Munnar: Mile High Tea

It is especially true that you never have enough time in India, but my short trip to the south was still one I will never forget. Over the next week or so I will be writing about the trip down south (one entry cannot do the ten days justice), starting today with our first stop in Munnar.

From the mountains to the backwaters, time doesn't seem to exist in the state of Kerela. You can just sit...and stare, for hours on end and it feel like a few minutes. We left the house at 3 am and flew from Ahmedebad to Mumbai to Bangalore finally to Cochin, then drove up winding mountain roads, edged by huge cliffs with no rails, for four hours to Munnar. The first glimpses of South India were straight out the jungles in the Ramayana Comic books we had as kids. Sadly, I cannot share many of these awesome scenes with you, as my Camera Curse continues...later in the trip, all the pictures from Munnar (except one, the picture above) and one day of the backwaters were wiped clean from my memory chip and replaced by 4 question marks that said "unidentified picture" (if anyone know what this means or how it happened, please enlighten me). But since I am in the land of the Buddha, I should take a tip and let go of such material things (i'm still kinda mad...). But imagine the Appalachian mountains were as green as the Irish Isles, dotted with coconut groves, wild mountain flowers and the occasional pack of wandering mountain goats. Munnar's hillsides are covered in Tea plants, those are the bushes you see that mosaic the mountains. It is a pretty stunning place, and we got there just in time to stop off at a roadside tea shack to watch the sun set. Anish told me the tea was something else ("like crack"), and it was. That is, it was so good that it was heavily addicting , I could probably drink it by the gallon, but was limited to a little dixie cup that looked like it had been used already.

The hotel was a very nice government lodge, and I noticed that there was a fire moving down one hillside towards the town, the power was also flickering on and off (a daily occurrence I got used to). I pointed at it and asked the bell boy if someone was going to do something before their town burned down, he smiled at me nodding his head and repeating "yes...fire. yes...fire", in perfect English. It was kind of of strange, but a lot of the people in the South can speak English really well but don't understand (or pretend not to) really simple sentences. By the time I got out of the shower, the fire was gone and in the morning the whole hill was black (I asked again what happened and all I got was "yes...fire").

In the morning we went on a thirty minute "speed boat" ride on the dam-made lake. It was a clear day so the hills were especially bright green from the tea farms. We grabbed some roasted corn and some fresh carrots and then headed back to town. In the afternoon we went to the national park that had panoramic views of the mountains and tea plantations. It was also a protected area for Shail's cousin, the endangered Nilgiri Tahr, or mountain goat (lowe u shail). The bus ride up the mountain to the park was pretty intense. There was barely enough room for one bus, yet they some how thought it was a good idea to go barreling up the mountain and around180 degree turns without slowing down. About three or four times the breaks were slammed, because another bus was coming down the mountain, and then, terrifyingly, the driver would just start backing up (I don't know how much he could see) and pulling to the side which was the cliff with no rail, to let the other bus by. Mom and some other aunties at one point yelped a little "Ahhhh!" and "Oh mai gohhd!!" So I got a little laugh in while my life flashed before my eyes.

We ended the day with some fresh ghee roast Dosa and chai and went to a small local Katha Kali performance in town. Katha Kali is the traditional theatre of Kerala ("story play"). So we sat down in the plastic lawn furniture in what looked like a vinyl Lowe's garage, but it was the real deal, nothing commercial about it. It was also really funny, but again sadly, my video is gone. But at the beginning, the woman character (played by a dressed up, "healthy" sized man, a picture is below) was showing the different emotions, so there would be a thud of the drum and twang of some instrument and her/his face would change from Sonesh's Bill Cosby face, to straight rakshas, to sorrow, to fear and so on ( I could not hold it in any longer and had to put my face down to chuckle). The show was good though, and I put some pictures up from the Internet so you could see what they looked like. We saw a short skit that was kind of a battle of the genders, which ended in the woman turning into a crazy rakshas and the King (the one with the really thick white make up) killing her (I don't know exactly what it was implying).

Munnar was such an amazing place to start the trip. The quiet hills were misty in the morning, bright green during the day, and a hazy orange at sunset. Houses, temples, churches, and Mosques hung off the side of cliffs with panoramic backdrops, and tea and spice gardens covered the hills. I got my first introduction to the South, which is like a different country- different cultures, languages, and people. Enlarge the one picture I have left of Munnar and you can see the tea fields a little better. Below is a picture from the plane and a quick stop we made at the birth place of Shankracharya. Here is a decent link to pictures of Munnar.