Ginger Without Borders

Our time in Trivandrum had come to an end. We were now going to begin our tour of other parts of Kerala with Kingston’s folks. That tour began with catching a 6:30am train ride, but this one was only for a 4 hour journey retracing our path north back to Kochi (also known as Cochin), a Kerala spice trading center since antiquity. Kochi was not our destination (yet), it was just the starting point for our road trip into the Western Ghats. This mountain range is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of “the 36 biodeversity hot spots” in the world. The mountain range is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India and is older than the Himalayas (and to me resembled parts of the Appalachians of North Carolina).

This time, we had a paid tour driver instead of a family member. Upon our arrival at the Kochi rail statio near lunchtime, the six of us loaded our luggage onto a 16 passenger Sprinter van for what Google maps said would be a two hour drive to our hotel in Munnar.

The train had arrived a little early in Kochi so we decided to sit down to a big lunch before we left town. The driver knew a nearby road side restaurant. Indians eat with their hands (using various flat breads sort of like utensils) but I was surprised to find an entire section of the restaurant dedicated to sinks. Arranged in a box shape of parallel rows, there must have been about five sinks in four rows (or about 20 in total) for a restaurant that seated about 60 folks. There were toilets on one side of the square (no sinks in the toilets). The opposite side of the square opened into the seating area. And it was a busy place that stayed full even when we were leaving around 1:30pm, so maybe it needed that many sinks. It would be the only restaurant where we experienced a sink area that large.

The road to the mountain became two lane (see picture above) almost as soon as we left the city limits of Kochi. But the roads were fairly straight for the first hour and a half. I checked google maps on my phone and we were still not even halfway to Munnar when the elevation began to rise about 3:30pm. Fairly soon after that, the road became a twisty ribbon which gave the driver far fewer opportunities to pass slower cars. India is one of about 75 countries (mostly former parts of the British Empire but including Japan, Indonesia, and Thailand which were not) who drive on the left. Driving on the left is something I had done on other vacations. But unlike other places where I have driven on the left, Indian drivers will stop suddenly in the middle of the road or just barely pull off to discharge passengers or even packages from the trunk (boot) or simply decide that the speed limit is way too fast. The Indian custom is that the driver in the rear sounds the horn when passing the vehicle in front. Same custom when going around a blind curve (of which there are many in the mountains). Our travel involved a lot of passing slow or stopped cars and blind curves, so our driver was almost constantly sounding his horn once we got on those windy mountain roads.

About a half hour after we entered the mountains (now past 4pm), Lena suddenly sighted some monkeys running along the top of the concrete roadside barriers. With the van going one direction and the monkeys running the other, my pictures were only blurs, but we had seen more monkeys! Soon we came around a corner upon a bunch of cars pulled to the side of the road with a beautiful waterfall just off the edge of the highway. We were ready to stretch our legs (after almost 3 hours in the van), so we got out to take some photos (and hoping to maybe see another monkey). We had just completed the photos above when a light rain began. Now to this point in our Indian journey, we had only experienced sporadic bits of rainfall even though this was supposed to be the monsoon season. I figured that like previously, the rain would blow through in a few moments. But the heavens decided I needed to see a monsoon rain and they just opened up.

The rain soon began to stream down the roadway in torrents of muddy water (see photo above). The hard rain made visibility difficult and the streams of water flowing down the road slowed traffic considerably. I had thoughts that the driver might decide to stop for the rain but he continued. By 5:30 (or after about an hour), the rain slowed considerably but the dark was coming. We had been traveling for almost 12 hours at this point. I knew how tired I was, so I worried about Mom and Dawn. The road signs still said Munnar was 10 miles away when the driver suddenly pulled into the driveway of a hotel tower. We had passed several in the last 15 minutes, so I was relieved. It was around 6:15pm. Our “two hour” journey was finally over after 4 1/2 hours.

Our rooms included dinner and breakfast, but the dinner buffet did not open until 7PM, so we gathered in the bar on the open air balcony once we checked into our rooms. Built into the mountain side, the reception area was at the top of the hotel, with the balcony and restaurant above. Our rooms were all below the reception floor, so you had to remember to go down to the room and up to the restaurant. The buffet had signs indicating what each dish was, but we still needed explanations from Kingston. The restaurant also featured a giantscreen TV that played Bollywood dance sequences (not my favorite dinner music). Unfortunately, the staff were not particularly careful to refill the serving dishes once they were getting low, so, over our several days here, we had to be alert to when the rush to dinner would occur. But for our first night in Munnar, we were first into the restaurant, the food was good, and we were soon off to a well-deserved rest.