Entries from April 2009 ↓

After the visit to Bhutan last year, I was convinced that I was not going to see hills or mountains so green ever again. The hills at Munnar might lack the grandeur of the Eastern Himalayas, but when it comes to verdure and biodiversity, they are an equal match.

We took a flight from Bangalore to Cochin and then took a cab to Munnar. Though just a little over 150 km from the airport, it takes close to 4 hours to negotiate the serpentine, hilly roads. The roads were in good shape throughout but the numerous sharp turns left me reeling.

Cochin was hot and humid and I had no idea how things were supposed to get any better just under a couple of hundred kilometers up the road. But things changed remarkably fast and once we were in the hills the air turned cool and refreshing.

We stayed at the Tea Valley Resort. Our room offered beautiful views of the hills and tea plantations in the valley below. We had reached late in the afternoon and after a quick lunch, found ourselves longing for a siesta. The weather too was conspiring to put us to sleep. Shortly it started raining. The thunder and the sound of the rain formed a perfect backdrop for our slumber.

The next morning was sunny but pleasantly cool. We went for a long walk all the way to the main town – a walk that took us through tea estates and cardamom plantations.

This scale for measuring the tea plants’ height reminded me of of the an Complan ad (”But I’m growing Mummy. I’m a Complan tea plant”).

With Lok Sabha elections around the corner, the town was abuzz with political activity. Posters of candidates vied for the attention of both men and cows.

The rest of the stay is a blur in my mind. The next two days are clumped together and all I remember is more long walks in the hills, through the tea estates and short drives to a river and a waterfall nearby. The camera agrees:

When we went to Coorg two weeks ago, we already knew that it was not going to be siginficantally cooler than Bangalore. And indeed, save for an occasionally misty early morning, it was every bit as warm and sunny as Bangalore gets in March. A few distant clouds were seen rolling over the hills, but they were unorganized mutinous soldiers and not the disciplined brigade it takes to start a downpour. Yet, they did manage to tinge the sunset with a bit of color and drama that the clear blue sky of all day long could hardly have managed alone.

But what this visit stands out in our minds for is coffee blossoms. Given how unpredictable the rains have been in Coorg, a lot of coffee estate owners have taken to irrigating their plantations themselves. Since everyone follows their own schedule, there is no one day you on which you’ll see all the estates blossom. Apparently this year, it had rained just a week before our arrival and practically every single coffee plant was bedecked with beautiful white blossoms. It was our noses that pointed this out first to us – the breeze in Coorg was fragrant with the scent of coffee flowers. Our eyes took notice of the unending sea of white much later.

Now if you are thinking ‘coffee smell’ here (you know the sort you get when you brew filter coffee, or step into a Café Coffee Day/Barista/Starbucks outlet), you are mistaken! Coffee flowers don’t smell even remotely like coffee. In fact, if you were classifying the coffee plant based on the smell of its flowers alone, you’ll place it somewhere next to Jasmine. This I think makes discovery of coffee an even more remarkable feat!

Unfortunately, the blossom is short-lived. Within a day, the flowers begin to wilt and turn brown. As we drove back to Bangalore, it was hard not to feel sad at their decay. But we had the smug satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of tourists who’d throng Coorg a week later (a long weekend) would have no idea what they had missed.