Magical Munnar

Ah, the next leg of our whirlwind trip to Kerala.  As I had mentioned in the previous post, we had to get up at a ripe old time of 4:30 a.m. to catch our 6:00 am bus to Munnar, a mountain town about 5 hours directly east (inland) from Kochi.  We were able to stash our large packs at the hotel for the days we’d be gone, as we knew we were going to be doing a lot of moving.  I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to find the bus, while the station in Kochi was probably the sketchiest bit of Kerala we encountered, with men lying everywhere on cardboard boxes, asking for money and taking their morning pees wherever they liked.  

It decided to pour that morning, which worried me a bit because my guidebook pointed out that the roads to Munnar often get washed away during monsoon reason, but I decided not to share this with the rest of the group and just hope for the best! We paid about 80 rupees for the trip, which was uncomfortable to say the least.  Public buses in India don’t have glass windows, so when it rains, all of the windows are covered with metal flaps, so you can’t see out anywhere. That, mixed with the fact that literally every minute I felt I was being flung to my right side and then to my left because of the mountainous roads, meant that the drive was pretty unpleasant for those of us who get carsick. We were definitely the only Westerners who opted for the public bus route, and were lucky enough to have gotten on at the first stops, so we had seats all the way. However, since the buses aren’t leak proof by any means, us and the majority of our luggage was somewhere between damp or soaked by the time we arrived 5 hours later. The 5 hour journey was actually pretty good considering the bus was unable to move for about 40 minutes due to a road block, likely due to the weather, during which time I was praying to just get to Munnar with all roads intact. 

 

Looking fabulous on our bus ride to Munnar

Get there we did, and we were swiftly picked up by a driver who within minutes arranged an entire tour and a ride back to the coast for only 18 bucks a person (about 12 hours of driving in a jeep). He first took us to the accommodation we’d arranged which was absolutely breathtaking. We stayed at Zina Cottages, which is just on the outskirts of Munnar. To get there, the jeep has to climb up a mountain, which takes about 10 minutes, and is one of the most terrifying drives of my life because the road is mostly washed out. Once we arrived, we realized that we were essentially staying IN a tea plantation, surrounded by endlessly rolling mountains filled with tea plants. We also realized that we were very much alone up there-no other accommodations or homes existed, and we absolutely welcomed the silence after being subjected to such noise pollution in Indian cities.  Our rooms were simple, but the views were so breathtaking it was hard to care about what we’d be sleeping in. 

 

The view from where we had our welcome chai

After some chai (so necessary given our surroundings), we started off with our driver, who promised to show us the lay of the land and have us back by dark (before the wild boars come out-I am not kidding, the locals were very serious in their warnings not to wander after dark as these animals will apparently take you out without a fighting chance-Lonely Planet confirms this, so I took their word for it). Even though much of the drive wasn’t to see anything in particular at all, we were constantly ooing and awing at the scenery, and taking about 1000 “snaps” around every turn we took.  One of the coolest things we saw along the way were… WILD ELEPHANTS. Yep, that’s right. Right in the middle of the coldest, most green, most damp, place I’ve been in India, sure enough there was a family of elephants wandering a field, eating all the grass they wanted.  The elephants, though we were looking at them from a bit of a distance, appeared to be smaller than the African elephants I had seen before.  Us and a few other tourists just watched them graze along, amazed that they were ACTUALLY wild, and didn’t belong to someone. Its crazy to me, because it’s kind of equivalent to seeing a deer run across a field at home, except that these were ELEPHANTS, and they weren’t running anywhere-they couldn’t care less that a bunch of us were watching them, they just wanted to get their fill of yummy grass. 

 

Wild elephants!!!!

 After that thrill, we stopped for lunch, which we requested to be cheap and local to compensate for the spending we were doing that day for the tour itself.  Our driver obliged, and took us to this little tarp covered shop that just served what was on the table-rice (big rice-different than what we had been having), a dahl and teeny tiny fried fish caught in the lake beside where we were eating.  My appetite wasn’t up and I have a strong dislike for dahl given my experience with sickness over the last month, but I ate a bit and the girls really enjoyed the fish. We then got some more chai (obviously), and kept going up the mountain until we eventually reached Top Station, a very high point surrounded by tea plantations where you can see the bordering state of Tamil Nadu. The views were absolutely spectacular, as we could see tea plantations for miles, followed by even bigger mountains. At the very top there was a chai stand, and I have to say that it was the BEST chai we’ve had since being in India-it was a nice spicy masala served piping hot, which we welcomed because it was pretty chilly. 

 

Mud hut lunch.

 

The view from Top Station

 

The man who served us the best chai of the trip

Afterwards, our driver took us to town to buy some of the tea from the plantations we had seen all day. Its pretty amazing to me that absolutely all of the tea grown there is growing on land that belongs to the Tata Tea Company. Workers who pick the leaves move through the fields every couple of weeks, and working in wet and cold conditions for 100 rupees/day (about 2 USD).   

 

My "its super cold in India" outfit consisting of tights, parachute pants, a t-shirt and a kurta

 Before dropping us to our hotel, our driver insisted that we all get these Ayurvedic massages done-this is a type of natural medicine that with origins in Kerala, so it seemed legitimate to give one a try-when in Rome, you know? Well, it didn’t quite work out like that. Had we been able to see the facilities before booking our 500 rupee massage, we would’ve known well enough to get the hell out of there. The room where you get massaged looks legitimately like a torture chamber-there’s a massive wooden bed that you are supposed to lie on, which definitely hasn’t been cleaned since god knows when, so that means your naked body has been laying where several hundred others probably have prior to it. Absolutely disgusting. The lady who was doing the massage was nice enough, but when I asked her what her training was to be providing these “treatments” she responded that of course she had gone to grade 10…so, basically, no real training in this medicine at all.  The massage also basically wasn’t one-it moreso involved the lady rubbing various oils on your body, but not in a nice way. O, and by body, I mean that this includes your face and hair, so that was just lovely.  Ewwww, I am actually cringing now just thinking about it. There was absolutely no way I could relax being in that room, but I guess the story is good to tell now, though not worth paying the 10 USD good… O, and since we had told our host that we wouldn’t be needing showers that night, we had no hot water to wash the disgustingness off with, so off to sleep we went, all oily and such. Ewwwwwww. Ew. Despite that being our final experience in Munnar, I am absolutely so glad we made the trip there that day for the whirlwind tour. It was so beautiful, and amazing how different not only the scenery, but the culture and the food, can be by just traveling a few hours inland.  More to come on the rest of our Keralan adventures soon!