Having arrived in the dark, it was wonderful to wake up to see the view and memories of my stay in Manali, India – complete with seeing locals going off to work on the mountain path in front of my porch. Zeeshan ended up cooking me breakfast since the local chef was afraid of messing up eggs for the foreigner (!) while I took photos of the beautiful garden flowers. Then it was off to explore the area, during which I had ‘one of those’ travel moments.
It turns out we are in the middle of one of India’s tea growing regions. We passed tea plantations with rows of bushes that are almost like an artist’s canvas with their lines looking like designs. These lines are the spaces between the bushes allowing workers space to cut the leaves.
We stopped at one spot where leaves were being gathered. This is a Tata plantation (Tata owns massive amounts of businesses and is one of the wealthiest men in India with 60% of his profits automatically put into a foundation for charitable works!).
The women I watched were hard at work, using these special clipper boxes that cut off the top leaves. They put them into their bags and lugged them down the STEEP hill to the station to be weighed (they are paid by weight, not bag). Nilgiri is tea grown here, and the local Tamil population does most of the harvesting.
Seeing how hard it was for the women to carry the bags down makes me appreciate the tea I drink that much more. I also learned of a little trick they do: when the manager is not looking, they dip their already heavy bags into water to make them heavier. I enjoyed taking photos of them (they did as well, especially the youngest one) and I gave them 500 rupees for the honor.
The drive continued with more interesting sights, facts learned, and beauty witnessed. One especially interesting factoid is that Indonesian fishermen are paid to pick up floating plastic in the water, paid by the weight when they return to port. A brilliant idea I feel!
Zeeshan bought me a real flower necklace where the flowers are braided with vines. The smell was so sweet and filled the car! Then we bought the carrots from a roadside vendor the driver knew, learning that you do not leave pineapples out at night otherwise the wild elephants will come to eat them and mess up your stall (they roam the area at night)! Unfortunately we did not see any elephants wandering….makes we want to return at night one day!
More tea plantations as we drove along.
I was enamored of the trees we saw while driving, so intricate with their branch designs.
Kerala is known for its nature, of course, and I was seeing lovely views throughout the day.
We finally arrived at Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, where we are spending the night in the middle of the park. I read about this in the Lonely Planet book, and to get to your cabin you have to hike for about 3km.
As we were waiting to check and for our guide to arrive, there were naughty monkeys hanging around. Before we even knew it, one monkey jumped into the car and grabbed our carrots.
This baby monkey was cute beyond words!
The park is home to two indigenous groups: the Muthivans and Mala Pulayas – 1800 people from the two very different ethnic groups. We were accompanied by two men from one the groups. They spent the night with us, cooked our meals and brought the water for flushing from the nearby river (no running water – beautiful nature and as close to roughing it as I am going to do at 63!).
The walk was not hard, but a bit long. 3 km through brush and rocky paths takes a lot longer than just walking. After we settled in we took an evening walk. There was LOTS of evidence of animals nearby but we didn’t see any, other than some spotted deer, the butterfly, centipede, and a few other insects below.
The evidence:
The evening walk afforded us some stunning views.
The evening was lovely as I finished my book, chatted on the porch with Zeeshan and listened to the birds, crickets and running water from the nearby river.