How a Random 4-Day Stop in Kochi Became an Entire Chapter of My Life

I was supposed to spend four days in Kochi.

That was it.

It was my first stop in India, somewhere I had picked mainly because I was terrified of India and Kerala looked like the least terrifying place to start.

Three months later, I was still there.

By then I wasn’t sightseeing anymore. I had my own room, my favorite cafés, people I saw every day, a bar where I knew everyone, a street dog waiting outside the hostel every night, and somehow even a group of people rescuing street dogs had become part of my life.

Visiting Kochi was supposed to be the beginning of a much bigger trip around India.

Instead, I got stuck at the very first place I landed.

And leaving ended up being much harder than arriving ever was.

India was never actually part of the plan

Before India, I had just finished a three-week overland trip through Central America with a friend.

From there, I flew to Colombia alone with what I thought was a pretty clear plan: travel solo overland through South America from Colombia all the way to Brazil.

Except the second I got to Colombia, something just felt off.

Maybe I was lonely after traveling with my friend for so long. Maybe I was more scared of traveling South America alone than I wanted to admit. Maybe I was simply tired.

But more than anything, I wasn’t excited.

Everything felt the same. The same language, similar surroundings, rain constantly ruining my mood, and absolutely none of that feeling I normally get when I arrive somewhere new and just want to go out and see EVERYTHING.

And I hate bad weather, so Colombia deciding to rain on me constantly definitely wasn’t helping.

I remember realizing that I didn’t actually want to be there.

What I wanted was Asia.

Asia has always been my favorite region in the world and, after weeks of feeling completely unexcited about continuing through South America, I suddenly knew exactly where I wanted to go.

India.

Which made absolutely no sense because India was also one of the countries that had scared me the most for years.

I had always wanted to visit. I had also always found a reason to delay it.

Traveling there alone as a woman terrified me.

But suddenly I was tired of being scared of it.

I wanted to go somewhere that excited me again, even if that same place scared the life out of me at the same time.

So, very last minute, I booked a flight out of Colombia, went back home for about a month and decided:

“I’m going to India!”

Starting in Kochi was my attempt at not running away from India immediately

Once I’d made the decision, I still had another problem.

Where the hell was I going to start?

The obvious choices were Delhi, Mumbai or Kochi.

Everything I saw about Delhi looked like absolute chaos. There were also plenty of women online talking about how uncomfortable or unsafe they had felt there alone.

Then I looked at Kerala.

Peaceful. Green. Calm.

Basically the complete opposite of everything people normally show you when they talk about India.

And I know myself well enough to know that throwing myself straight into Delhi could have ended with me being so overwhelmed that I got scared, booked a flight and gave up on India completely.

So I came up with what I thought was a very smart strategy.

Start with the easy side of India.

Get comfortable.

Then slowly work my way north as things became progressively more chaotic and challenging.

Kochi seemed perfect.

What I didn’t consider was the possibility that I would fall so in love with the easy side of India that I simply wouldn’t want to leave it.

That became a problem very quickly.

Naturally, I chose the most ridiculous possible way to get there

Getting to India could have been incredibly easy.

I had two options.

Option one: pay around 400€ and take two normal flights with a good airline like a sane person.

Option two: spend around 200€, take a bus to another country and then take FOUR flights.

Obviously I chose option two.

So my journey to India looked like this:

Portugal → bus to Seville → Istanbul → Kuwait → Abu Dhabi → Kochi.

At one point I was sleeping on the freezing floor of an airport.

By the time I finally landed in India, I genuinely felt like I had gone on a world tour just trying to reach Kochi.

I was destroyed.

My first night in India involved 11 Indian men and a windowless dorm

I landed in Kochi at night and the airport was basically a ghost town.

There were separate immigration lines for Indian citizens and foreigners, except there was absolutely nobody on the foreigner side.

Just me.

The immigration officer was ridiculously sweet and seemed genuinely so happy that I had come to India and chosen Kochi.

It was probably the nicest possible introduction I could have had after spending years imagining Indian immigration as this terrifying first obstacle.

I had booked an airport pickup through my hostel because it was late and Fort Kochi was around an hour from the airport.

My driver was lovely and spent most of the journey asking about my travel plans.

Which was funny because, as usual, I barely had any.

By the time I reached The Hosteller Fort Kochi Ocean Edge, it was already after midnight.

I had booked a bed in a 12-bed mixed dorm.

The room was on the ground floor, had no windows and I was so exhausted that I barely looked around before climbing into bed.

The next morning I discovered I was the only woman in the room.

The other 11 beds?

Men.

Welcome to India, Rita.

Honestly, I was too tired to even care.

I finally had a bed.

That was enough.

By the next morning, Colombia felt a million miles away

I woke up and immediately wanted to explore.

Whatever boredom I had been feeling in Colombia was completely gone.

Apparently the ridiculous journey hadn’t even tired me out enough because all I could think was:

WHAT DO YOU MEAN I’M ACTUALLY IN INDIA?!

I walked around Fort Kochi for hours.

And I couldn’t believe how different it was from the version of India I had built up in my head.

It wasn’t endless honking.

It wasn’t complete chaos.

It wasn’t packed with people everywhere.

Fort Kochi felt calm, beautiful and surprisingly clean.

There were cafés everywhere, so many restaurants and — massive win for me — loads of Western food.

I am an incredibly picky eater and food had genuinely been another thing worrying me about India.

Suddenly I was thinking maybe I’d made the best decision possible by starting here.

I thought I was going to be completely alone

There was one problem.

I barely saw any foreigners.

And suddenly I started thinking:

Great. I finally came to India alone and now I’m actually going to be ALONE.

Then that first evening I went upstairs to the hostel terrace.

A group of Indians started talking to me.

They were so welcoming that almost immediately all that anxiety disappeared.

And then something really weird started happening.

I became social.

Like, actually social.

My days quickly developed a routine.

During the day I’d wander around Fort Kochi, explore, try different cafés and eat my way through whatever I found.

Then I’d go back to the hostel.

At night, everyone would end up on the terrace.

We’d talk, play pool, meet whoever had checked in that day and somehow making friends became ridiculously easy.

For someone who spends so much of her life arriving somewhere, leaving again and starting from zero, it felt good.

Really good.

Four days passed.

Obviously I didn’t leave.

After two weeks, I finally forced myself to go somewhere else

Eventually I decided this was getting ridiculous.

I had come to India to travel around INDIA.

Not apparently move into Fort Kochi.

So after around two weeks, I finally found the courage to book a train south to Varkala.

And then India immediately did what India does and turned that into another completely random story.

In Varkala I accidentally met two couples who were also content creators.

I ended up traveling with them for about a week through Varkala, Trivandrum and Alleppey before eventually making my way back to Kochi.

And that’s when I realized I had a problem.

Coming back to Kochi felt like coming home

I don’t really know how else to explain this.

The second I walked back onto that hostel terrace and everyone started welcoming me back, it felt like I had gone away on a little trip and come home again.

Not arrived at a hostel.

Came home.

I’d only been there a few weeks.

It made absolutely no logical sense.

But that first night back was probably when I realized Kochi had become something completely different to me.

And that leaving was going to be difficult.

Unfortunately, instead of taking that realization as a sign that maybe I should continue traveling before I got even more attached, I did the exact opposite.

Then they offered me a private room for 10€ a night and my India itinerary was finished

I kept telling myself it was time to plan the rest of India.

I’d look at buses.

I’d look at trains.

I’d think about where I should go next.

Nothing felt right.

So I’d tell myself:

I’ll book it tomorrow.

Tomorrow became another tomorrow.

And another.

And I just… never booked anything.

Then someone at the hostel told me about their long-stay deal.

The private rooms were normally around $25 a night, but if you booked 30 days through their website, the price dropped to around $10 a night.

A huge private room.

To myself.

For an entire month.

For around $10 a night.

I took this information as a sign from the universe that clearly I was not supposed to leave Kochi.

So naturally I booked the month.

At this point, my four-day visit had officially gone completely off the rails.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a tourist

By then, staying in Kochi had nothing to do with sightseeing.

I’d already seen Fort Kochi.

I wasn’t waking up every morning looking for attractions.

I wasn’t trying to tick things off a list.

I was just… living there.

And sometimes I actually got annoyed with myself about it.

I’d come all the way to India wanting to explore this massive country and somehow managed to get stuck in the FIRST place I landed.

But I was attached.

Not just to Kochi.

To the life I’d accidentally created there.

There were other reasons I stayed that aren’t making their way onto this blog, but the biggest thing was the people.

As someone who travels constantly, I don’t normally stay somewhere long enough to build a proper group around me.

People come and go.

I come and go.

There’s always another flight, another bus, another country.

Kochi reminded me how good it feels to actually have your own people.

For once, I had people waiting for me every day

There were several of us staying long-term at the hostel, so eventually we all became the regulars.

It genuinely started feeling like a weird little shared home.

There were two girls in particular who reminded me how much I’d missed having girls around.

Girl talk.

Having someone there when something went wrong.

Knowing there were people I could actually count on.

And trust me, there was enough drama happening during those three months that having people around became VERY useful.

Our days weren’t remotely exciting by travel-blog standards.

That was kind of the point.

We’d go to cafés.

Sit around talking.

Play pool.

Go exploring occasionally.

Hang out at the hostel.

Go for drinks.

Go out at night.

Do normal things.

And I loved it.

Then I somehow acquired a street dog, seven Pizza Hut puppies and an animal rescue group

There was also Lizzy.

Lizzy was a street dog whose territory was basically the street outside the hostel, so she appeared every night.

Obviously we named her.

And obviously seeing Lizzy eventually became part of my normal daily routine too.

Then there was Pizza Hut.

I started going there constantly for two very important reasons.

First, an entire menu was around 2€.

Second, there were SEVEN puppies living outside.

So apparently one of my routines in India became going to Pizza Hut every day to see puppies.

Very cultural of me.

Through all of this, I also met the team behind a local animal shelter helping street dogs around Kochi.

They were doing amazing work, including vaccinating street dogs against rabies and educating people in the area.

I visited the shelter once, and eventually that group became part of my Kochi life too.

I’d see them most nights when we went out.

Again, none of this was remotely part of the plan.

But that was kind of Kochi by then.

Somehow I also became a regular at a bar in India

Our usual nights out ended up revolving around Cochin Fort and Club 18.

And because I was there for so long, the people working at the bar stopped being random staff and became people I genuinely cared about seeing.

Me.

A regular at a bar in Kochi.

Hilarious.

By Christmas, I’d been there long enough that after the bar closed, they invited me to have a little family Christmas dinner with them.

That meant so much to me.

I was thousands of kilometers away from home, in a country I’d originally been scared to travel to alone, sitting there having Christmas dinner with people I would never have met if I’d actually followed my four-day itinerary.

Those are the moments that made Kochi impossible to leave.

To be clear, this was NOT three months of peace and spiritual enlightenment

Before this starts sounding like one of those travel stories where someone moved to India, found themselves and spent three months watching sunsets:

Absolutely not.

There was drama.

SO much drama.

Honestly, my three months in Kochi could probably have been turned into a Netflix series.

I’m not putting the details of half of it online, but there was always something happening.

For some perspective, I managed to be involved in three bar fights in ONE WEEK.

I wasn’t fighting anyone myself.

I was apparently just constantly around people who were.

During one of them, two different groups of my friends started throwing punches at each other.

Naturally, I ended up in the middle trying to stop it.

Naturally, I hurt myself.

And naturally, the next morning I was at the hospital being told I’d ruptured the ligaments in my finger and needed a splint.

Wonderful.

So no, Kochi wasn’t perfect.

But somehow even all of that became part of why those months were so memorable.

There was never exactly a shortage of entertainment.

Eventually my visa made the decision I refused to make

By the end, I knew I had to leave.

My visa was running out.

There was no more:

Maybe next week.

Maybe I’ll stay a little longer.

Maybe I’ll book the train tomorrow.

India was literally kicking me out.

I decided Sri Lanka would be next.

Even then, my friends and the people at the bar kept trying to convince me not to leave.

And believe me, I delayed it for as long as physically possible.

But eventually there wasn’t another excuse.

I had to go.

Leaving Kochi genuinely broke my heart.

Because I knew exactly what was waiting for me once I left.

Solo travel again.

Being alone most of the time again.

Arriving somewhere where nobody knew me again.

And yes, I knew I was coming back to India.

But I also knew the rest of India wasn’t going to be Kochi.

I don’t think anywhere else in the country could have given me that same feeling of comfort and home that Kochi did.

Kochi was supposed to be four days

When I landed at Kochi Airport alone that first night, exhausted after my ridiculous journey across half the world, I had absolutely no idea what was about to happen.

I had picked Kerala because I was scared of India.

I thought Kochi would be the safe, easy beginning before I moved on to the “real” adventure.

Instead, the place I chose because it felt easiest became one of the hardest places I’ve ever had to leave.

Four days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

A hostel became home.

Random people became my people.

A street dog became part of my daily life.

And a place I’d barely even thought about before booking my flight became an entire chapter of my life.

Maybe starting my India trip in Kochi really was a mistake.

Because once I’d found somewhere that made India feel that safe, comfortable and familiar, I never really wanted to leave.