Munnar Part 2

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After two hours of weaving through tea fields, crossing a mini-waterfall, taking a small and casual spill, and coaching my roommate through her first wilderness "urine passing" my rommate Alia and I made it back to a hotel in Munnar where we planned to camp out and write letters while we waited for our two travel companions to meet us for dinner. It was 8:30 when the other two students, Dan and George, finally came through the restaurant door. Curiously, they were wearing swimming trunks and one look at their legs told us why. Leeches!! It looked like their legs were covered with bullet holes where the leeches had attached, and these holes were gushing streams of blood down their legs. We ushered them into our booth quickly before the other patrons in the restaurant glanced over and lost their appetites. They told us about their extended journey over dinner which took them to the highest peak in Munnar and sounded incredible, however there was definitely a part of me that was glad to have missed out on the view in exchange for not fainting from blood loss. . .

The owner of our cottage was a great resource to have while exploring Munnar. He knew all of the mountain trails and where to find the most beautiful waterfalls. It turned out, however, that he wasnt the greatest resource when it came to transportation back to Thiruvananthapuram. We figured this out at the bus station when we realized that the bus he had told us to catch didnt exist and every other bus didnt come as frequently as he had said. We had planned to take a bus from Munnar to Kochi, then take a train from Kochi to Trivandrum. At the bus station we realized that our only real options were to take a bus from Munnar to Kothamangalam then from Kothamangalam to Kochi then a train to Trivandrum or take a bus all the way from Munnar to Trivandrum which would be about 10 hrs. We decided on the first option and boarded our first public-extened-ride bus . . . in the mountains.

I have been known to become a little white knuckled when traveling around tight corners in an SUV. I dont think this will ever happen again. The bus ride was literally like being on a rollercoaster. My roommate and I clutched each other as we sped around the mountain corners and squeezed past other vehicles on the road, it was awesome and terrifying at the same time. We werent the only ones who noticed the stomach turning ride. Before long the woman in the seat behind us got sick and needed to vomit out the side of the bus, only her window didnt open. This meant that for the rest of the ride, she would lean over the seat next to me and vomit out our window. I was grateful that I wasnt feeling sick because otherwise I might have joined her, and I was luckily able to tune most of it out. This became a bit more difficult when halfway through the ride, the girl in the seat in front of us also got sick. This meant that Alia and I were sandwiched between vomiting travelers. The windows next to us were covered with puke and some of it definitely got on our jackets and back-packs. Eventually the vomiting became sort of rythmic and I was (thankfully) able to tune most of it out while being amused by the situation and feeling a lot of sympathy for my fellow sick travelers.

We finally made it to Kochi where we found that there werent any more trains going to Trivandrum, so we boarded yet another bus . I was confident that this bus ride wouldnt't be like the last because we werent traveling through mountains and the buses were named things like "Super Fast" and "Great Vehicle". I was right, and after a long but vomitless ride, we made it back to Trivandrum around 1am. Once back at the program house, I was surprised by a letter from a love and a loving mother which I of course had to read even though I was dead tired. A perfect end to an amazing weekend.

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