10 Nov 2013 Kochi to Munnar

It is a long way to Munnar, 130km in 41/2hrs!

The first 35km is through the flood plains around Kochi and its many many villages. We are travelling on a Sunday morning, and I thought it would be fairly quiet on the roads, but alas I was wrong, it’s church morning and it seems the entire population of this city is on the road. It took 1 1/2hrs to do the first 40km of our trip.

The next 50km took 1 1/2 hrs up through twisting mostly 1 1/2 lane mountain roads that are still pretty broken from the monsoon.

We passed by the two main features, waterfalls that are fairly close together, just before the 70km mark. Both were underwhelming and we didn’t stop. The mountain region has a lot of different agriculture to that we have seen elsewhere. They grow rice, bananas, pineapple, rubber trees, cardamom, pepper, ginger, cocoa, turmeric and coconuts, just to name a few.

Around the 80km mark we had a stop, the driver needed a break, at a spice garden/shop. We took a tour of the garden, they grow a huge range of herbs, fruit and medicinal plants, many of them you would just walk passed without giving them a second thought. We saw pepper, cocoa, cashew trees, turmeric, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and many more. They had herbal cures for everything from sore eyes, bad complexion, to farting and “stamina” problems.  It was really interesting.

The mountain roads were busy with lots of traffic, particularly buses. Our driver told us the ones running in the same direction as us were on their way to Mumbai, an all stops to Mumbai bus takes about 4 days from here!!  (Deb here, our driver was sooo slow driving up here, I am sure we could have got here an hour sooner, at some points I felt like we were on a donkey!  It was painful!!  I am missing our driver from Rajasthan, Mangeet, not only was he good fun, but now I appreciate how good a driver he is.  mmm such is life!)

We got into Munnar and our accommodation at The Windermere Estate, a Cardamom plantation, at about 1pm, in much better time than we were told, 4 1/2hrs for 130km!

We were first shown to the Coffee Bungalow, but were given the option of swapping (upgrading) to a Plantation Bungalow, due to the house warming party being held by the villagers right next door to the Coffee Bungalow. Once we had a look at the upgrade we accepted without hesitation, it is all fairly basic accomodation but it had a beautiful view.  So we settled in and then went and had lunch, a set meal of Keralian food, very tasty.

After lunch Deb relaxed a bit and chatted with Carly on Facebook while I went exploring. The Estate has a viewing mound, that gives you a near 360 deg view of the area, it is a huge area with steep mountains, we are at about 1700m above sea level. I walked around took some pictures of the tea plantation either side of the driveway and then went on a guided walk through the Cardamom plantation, it was just me and a german couple on the walk with the guide. It was really interesting, the guide told us that we are too high for commercial coffee to be grown and that there are wild coffee plants all through the area. The Cardamom plants produce their fruit at the base of the bushes, cardamom is a member of the ginger family, and the bush looks very similar to ginger. They use plants between 4 and 14 years old for fruit production and then rip them out and replant. The tending of the plants and picking of the fruit is very labour intensive, the plants need a lot of water and shaded areas in tropical climates to grow well. We were told that the tea bushes were planted in this area in about 1880 and can be over 100 yrs old and still producing fine teas.

As we were finishing the walk and getting ready to come back, the mist rolled in followed by rain , the end of the monsoon type rain!

As we were walking back in the rain our guide waved down a TukTuk and we had a manic ride back to the Plantation, I am sure the guy driving was practicing for the F1.  (shame he wasn’t our driver up here!)

I found Deb in our room, and it was raining too heavily to go out to the tea and coffee afternoon drinks so we stayed in and kept dry.

Looking forward to exploring the area some more tomorrow.