Malarikkal's Water Lilies, and the Five Places Everyone Misses on the Same Backwaters

Everyone who plans a Kerala trip around the backwaters ends up at Malarikkal, watching the lake turn pink and white with water lilies for a few months each year. It's a real, worthwhile stop — and, for what it's worth, the actual place Elysian Trails started: our very first trip was a weekend to Malarikkal and Kumbalangi, long before this was a company.

Here's the part almost nobody does: keep going.

Malarikkal sits at the edge of a much larger backwater system — the Kuttanad canal network that spreads across Alappuzha and Kottayam. Most visitors see the water lilies, take the standard houseboat route through the main channel, and never see what's a short paddle or drive off that route. Every place below is real and verified in our own places database, not written to sound that way — and none of them are a houseboat operator or a property, because we don't publish those names here either.

The Other Five

1. Pathiramanal Island — a genuine bird sanctuary reachable only by boat, home to migratory species that most standard houseboat itineraries never stop long enough to see.
2. Kakkathuruthu Island — a small coconut-grove village built on the water, the kind of stop a main-channel cruise glides straight past.
3. Panavally Lake — a quieter lake off the main channel, carrying a fraction of the boat traffic Vembanad itself sees.
4. Aadimoolam Vetticode Sree Nagaraja Swami Temple — a working snake-worship shrine reached through paddy fields at the water's edge, more unusual than anything on the standard route.
5. Arattuvazhi Beach — where the backwaters finally meet the sea, without a houseboat in sight.

Five places, all part of the same canal system as the view everyone photographs, quietly skipped by nearly every itinerary that stops at the main channel.

"Depth over magnitude, always."

That's the whole idea behind what we build. Anyone can do the backwaters. Fewer people can say they actually saw Kuttanad.