied to the wider world.

Along the banks near Nilambur stand mosques, churches and temples, a gentle mix of faiths sharing the same water.

On that first afternoon my arms did all the work, as beginners' arms tend to, and by evening they were burning. We came ashore on a cobble beach below an old stone tower near Mampad, just above the Odayikkal regulator. As the light faded, we lifted the kayaks over the regulator on the right side, crossed to the left bank for the checkpoint and walked to the resort for the night. There, to the beat of chenda drums, a Theyyam performer danced in a blaze of red cloth, marigolds and fire, a ritual art of north Malabar handed down over centuries. Sitting there with aching arms, watching that steady, ancient rhythm, it was hard not to notice that I had yet to find my own.

The red country

Day 2, 3 October. River km 8 to 24.

We walked back to the regulator before dawn and set off from just below it, where the riverbed lay almost bare in the early light. Within the hour the land had changed colour. The granite gave way to laterite, the iron red earth of Kerala's midlands, glowing wherever a bank had crumbled into the water. The river turned a soft green and began to wander. This is its most winding stretch, and it looped back on itself so often that the morning sun warmed our backs, then our faces, then our backs again. Ridges rose close to 200 m above the river north of Edavanna, the highest ground we would pass.

With no signal, we found our way much as travellers on this river always have. The Chaliyar runs broadly west, so sun on your back meant progress. The guides called out the next landmark across the water, and we paddled towards a name until it turned into a place.

We paddled towards a name until it turned into a place.

In the deeper stretches of forest, with no village in sight, the call to prayer drifted across the river, first from the left bank, then from the right, then from somewhere far ahead. The villages were hidden, but you could hear them. Fields opened up between the trees more often here than anywhere else on the river, and Mampad, a busy college town, slipped past on the left bank.

Just below the bridge at Edavanna, a gold washer stood waist deep in the shallows beside a wooden sluice board, swirling the river's sand in a basin. They worked with an easy, unhurried patience, the kind that comes from long practice. It was the same fine gold that runs down from the Nilambur valley, still worked by hand as it has been for generations.

Edavanna grew up where the old road from the coast to the Nilgiris meets the river, and it still feels like a crossroads. The expedition paused here for breakfast with local leaders and members of nature groups, a reminder that the river has its own community of guardians.

The river brought people together, too. Somewhere along the way I got talking to Axe, a paddler who had climbed Everest and later paddled from Singapore to New Zealand. He had stories enough for the whole 3 days. He watched my stroke for a while, then quietly showed me how to stop hauling with my arms: plant the blade, turn the body, let the torso do the work. There were 2 boys of 12 who had come all the way from Delhi on their own, and a little one of 6 paddling the full route. Friendships formed in passing, a few words as kayaks drew level and drifted apart again. If they could do this, there was no excuse for the rest of us.

So the effort moved. With my arms spent, it climbed into my shoulders, and I began to lean into each stroke and let the paddle swing my upper body round. It ached in a new place, but it carried me further. By lunchtime we reached the hanging bridge at Pavanna, its long cable span slung from a steel tower, right where the guides had said the next checkpoint would be.

Rain on still water

Day 2, 3 October. River km 24 to 39.

Just beyond the bridge, worn laterite steps climbed out of the water at Nechikund into a tunnel of green, an old bathing ghat that the forest was slowly folding back into itself. The clouds had been building all morning, and not long after lunch the rain arrived. Rain on a still river is a lovely thing to be out in: thousands of tiny rings opening and vanishing, the forest hissing softly, every paddle stroke suddenly loud. The air cooled at once. With it came a breeze from the west, the sea air reaching inland from a coast still some 30 km away, a first hint of where all this water was heading.

The weather was kind to us that day, warm but never fierce, and the river itself was as warm as bath water. It was running low, at well under half its usual October level, lower than in almost any October of the past 20 years. That explained the scraping on the first day, and the long, quiet pools still to come.

For a few still minutes the Chaliyar seemed to have no edges at all.

The banks grew busier as the afternoon went on. This middle stretch is the most closely settled part of the river, with hamlets strung along it like beads, and the floodplain behind them is dotted with ponds that fill in the monsoon. Areekode slipped past on the left. Its name is thought to come from an old word for a riverside place, an inscription found nearby is more than 1,100 years old, and the town is known all over Kerala for its love of football. Children ran down to the water to wave at the parade of 80 brightly coloured kayaks, and we waved back until our arms reminded us of the distance still ahead.

The place names tell a story of their own. Many of the hamlets end in paramb, the Malayalam word for garden land on higher ground, and many of the landings end in kadavu, a ferry point. Homes on the rise, boats at the water's edge: these were river people, who once travelled along the Chaliyar as naturally as we now drive along a road. Many of those old landings have since become bridges, and we passed under 4 of them that afternoon. Near the last one, a pump house drew water up from the river for the fields above.

We reached the campsite at Murinjaad, an open meadow by the water, at about 5 in the evening, and the tents went up in neat rows under a floodlight. The night was warm and heavy with damp. When I unzipped the tent the next morning, the river had vanished. A mist lay so thick over the water that the far bank was gone, and for a few still minutes the Chaliyar seemed to have no edges at all.

Where the waters meet

Day 3, 4 October. River km 39 to 51.

We pushed off at 6 into a gentler river. Elamaram Bridge, red and yellow, stood reflected in water as smooth as glass. The Oorkadavu regulator lay somewhere ahead, still out of sight, and the Chaliyar had settled into a long, wide pool behind it, green and almost without current. On flowing water the river carries you. On still water you carry yourself, a metre at a time.

The banks now belonged to the areca palm, tall and slender in rows up the slopes, with banana plants crowding beneath and coconut above. Houses sat tucked into the hillsides as though they had grown there. Little wooden boats lay moored under the overhanging branches, and from one tree a fishing line hung into the water, quietly doing its work. Mats of floating weed drifted in the still water, and egrets stood along the edges and barely looked up as we passed.

On still water you carry yourself, a metre at a time.

Near Koolimadu, 2 rivers flowed in to join ours within a few hundred metres of each other, the Iruvanjippuzha from the hills and the Cherupuzha from near Mavoor. Beside the confluence stands a water works, where the river becomes drinking water for the towns around it, and further down, pump houses lift it onto the fields. The settlements were busiest here, town following town along the banks, and a ferry still crosses at Manthalakadavu as it has for as long as anyone can remember. Riverside cottages on stilts looked out over the water, and above the river at Vazhakkad rose a fine white mosque with tiered roofs in the Kerala style.

This stretch also holds a story worth telling. A few decades ago, waste from a factory near Mavoor was harming the river. The people of these villages came together, campaigned for years and, in 2001, saw the factory close. The calm green water we paddled over is, in a real sense, their gift. All along the route the 80 of us gathered plastic from the water and the reeds, a small way of carrying that care forward.

By the third morning something had changed in the way I paddled. The effort had dropped from my shoulders into my hips: feet pressed against the footrests, body turning, the paddle simply following. It was the stroke Axe had shown me, and at last it made sense. After that it ran almost on its own, stroke by stroke, paddle by paddle, as if the body had quietly taken over from the mind.

Sometimes, after a long stretch, I would stop paddling altogether, rest the blade across the deck and just float. The kayak would turn slowly in the current, the banks drifting by, the ache fading from my arms. Those were the moments I felt most alive, and they only came after the hard work.

We stopped for breakfast near the regulator, then crossed it, a slow passage that took the whole group over an hour. On the far side, sailors and rowers joined us, and white sails appeared among the kayaks for the first time.

Against the tide

Day 3, 4 October. River km 51 to 63.5.

Below the regulator the river opened out, wider and straighter, and the water took on a bluish green. Then came a taste of salt on the lips. On stones and old posts near the waterline, barnacles had settled, sea creatures living several kilometres inland. We had paddled into the estuary, where the Arabian Sea comes up the Chaliyar twice a day.

Coconut palms lean far out over the water here, and the closer we came to the sea, the further they leaned. Some lay almost flat, their crowns just clear of the surface. At Kakkov, fallen trunks rested in the shallows below an old wall built to hold the bank. It is the loveliest stretch of the whole river, and a reminder that the soft banks are always being reshaped by the tide. Houseboats appeared for the first time, moored along the quieter edges, and at the sandy beach at Aakode we stopped for refreshments while the sailors brought their dinghies ashore.

There was nothing for it but to keep going.

The last few kilometres were the hardest of the trip. The tide was coming in, a west wind blew steadily into our faces, and with the river so low there was little current to help. The moment you stopped paddling, the kayak started drifting backwards. There was nothing for it but to keep going, giving every stroke all you had.

The finish lay on the far bank, and crossing to it was the real test. Head straight across and the waves would catch the kayak side on and roll it. So we angled upstream into the current and edged across little by little, the boat wobbling under us with every stroke, hips and back doing work they could not have managed 2 days earlier.

Above the trees on the far side rose tall red chimneys, the tile works of Feroke and Cheruvannur, where Kerala's tile industry began. The clay for those tiles was carried down from the Western Ghats by these same rivers, so the same water that leaves gold in the sand at Nilambur leaves clay at Feroke. Those chimneys were also how we knew we had nearly made it. Just beneath them lay the landing at Jellyfish, and in the early afternoon the kayak finally touched the bank.

The river runs on a few more kilometres to the sea. At Feroke, Tipu Sultan once planned a capital he called Farookhabad, and an iron bridge built in 1883 still crosses the water. At the mouth, the boatyards of Beypore have built the uru, the great wooden dhow of the Arabian Sea trade, for centuries, traditionally from Nilambur teak. So the timber we had paddled past on the first afternoon ends its journey here, as we did. Across the water lies Chaliyam, an island town with one of Kerala's earliest mosques, the site of a 16th century Portuguese fort, and the end of the line for Kerala's very first railway, opened in 1861.