If Dubai is building artificial islands in the sea, our men from the God’s own country are all set to build a floating village!
The proposed water-wonder, according to the Kerala government, will be a cluster of 100 houseboats offering over 600 rooms equipped with all modern amenities. The houseboats, called Kettuvalloms in Malayalam, are boats made by tying together pieces of wood and are a great hit among tourists who wish to explore Kerala’s backwaters. The houseboat village will come up off the coast of Kochi by December this year.
“Though houseboats have been an integral part of our tourist attraction programme, the idea of a houseboat village was born out of necessity,” Kerala’s tourism director M Sivasankar told Business Standard. The idea was basically mooted to address the accommodation-crunch likely to hit Kochi when the city becomes a stopover point for the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09, a global yacht marathon.
The race, which starts from Alicante in Spain on October 4, will be a nine-month odyssey covering 37,000 nautical miles with stopovers at 11 ports. The race will touch Asia for the first time this year through the Kochi port.