Sweet and Sour Kerala Trip Part 2 – Beautiful Munnar

I know that it has been a long since I wrote the first part, so for those who read it but forget and those who missed it, here is the link to the first part of the tour about visiting Kochi.

After spending a day and a night in Kochi, we headed towards Munnar, one of the most popular and beautiful hill stations of India. We left Kochi at around 5:00 am and soon we were on Kochi Munnar Road. It was raining that day making surroundings and weather very beautiful and enroute I was thinking if it so lovely here how it would be in Munnar. We took our first halt for breakfast of famous Appam and Egg Curry and Aloo Poori with filtered coffee…ahhhh that divine taste of filter coffee…

Our next stop on the way was Cheeyappara Falls, a very famous and fascinating place. The sound of water falling down the cascaded hill is surely a treat to ears. We clicked few pictures here and resumed the journey.

One comes across many spice plantations on way to Munnar. With an urge to see how spices and herbs are grown, we stopped at Hindustan Spice Garden. The lady guide very expertly showed and described gardening and planting of each and every spice and herb being grown in the plantation. Most of the spices being grown were what we use in our daily cooking and it was quite interesting to know about them. The variety of spices and herbs included cardamoms, oregano, turmeric, black pepper(it is surprising to know how green bulbs of pepper are dried and turned into black pepper), coffee, cocoa, cinnamon, bay leaf etc. etc.

We reached Munnar in the afternoon and realized the city was full of tourists and vehicles due to which it was difficult to reach first sightseeing spot Mattupetty Dam as the road was jam blocked. My tip: ‘Avoid to visit a tourist place on long holiday weekends’. So we decided to take another road and visit Ernakulam National Park, which we regret visiting later. Read on to know how.

In order to visit the Park, one has to park their vehicles near the ticket counter as only Park mini buses are allowed to take you to inside and you almost faint to see the long waiting line to buy the entry ticket. It sounds unbelievable that we had to wait for 2 hours in queue to reach the ticket counter. The mini bus operated by park autorities came as a ray of sunlight in darkness. We boarded the bus with big hopes to visit mighty Nilgiri Hills, the home of Nilgiri Tahr(an endangered species of wild goat and state animal of Tamil Nadu) and a lucky sight to Neelakurunji (a rare flower that blooms after a span of every 12 years). The serpentile road to the top of the National park was surrounded with beautiful tea gardens which looked liked green velvet carpets, hills were covered with mist making views more scenic and soothing to eyes. The mini bus dropped us at a point from where you can take a stroll towards hill top. The weather was quite cool at that height.

Well neither we spot any Tahr nor any Neelakurunji flower. We came back to the parking point with a little disappointment of expecting more than actually what it was. A two hours wait for ticket seemed worthless to us. We were very tired by the time we reached back to the taxi and as it was going to rain anytime we decided to check into hotel and visit other places later. As we had every booking under package, we had no idea that we will be staying in a place far away from the main city. We had a booking in Springdale Resort, Devikulam, Munnar and we realized that we had really made a mistake by booking package from that company (I won’t reveal their name but I will always curse them for spoiling our tour). The height of frustration was when we could not communicate properly with our driver about where he was taking us and which spots we should see or not. He was a totally dumb person.

Cinnamon Tree and its leaves are Bay Leaves[/caption]

Anyways, we checked in the resort which is a heritage resort located around 10 kms far from Munnar. Being far away from city we dropped the idea of sightseeing and market visit and decided to stay in the resort only for rest of the day. I missed pucrhasing famous Munnar chocolates and specialities. The room had an old style bed and very old style television set which took 15 min to get started. The most funny part of the so called heritage resort was there was no water jet facility in the commod. Use your imagination here  how would you have used that toilet without water jet. Upon asking manager, we were told this style is kept to preserve the heritage. Very funny!!! We tried to forget everything and enjoy the stay but the dinner we were served acted like salt on wounds. Pathetic, I must say.

Let me tell you the most interesting worst part now. As we woke up next day we realized we had forgot our bag having shoes of three of us, in the taxi last day. We would have ignored it if the cost of all shoes was not Rs 5000. A big loss  and another mood spoiler. We were kind of blocked as there were no phone signals except BSNL, the driver who dropped us had left for celebrating Eid and some other driver had to serve us for next day, we did not have his phone number, tour manager’s phone was out of network. We found ourselves stuck in a stranded place. Resort Manager tried but could not help us. With a spoiled mood we asked him to arrange a taxi back to Kochi which also cost us extra. We were not in a mood of going anywhere but back to our home. Suddenly on our way back, we received the call from the tour Manager and started scolding him for ruining our tour and asked him to return our shoes packet. We broke the rest of the deal with him and Thank God we hadn’t paid him all money in advance. Well, all that ends well is well. We checked in at a hotel near airport at Kochi and waited for his driver to deliver the packet so that we could then plan forward to our next and most awaited destination Allapuzzha or Alleppey, the Venice of India.

Stay tuned till next post.