More Tea Father? Ah sure you will have a cup; go on, go on, go on

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Apologies if some of you got the email version of the last blog with the dodgy punctuation inserts. It is probably due to the terrible internet connections and ancient operating software used in the last cafe.

So our second day in Kummily started with loud animal screeching noises and the additional sound of dogs barking furiously. All this was happening on the roof of our lodge style room.

I naturally looked out to see what it was all about. What I saw was two monkies in busy in the process of making three!! The dogs were behind a fence, supposedly there to scare the monkies away from the toiurists.

We recovered ourselves from that sight and decided to see where the 10cm long orange lizard had got to overnight. We had last seen him sitting on the telephone beside our bathroom. Couldnt find him so we just went to breakfast.

Its suprising what wildlife you become used to living with and this lizard was a benign little fella who was just phoning his sister!

Ruben picked us up and took us to Abrahams Spice plantation on the outskirts of Kummily. It was lovely. There was just the two of us with our guide Krishna who is as passionate about plants as I am. We saw all teh spices you can imagine. Their flat roof top is used for sun drying coffee beans and made for some great pictures.

Kumily is on the border with Tamil Nadu and as such is a busy town. It is made even more cahotic when the Ayppa pilgrimage takes place. This pilgrimage is like a really tough Lent. For 41 days teh males must not:
Smoke
Be profane
Touch their women (ahem)
and they must make this trekking pilgrimage through the forest to a shrine in the mountains.
Waht this means is that there are literally thousands and thousands of black lunghi wearing smelly men traipsing through the border crossing to the Kerala side.
They carry their temple offerings on their heads and most have amazingly complicated temple markings slathered across their face, neck, ears and primarally their foreheads.

They seem to exst on a diet of fundalmetalism and banana chips! These chips are cheaper in Kerala than Tamil Nadu- so they stock up en route to and from the temple site. We didnt have the energy to trek through the jungle and anyway, where would we find a toilet or an ATM or a bed, for that matter.

In the afternoon we went to the nearby national park to take a 2 hr ferry ride on the lake. We knew it would be packed with Indian tourists but thought the scenery would be worth it, even if we didnt see any animals
.
Its hard to describe the riotous din that 200 excited Indians can make when they see a group of otters (which , by the way looked like little black dots), on the shore line.

Imagine then, if you can, the noise they are capable of making when a small herd of elephants is spotted in the distance. The elephants hurried, suprisingly quickly, off to the trees - obviously a bit perturbed by that very large two tier, noisy water beast.

The next day we headed for Munnar. The scenery is breathtaking and the roads amazing. Miles and miles of sculpted tree plantation landscape . As far as the eye can see on every vertical and horizontal space there are tea plants. We stopped a couple more times while Ruben explained some more facts about tea production.

Our last journey with Ruben was to take us to Kochin railway for our 9pm overnight train (12 hr) to Bangalore.

Kochin is a sweatbox. It was our second time there so knew this to be the case. When we stepped from the car after 4.5hrs down mountainside driving, the wall of heat nearly flattened us.
We went straight to the nearest western A/C hotel and had a welcome cup of tea.

The two tier train bunks were not as bad as we had imagined them to be but the A/C unit blowing into our top bunks did become a bit of a pain. John has developed a snuffle ever since.

We shared orur compartment with a lovely Indian family who were moving to Bangalore to be with their daughter. She is returning to work after having her baby. Her parents had just three small suitcases. I got into conversation with the father - his name was St Thomas - and he told me they were moving for a year! We had 4 times their luggage and we are only six weeks here.
Initally we both looked at each other when we saw we were to stay locked in a moving train carriage with a teething 3 month old.
All was fine though and John said that I made more noise than the baby!

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