12.2.19
Feeling refreshed and raring to go this morning and John has been for a run.
He had good news yesterday that his dad is going to be sent home at the weekend as they have stabilised his kidney function.
Mr P, who I now know is called Palini collected us promptly at 9am. Our first stop was the tea museum.
After a lot of kerfuffle they managed to get the projector and sound working at the same time!
The film was called New Roads, Old Mountains and followed the history of Munnar right back to British explorers surveying the hills, tribal groups, transformation of the hills with tea plants, development of the railway, history of plantation owners to the current Kanan Devan Hills Plantation. Over 80% of the company is now owned by the workers themselves, they receive housing, health care, community initiatives and real work and activity projects for the differently abled.
The plantations only cover 30% of the Munnar hills so that wildlife is protected.
Next we went upstairs for what we thought was a talk about tea production but was in fact a very hard to understand lecture about the benefits of drinking green tea. I must admit it has inspired me to give it a go and I fancy buying a green tea bottle with built in strainer before we head back home.
We continued our journey past elephant mountain.
We passed Evranakulam wildlife park, it isn’t breeding season, it’s birthing season which makes much more sense than being closed for breeding!
Onwards through huge tea plantations. It all has a much better meaning since the video and knowing the workers are co owners is just great.
We’ve seen so many of these brown jeeps, they transport plantation workers.
From here we drove to some waterfalls
Next we were entering Chinnar National Park area, through a sandalwood forest.
Time for lunch, we stopped in a buzzing little town Maryoor, at a place recommended by Palini
Another thali for John, no banana leaf today. I had very tasty chicken noodles.
We drove on to the Chinnar National Park ticket office (615 rupees each. We had a choice of a culture walk or waterfall walk. We opted for culture.
We had our own personal guide for our 2 hour stroll. It was nicer than Periyar (no Russians for a start ) as he took the time to point out different trees.
We saw 2 burial tombs and a wall painting, both 5000 years B. C. Unfortunately some paintings are very hard to see now as washed out by the rain.
We heard lots of birds, saw a chipmunk, lizards, and a large black and white squirrel. Not masses of wildlife but worth the trip for the views and trees.
On our way back we stopped and saw brown sugar being made from cane.
Palini brought us back to Munnar via the scenic route. We saw numerous plantations, sugar cane, bananas, cocoa, tapioca, sweet corn and figs.
We asked him to drop us off in town as we need internet to pay some bills back home. Weirdly our Airtel mobile internet doesn’t work anywhere outside of Munnar main town.
Walking back from town was a nightmare in the dark, its such a short walk it doesn’t warrant a tuk tuk but there’s no pavement, no streetlights and pot holes everywhere.
We stopped and booked a taxi for tomorrow morning.We are heading to the train station at Ernakulam. It is another 3 and a half hour trip, then we have a 4 hour train journey to Kozhikode in the north of Kerala.
We got back to JJs and collected our laundry.
14 pieces went in. 15 came back but 2 weren’t ours and they couldn’t find what was missing and we have no idea what it might be.
We ate in Kurunji again, excellent as usual.
It’s going to be a long day tomorrow, just hope it all goes smoothly.
Our Passage to India 