Blogs from Munnar, Kerala, India, Asia - page 9

I have now made it to another hill station of Munnar which is not as hill as as Otty, but still it feels brisk tonight and there are people going around in hats and scafs which i find terrible amusing. I have left the lovely Anja as she has headed off North to Kashmire for some hard cord treking, but met to nice Dutch girls, who i am sharing a room with, we have booked to do a whole day of hiking, waterfall seeing, and national park roaming for the morrow. I was happy to leave Fort Kochi having spent 5 nights there it was time to move on, it is by far my favorate place, so much less hassel and relaxing, the coffee/cake shop was also really nice, and almost a Oasis in the mists ... read more

After the peace and quiet of the backwaters it was straight back into the thick of things with a relatively short bus journey North to Cochin. The buses were strangely not on time and we had to wait a while in the intense heat - then 3 came at once and typically everyone tried to get on the first one - there are just too many people in India! We made it to Fort Cochin via a brief rickshaw ride and then our cheapest trip to date - 5 rupees for a ferry across to the peninsula. Fort Cochin is a nice place with some real colonial history. The Portuguese started there then the Dutch came then the British took over and stayed until independence. Therefore Cochin has a distinct flavour and the architecture is as ... read more

Raj popped his head around the door again. This was the third time in a minute. This time he wanted to know if we had spotted the switch for the lamp with the green lightbulb in the corner of the room. Eager to ensure that we had absolutely everything we wanted Raj closed the door again. We didn’t have to peek through the curtain to know that he was lurking outside the door thinking up what else we could possibly need. The Keralan hospitality has been first class. Raj, a 28 year old business graduate who has built some tourist rooms next to his family house in the hill station of Munnar is a shining example of this. The food has been superb and al the little tours we have been on have been highly efficient. ... read more

Well we escaped paradise the other day , finally, and we ended up taking a train and jumped on a 8 hour ferry boat, that crusied the back water of India. It was unreal, the scenery was amazing, so relaxed and gorgeous, small narrow straits longed with palm trees and random cement houses, with no doors or windows, and kids waving along the side of the river like we were celebs of some sort. They were smiling and jumping into the water to get our attention,....upon further observation we noticed these smaller bamboo type huts onthe edge of the water , covered with linen clothes, and assumed they were bathrooms and this was confirmed by the indian with us, so essentially if you read closely, you would have realized the kids jumping into the water ... read more

Just a quick update. We went for another stroll through the tea plantations, visiting a tea manufacturing plant. We are now completely informed as to how tea is harvested, processed and packed. Frightfully interesting and you'll be pleased to hear that the British tea company use the lowest three grade tea for their tea bags! Perhaps more interesting are the small villages that crop up all over the plantation; the families who work for the Tea Factories are housed and the children schooled throughout the vast acres of of valleys and hills. Today being Sunday our walk was interrupted again by children asking for pens and coins (this time we were armed with sweets), but one lovely family invited us into their home, we were given tea, a lunch of vegetable curry and rice, with garlic ... read more