It became clear we needed to reach Kerala (the southernmost state in India) as quickly as possibly from Kodai Kanal, our hill station in Tamil Nada (bordering state), in order to fit in everything we want to do before that dreaded August 15th.
The four of us pored over train and bus timetables and thought about when to check out. We're trying, without much success, to do everything as cheaply as possible. Someone joking suggests, why don't we walk. And then after a practise trek of 5 hours to break in our hiking boots, we did. That first walk was wonderful, our guide told me everything I wanted to know about the flowers, helping me with a certain nerdy project going on in my journal, and the views were stunning. We took regular smoking breaks, never fear, and met the Indian version of Blazin' Squad (subsitute 'numerous-overdressed- irritating-loud-noise-making group of boys with attitudein their early twenties' if you haven't had the pleasure) on a jutting out piece of rock which would have otherwise been a tranquil meditation spot. Anyway, we realised that the guide was a very nice, funny man, and trustworthy, and that we were all physically capable - although me possibly not mentally capable as that first day I sat on a rock and whined about athsma attacks - of walking to Kerala, to Munnar in particular, over two days. So, we threw the Lonely Planet into the bottom of our lugagge and were content to follow one man along mountain tracks though misty cold 'natural' forest, skyscraper eucalyptus (artificial?) forest, across waterfalls, down sandy mountainside, up through small villages where we drank chai and played with schoolchildren with talc'ed faces, scrambling over boulders and past some of the craziest trees, and a tea plantation . Every ten minutes it seemed there was a new country surrounding us, the climate and vegetation and road surface changing.
We (myself, Georgia, our luggage carriers Shaun and Dan, Francis - a french man who joined us for kicks - and the guide Shaika) ate lunch on the ground on freshly cut banana leaf, the most appreciated food there's been lately.
Those two days I felt very at peace.
Until the leeches that we had given homes to when we swam in the waterfall started to swell to visible size and had to be pulled or salted off, which produced much blood and hysteria. Georgia and I managed to escape, in fact but at the time this worried us even more, thinking they must be in more hidden places than arms and legs.
That's enough for now, tomorrow we taxi to Aleppi to get a house boat for 48 hours, to punt through the backwaters and read the 15 books bought today - in the Jewish District of Kochin where as Shaun put it (and probably would prefer I didn't repeat) the shopkeepers have the wilyness of a Jew and the stubbornness of an Indian.
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