Snakes from the temple wall at Belur

The Honeymoon Trail Part 2: Periyar The following day we went to Thekkadi and the Periyar nature reserve in the mountains. The drive was very long for Mike who found travelling in India by car quite tough, but I enjoyed it a lot. As we got higher into the mountains we left behind the palms and bananas, then the rubber tree and coffee plantations and the landscape became almost Pyrennean for a while. We stopped for tea at a roadside cafe which was completely isolated with a precipice on one side and a cliff on the other. Everything in it and everything it was made of seemed old and greasy including the tea itself. A few kids were hanging around inside watching television on a black and white set. At an even higher altitude we found vast areas covered with tea plantations. The hotel we stayed in at Thekkadi was called the Spice Village and was one of the nicest places we stayed in. It has little thatched cottages set in a large garden filled with different kinds of spices. Mike liked it so much that he wished we were staying several days just to relax by the swimming pool and eat pakoras with real curry leaves in them. In the evening we sat in the outdoor restaurant and enjoyed the buffet while watching the classical dance show. The two dancers seemed to be local teenagers and were accompanied by an older woman who watched them and helped them change their very complicated costumes. The dances were extremely energetic and seemed to have a humorous and possibly a narrative side. These types of dances were originally performed in temples and palaces. Access to the nature reserve is quite limited which is of course a good thing for the animals. The main attraction is an evening boat ride on Periyar lake. Fortunately this was reserved and arranged for us by our hotel well in advance since there seemed to be rather more people trying to get on boats than there were places. Eventually we all set off in a strange flotilla of old fashioned boats of assorted shapes and sizes. These boats all leaked quite a bit and the bilge water had to removed with a hand pump which kept two men occupied almost constantly. They also left a visible trail of petrol slick behind them on the lake. The reserve seen from the lake is really very beautiful with its forested rolling hills and open pastures close to the water edge. Since the lake was created artificially tree trunks can be seen rising up all over in the water and these make a favourite perch for birds. To see such a huge area with no human habitation was very restful after a couple of weeks in Nepal and India. The boat ride would have been well worth it even if we had seen no animals but in fact we saw a monkey, several deer and wild boar and even one elephant in the distance. In the morning we got up very early to go "jungle trekking", which is Indian for a stroll through the woods. You have to do this with a forest ranger, and it would be fairly hard to find your way without one. We walked along leafy trails in the thick woods that occasionally opened out into big prairies with water holes which could theoretically be a good place to see large animals, though we saw none. We did see lots of signs of animals such as tracks in the mud, elephant 'spores' and things but unfortunately our ranger was not very interested in explaining these smaller clues to forest life. At one point Mike asked him the name of a very large tree, and the ranger thought he was asking about some damage on the trunk. It turned out that these were scrapes made by elephant tusks. The largest things we saw were termite mounds which look like piles of leaf litter and are taller than a human. All this time, since we were in Nepal, Mike had been very curious to see a leech and it was not long before his desire was satisfied. When we stopped for a rest we found these disgusting creatures all over our shoes and the lower part of our trousers. They have this horrible way of squirming about and burrowing down between your shoe laces. At the time I didn't think I had been bitten by any but later I found a strange circular bruise on my leg. A guy in Kottayam told me this was a leech bite and showed me his arm which was covered in them. The Honeymoon Trail continued... Back to travelogue contents