Advertisement
Published: December 27th 2008
Edit Blog Post
From the boathouse, I took a public ferry through the backwater canals to Kottayam, the urban commercial hub of the backwaters, and then a bus up up up into the Western Ghats range to Kumily, the gateway to Periyar Tiger Reserve. The ferry was another opportunity to watch village life in the backwaters, which seems not unlike life in other rural villages, but the backwaters overlay the common washing-cooking-moving-about scenes with mystical quiet remote isolation, a different world.
The bus ride up the mountains to Kumily goes through rubber tree plantations, then through shady coffee, tea, and spice plantations. Rubber (like coffee) is gathered on a micro-scale, where individual families with a few trees tap then dry the milk at home, smoke it in their kitchens to give it color, and then sell it directly to the factories, where it is turned into products.
Kumily (also spelled Kumali and Kumili) is a small tourist stop-off town at the entrance to the Tiger Reserve, a place to buy tea, coffee, and spices, and to rest between various organized day trips in the Reserve (all day boat ride, nature hikes, and boat rides). The busy commercial area is concentrated to about
a half-mile stretch between 2 streets, with the homestays and residential areas on a couple of quiet rural streets. There are no street lights on the back streets, also no busses and few autos. The stretch from town to the entrance to the park is chock full of hotels and tourist shops selling the now-familiar Indian tourist
stuff. Wild jungle lurks just a few feet from the houses and commercial strip, and a very short walk past the main street leads to traditional rural life in India.
What makes Kumily so lovely is that it’s the center of the spice production area. The streets literally smell of cardamom. The altitude, temperature, and rainfall make this area ideal for growing pepper, aloe, cardamom, nutmeg, allspice, mace, vanilla (flowers must be hand-propagated before sunrise), cloves, cocoa, as well as tea and coffee. I had a tour of a small spice garden, Krishna showed me all these and others, most fascinating.
I also toured a tea plantation and factory. Trees are planted among the tea plants to provide a bit of shade for the summer, and pepper vines grow up the trees. The tea bushes are productive for 50-60 years. The
women pick the new leaves (my guide was clear that this is
womens work; men prune the bushes, and work in the factory), which are then dried, chopped up, baked, sorted, graded, and shipped off to market. For those that like tea (like me), it’s reassuring to see the simplicity of the process: nothing artificial added, and not a source of air/water pollution.
While walking off-trail on the tea plantation and enjoying warm sun (the air is significantly cooler up here than down in the backwaters and Kochi area), we came within 5 feet of a cobra, likewise enjoying the sun. It was wide-eyed, so my initial instinct was that it was not a dangerous specie, but Saneesh (my guide) had the more appropriate Indian instinct to fear all snakes, so we slowly backed away. The snake was light brown, with a pattern on its back, probably 6 feet long. As he headed in the other direction from us, he flared his hood slowly and clearly, so we could clearly see the black symbol pattern “painted” onto the back of the hood. Saneesh explained the symbol (like a curley “U”) represents god, and is a symbol that appears on
many paintings and images to represent god. Saneesh had never seen a cobra before, and swore off hiking off the trails. But he took it as good luck, as well.
Kumily is also along the Sabermali pilgrimage path, which is going on right now (takes place for 45 days, every so often, I couldn’t quite figure out the details). This is a pilgrimage that men take into the jungle, where there’s a golden temple that is purported to bring income to those who make the pilgrimage out there. Only men, and young girls and old women accompanied by men, may go to the temple. There are thousands of men in black lungis (traditional attire for men, a cloth wrapped like a sarong, often folded up in half and tucked in when it gets warm), vehicles decorated with flowers, and the hotels are chock full of pilgrims. Between them and all the holiday tourists, this place is a bit of a mad-house.
I ended up in a homestay room a bit fancier than I’m used to, with a television even! So I watched TV for the first time in India, the commercials alone were real entertainment. In addition to
the Indian CNN and BBC channels, and several movie channels, I found lots of cheesy dancing music videos.
I ran into Hazel, a woman from the UK that had been spending time to Trude and Pam in Alleppey when I met them looking for a houseboat. So we met up for dinner on Christmas Eve, treated ourselves to eggplant lasagne. Incredibly overpriced by Indian standards, and overloaded with cheese, but quite a treat.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.162s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 51; dbt: 0.1108s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb