After the heat & humidity of Kochi, we set off for some welcome respite in the cooler climes of the Western Ghat mountain range. Our first destination was Munnar, the tea-growing centre of South India, followed by Thekkady in the Cardamom Hills and entrance to the Periyar National Park.

Munnar

Kochi to Munnar is a drive of only 80 miles but takes 4-5 hours on the twisting roads. There are buses, but common wisdom is DON’T unless you are on a severely restricted budget. So a taxi it was, arranged by our hotel for Rs 5,000 (just under 50 quid). We asked the driver to make 3 stops on the way at (1) an ATM, (2) a pharmacy and (3) somewhere to buy beer.

The first stop was uneventful and Debbie, terrified of running out of cash, filled her wallet with Rs 500 (£5) notes.

The pharmacy stop was more interesting. Guide book advice was to take a preventative travel sickness pill for the journey, and as our Stugeron had been way out of date we needed to find an Indian alternative. Debbie tried explaining what she needed with words and actions, then used Google translate without success, finally showing the pharmacist a picture of someone throwing up off the side of a boat. Hurrah – the pharmacist nodded understanding and handed over the drugs with instruction to take ’30 minutes before’ and charged Rs 52 (less than 50p). Not entirely convinced we had the right stuff, a quick Google search showed that the medication was Ondansetron, commonly prescribed for sickness related to chemotherapy! We didn’t bother taking the tablets and hoped the journey wasn’t as bad as feared.

The beer stop was at one of the monopoly Kerala State Beverages shops, where large Kingfishers were only a little more expensive than the shops in Goa, but my god we wished we’d bought more of the £3.50 gin with us. Top tip for gin-drinkers visiting Kerala – bring as much duty free as you are allowed as a bottle of Bombay Sapphire is almost £50 here and there’s no cheapo local alternatives in these shops. We will be sticking to beer!

The journey wasn’t too bad from a motion sickness perspective, but Indian taxi drivers have a very interesting habit of overtaking on blind bends! But we made it unscathed (physically at least).

Our accommodation for 3 nights was Gruenberg Tea Plantation Haus, a 5-room hotel set in the middle of a tea plantation funnily enough. It wasn’t fancy and could’ve done with some refurbishment, but we couldn’t have wished for a better location and it was brilliant value (about £35/night including breakfast and dinner). The menu was short & simple, pre-orders were taken in the early evening and the food delivered at your chosen time to your room or the roof terrace. Then at some point in the evening breakfast pre-orders were taken and the process repeated. All the food was freshly prepared in the small kitchen, where they also kindly kept our beers in the fridge, with supplies arriving by tuk-tuk each morning, Delicious food and about £3 each for dinner!

Munnar itself is a busy, chaotic and scruffy town and most tourist accommodation is in the surrounding hills. There are many huge and imposing 5* resort hotels, perched high on the steep hills dominating the landscape, and charging 5* prices, but we were glad we had booked somewhere more homely.

We were about 7 miles away from Munnar so securing transport to sightsee was a must. A couple we’d met at cooking class in Goa had suggested hiring a driver for a day, so we asked our hotel to organise one.

There are 4 sightseeing directions from Munnar – we chose the ‘Top Station’ direction and left it up to our driver Babug to show us the best of the area, but declined the elephant riding. Winding our way further up into the mountains we had a short stop at a botanical garden, a couple of dams with spectacular views (and some very acrobatic monkeys) and Echo Point. The scenery was stunning all along the 45Km route, but at it’s best as we approached Top Station, with tea plantations as far as the eye could see and on some pretty steep slopes. From Top Station (about 7,500 ft above sea level and used to have a narrow gauge railway terminating there – hence the name) we got a magnificent view across the top of the Western Ghats and down into the state of Tamil Nadu – in fact we went just across the state border. After a stop for lunch back in Munnar we headed off to a spice garden for an education in the Ayurvedic properties of a whole host of herbs & spices, and after taking advice from the in-house Ayurvedic doctor (quack?), Debbie purchased some lotions, potions & pills to aid her shoulder recovery. Remember the 50p she paid for real drugs on the way to Munnar? Well a fool and her money – she parted with 100x that amount for some massage oil (which absolutely stinks), some pills to take in the morning and some for the evening. Funnily enough, there’s been no miracle recovery yet!

The following day we decided to have a ‘tea’ day, so took a tuk-tuk to the Tea Museum – an interesting documentary on how the area became tea growing country (some German and Scottish folk bought the land for almost nothing as there was no obvious value in it) and some propaganda on how well they look after the tea plantation employees. Interestingly, the day before Babug had pointed out the migrant labourer huts at one plantation – there’d be an outcry if the same was spotted in the veg growing fields of Norfolk. A stop for a drink and cake in Munnar (Chai, Fanta and 2 savoury donuts for less than £1) and then another tuk-tuk to the Lockhart Tea Estate for a guided tour of the planation and factory visit. Aside from the sheer beauty of the planation, we were astounded by some of the facts about tea – most notably that the bushes are harvested every 15-25 days. Given the amount of tea bushes in this region, the labour required is immense – numbers of 12,500 to 15,000 tea pickers were quoted, almost exclusively women and some very old ones at that. The tea factory workers were mainly men, and we learned about the production process (surprisingly simple) and different types & grades of tea. After a tasting session we reconfirmed that Debbie really does not like tea.

So, Munnar in summary – STUNNING!

Thekkady

It’s about another 80 mile drive from Munnar to Thekkady (pronounced Tech-a-dee), and there is a bus but we decided to be extravagant and ask Babug to take us in his taxi. Given that we’d only spent £9 on food while in Munnar, we thought we could splash out £40 for another (terrifying) cab ride. It’s a lovely 2 hour journey with an abundance of churches along the way. South India is predominantly Christian and it seems the different versions of the faith try to out-do each other with the size and grandeur of their places of worship.

Accommodation – The Wildernest – a boutique 10 room hotel made from stone and just 5 minutes from the entrance to Periyar National Park. All rooms are the same price but the 5 best are duplex with balconies. On arrival Princess Deborah had a strop about the room allocated (justifiably, it was the worst room in the hotel) and eventually we got a room she was just about satisfied with, but not the room with balcony she’d requested and that the hotel had acknowledged at the time of booking. Lesson learned – booking through Agoda puts you at the bottom of the room allocation list unless specific room types can be booked.

We secured our activity for the following day and went in search of beer – not an easy task. Debbie trawled Tripadvisor looking for mention of beer and found Grandma’s Cafe – a cute little place in a garden down an alley, brightly decorated and playing rock music. No sign of beer on the menu but we could see someone with a Kingfisher so all good, and we went back there for dinner too (twice!). We were rather amused that the beers were listed as ‘pop’ on the receipt, so perhaps they weren’t totally above board.

Our chosen activity – bamboo rafting in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. We already knew that there was sod all chance of spotting a tiger, but rafting was supposedly better to spot other wildlife on the huge lake than taking a noisy tourist-filled boat. We were advised on booking that our ‘Half Day Bamboo Rafting’ excursion was actually a 4-5Km walk to the lake, 1 hour rafting, and 4-5Km walk back, so it wasn’t mis-sold, but we expected to see some wildlife along the way and do more than a 400m drift up the lake and back again! No matter, the scenery was beautiful and it burned off some of our curry excesses. The ‘rafting’ was comedically bad – our raft had a mind of it’s own, perhaps not helped by the extra weight pressure we were putting it under, so after a brief stop we were transferred to join another raft and the guys walked ours back. On the return trek we did see a ‘fresh’ tiger track, which our guide miraculously found when he ran ahead of the group. Obviously he carries a tiger-paw stamp with him as our ‘armed guard’ surely wouldn’t have been so relaxed, carrying a brolly to shelter from the sun with his rifle slung over his shoulder, and no sign of any ammunition, if he thought that a tiger was actually in the vicinity!

We managed to see a deer on the other side of the lake and a few black squirrels but not close enough to get a decent photo of. The only creatures we came close to were monkeys and cows!

After the unaccustomed exercise, especially in the heat, we were both knackered and aching – Steve went for a lie down & a game of chess, and Debbie went in search of a massage. The hotel’s recommendation turned out to be a lovely Ayurvedic spa in a magnificent building in a less than salubrious location a down an alley next to an electricity sub-station. On being taken to the therapy room, she was handed the customary disposable underwear – but not the usual paper knickers, instead a rectangular loin cloth with integral belt (similar design to TENA Flex – IYKYK!). Dignity out of the window, the massage began with the pouring of heated oil from an ornate copper urn and the therapist doing a little chant – bizarre in the extreme but very relaxing.

Just a short 2 night stop in Thekkady was probably sufficient. Most Southern India organised tours come here, with most doing so in preference to Munnar, presumably as it makes more sense logistically (we are doubling back on ourselves to do both), but in our opinion it’s madness to choose Thekkady over Munnar. Whilst the former gave us another flavour of Kerala and was nice enough, the latter has been the scenic highlight of India so far.