This post was also published on my substack at The Art Noob: A Trip to Calicut(Kozhikode), Kerala - Part II

Before the details are lost from memory I want to jot down the thoughts on the rest of the trip to Calicut.

We took an afternoon trip to Kappad Beach close to Calicut.It is a nicely maintained quiet beach, but you have to pay a fee to get in. However the clean beach is worth it. And the fee keeps the crowd to a minimum. We spent most of the time in the water, and took no photos.

In the evenings we would take an auto and go out to a restaurant near our hotel. As I've mentioned in Part I of this series, Calicut is a city for foodies. One evening we discovered this cafe/restaurant where my son had a custom Milo drink. He liked the drink so much we went back there a couple of times. Another find was a cafe/bakery which served excellent drinks and shakes.

So it was good food and lots of small trips. Great combination for a vacation.

One of the longest trips was Kadalundi bird sanctuary where we rented a boat for several hours. Most of the migratory birds were gone, but the mangrove islands are beautiful and there were quite a few local birds. I managed to take a few photographs.

Our boatman was quite a cheerful person and helped setup our family photos at really beautiful spots which he had memorized.

He was also quite knowledgeable about the birdsandnamed several of them, and I later verified those names online.

There were quite a few egrets and they are really photogenic birds as you can see below in some of the photos.

Since we were visiting during the afternoon,I believe these were just resting in the mangroves.

There was a tiny grassy island in the middle of the river where you could see lots of ibis and egrets together.

The smaller birds were harder to photographas I had just a 300mm zoom on my dslr. But I did get a bee-eater and a kingfisher.

This golden crab was lounging aroundjust as we were about to return to the boat pier. I managed to get down and get a shot before it ran away.

I think this post has again run too long,so I will stop here. I did take lots of photos. I was carrying my old Nikon D3100 and kept my main cameras home. And contrary to expectations the place was so photogenic that I took lots of nice photos.

Hope you liked some of them. Let me know what you liked or didn’t. And perhaps make a trip to this nice place someday.

Have a great day!

-Abhishek (artnoob)