Houseboats are floating luxury hotels with stylish living facilities and a spacious sit-out area to enjoy the mesmerising beauty that surrounds you. Alleppey is a town with picturesque canals, backwaters, beaches and lagoons and is known as the ‘Venice of the East’. Our houseboat cruise takes you through the most beautiful among these places in and around Alleppey, and sometimes all the way up to Quilon as per your preference.
The cruise begins at Minar de’ Lake’s office-cum-lounge facility where guests can park their vehicles and board the houseboats. During the cruise, you will be accompanied by the Captain of the boat (who will also act as the guide) and a Chef who is an expert with the local cuisines as well as international flavours. In a typical case, our guests join us around 12 noon and enjoy the cruise until 10AM of the disembarking day.
Alleppey has a thriving society along the backwaters with houses, shops, schools, religious homes and countless other establishments. As you cruise through these places, you will get to see flourishing agricultural lands on one side and upcoming skyscrapers on the other. There will be a host of colourful birds and marine creatures to incite your curiosity in a world away from home. Innumerable punts, kayaks and electric boats will go alongside you, many of them delivering milk, vegetables as well as transporting people from one place to the other.
Once you leave the settlements behind, you will enter the stunning sea with water all around you. The immaculate blue that wraps you will definitely blow your mind away. The soul-touching silence and equanimity with nature will de-stress and lead you into a world you always craved for.
Due to fishing and trawling activities, houseboats do not move between dusk to dawn. During this time period, they are anchored to the shore either in the sea or near the office premises of Minar de’ Lake. You can spend the evening watching television or playing board-games and then retire for the night in our luxurious, state-of art air conditioned bedrooms. The cruise will commence again next morning after dawn.
The boats used as houseboats on the Alleppey backwaters are known as ‘Kettuvallom’ (the word derived from ‘kettu’ meaning knot and ‘vallom’ meaning boat). They are built with Aanjili wood (Artocarpus hirsutus) and coir ropes are used for fastening several layers of the wood together. The coir industry is highly developed in and around Alleppey. The engineering principles that are employed for the manufacture of houseboats are traditional and passed on across generations. In the ancient days before motorisation waterways were the preferred mode of transportation and Kettuvalloms were extensively used to carry goods like rice and spices across the state. They were also used as the luxurious living quarters of the royalties of the region.
Today, Minar de Lake is successful in recreating such royal experiences for our clients along with modern-day comforts.
Minar de Lake is a veteran in the Alleppey houseboat tourism industry with its impressive fleet and the experience of serving guests from all parts of the world over the last fifteen years. Our strength lies in the satisfaction of our thousands of guests who have repeatedly shown their goodwill by promoting us, which has in turn strengthened our conviction to do everything in our means to make the experience of our guests most enjoyable and memorable. Check our testimonial pages to hear our past guests.
As you would have noticed, Minar de Lake roughly means ‘Palace of the seas’. We believe in providing our guests with a royal experience and we have been successful in doing so for the last fifteen years. We also believe that our wonderful kings, beautiful queens and the little princes and princesses deserve a personalised experience and we are the first houseboat cruise company in Allppey to completely allow our guests to plan their cruise the way would like it.