People say a picture speaks a thousand words. In today's uncertain times,these pictures remind us of the happier times , they remind us to have hope and faith and believe that this time too shall pass. Also, looking at the pictures gave me the chance to write about our trip to Munnar. so here is my experience of travelling to Munnar.
Munnar has been on my wishlist ever since the song " Kashmir main Tu Kanyakumari" from Chennai Express. Although i have seen tea gardens in Ooty, the beauty of the tea gardens in Munnar looked so different and serene. We were planning to drive down to either Goa or Munnar in November and finally decided on Munnar since the roads to Goa were under construction.
The plan was to leave early in the morning ( Nov14th) from Bangalore and drive the 480 km with a few breaks in between.
One day when I was looking up some munnar travelogues I found a hotel that looked beautiful, "Hotel Amberdale". I quickly checked the reviews and booked it for 4 nights. The hotel is situated inside a tea estate and looked serene with beautiful views from the Balcony.
With all bookings in place, we started our trip from home in Bangalore at around 5:30 in the morning. Start this early would mean that we would reach the hotel around 2 in the afternoon, right in time for lunch. Little did we know, how wrong this assumption was.
We generally stop at Shri Krishna Inn on the way to Salem, but on this morning the hotel was just so crowded that we had no place to sit, hence decided to go ahead and find a new place to eat. We finally found a newly opened Adyar Anand Bhavan and had our breakfast there. As the events of the day unfolded, this turned out to be a good choice since the food was good and we ended up having a heavy breakfast.
We then continued our drive towards munnar and passed through two natinal parks and sanctuaries with zero sightings. At every border crossing and entry into these parks you need to enter your car number, drivers name and number of passengers into a register. The only problem with these national parks that I found was the the roads were narrow and wore an extremely deserted look. My earlier experience was driving through the Bandipur national park which is comparatively busy and had regular vehicular movement.
As we crossed into the Chinnar wildlife sanctuary at one turn you see the Athirapally water falls at a distance. This sight was a treat to our eyes but also the fact that we were completely alone in the forest was a little unnerving.
We crossed the national parks and were about an hour away from Munnar and everything was as per schedule. We would reach the hotel around 2:30, in time for lunch. Alas, the delays started from here. Apparently the roads were being laid and so the traffic was stopped for close to 45-60 mins for the road relay work to be done. Although there was a delay what was amazing to see is the work that used to take days years ago now is done in an hour. I remember the time when relaying of the roads was a tedious process, which used to take close to 3-4 days.
After about a 45-60 min wait here, we continued on our journey, to be stopped again for about 20 mins. As we reached Munnar though, the beautiful tea gardens and the scenery enroute were mesmerizing.
We finally reached the hotel at 4 and realized lunch timings were over. We checked in to the hotel and were finally taken to our room. The "Ananta" room that we had booked was beautiful. The rooms at the hotel are maintained amazingly well.
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| Room view -1 |
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| Room view 2 |
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| View from the Balcony |
After lunch we just relaxed in the room and try to figure out the plan for tomorrow. The hotel turned out to be one of the most beautiful hotels we have stayed in and had extremely friendly staff. We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel and called it a day.
Day 2: Munnar.
We woke up in the morning to a beautiful sunrise. The hotel actually has a balcony where complimentary tea is served if you are watching the sunrise from there. We however decided to watch it from our own balcony.
Breakfast was complimentary and after it I just checked with the hotel travel desk to get information on the best tourist places. They gave us a map and also options to take the hotel taxi to go to these places at an additional cost. Since we had driven a long way the day before we decided to take the taxi for a day tour. There are 4 directions with different tourist places to see. We decided to do the Mattupetty direction. The other 3 are Coimbatore, Kochi and Thekkady.
We started around 10 in the morning towards the Mattupetty direction. Our driver was a local guy but spoke really good english. Our first stop was a point called the "Shooting Point". The is just a view point where you see acres and acres of beautiful tea gardens.
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| Shooting Point |
Second stop was just on the way to the elephant safari. The point was called Jungle Honey bee tree. Truth be told, i was little skeptical about this since i thought they would show us some bees, it just ended up being one tree on the road which has a lot of bee hives. We moved on to the Elephant Safari. We were already told that the Safari was closed, which we were fine with. We just wanted to go see the Elephants up close. For Rs 100, they allowed us to feed a pineapple to the elephant. Feeding the elephant was one of the most amazing experiences i had in my life. It was just amazing to see the creature up close. It was also heartening to see that they were fed well and being taken care of very well.
Fourth stop was to go to a flower garden. The garden was small but beautiful. If you have seen "Sims park" in Coonoor or "Botanical Gardens" in Ooty you can just ignore this. The only advantage was that there were hardly any people here and hence the crowd was minimal.
We then went to the Kundala Dam and Lake. This lake was just filled with people boating and walking around. The best part of taking the taxi instead of our own car was that we could relax and take in the scenery and also that the driver was such an intelligent guy. He kept telling us interesting things like where "Chennai Express" was shot and a few other movies.
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| Kundala lake |
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| Kundala dam |
We skipped the Echo point since it was super crowded and went on to go to Top station. On our way the driver told us that he spotted an elephant in the tea estate some time ago and hoped that it would still be there. We are fortunate enough to spot not just one but three elephants in two different locations.
The sight of the elephants within the tea estate was an surprising and amazing sight. We continued on our way at to go to Top station. The road to Top station is filled with beautiful tea estates and every corner we turned was picturesque. We kept clicking pictures all the way to the Top station.
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| On our way to Top station. |
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| View from below top station |
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| Top station. |
Top station was super crowded and unfortunately completely engulfed in fog. We had a quick lunch here of Maggi and Mirchi bhajji. We left for our hotel right after lunch. On the way back we went to Mattupetty dam and as we had on Kundala dam we drove over the dam and reached the hotel around 5 in the evening. Diner was at the hotel again.
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| Sunset from the Balcony |
Day 3: Munnar
We woke up to a beautiful sunrise and decided to go to nearby places today. We decided to see only two places today, Attukad water falls and Pothamedu view point. The places were about 5-6 kms from the hotel and so we decided to take our own car.
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| Sunrise from the Balcony |
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Panorama view from the balcony
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After the complimentary breakfast, we left to see the Attukad waterfalls. The waterfalls were in full force and it was a beautiful sight to see.
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| Attukad waterfalls in full flow from the road |
After spending some time on the bridge overlooking the falls, we decided to go to the Pothamedu view point. Google maps showed us a short cut to get to the view point from the water falls, but we decided to go back to the main road from where we had taken a diversion for the falls and continued on the main road to the view point
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| Pothamedu View point |
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| Our hotel as seen from the view point. |
We reached the hotel in a few hours and as usual had our lunch at the hotel restaurant. We decided to relax that afternoon and catch up on some lost sleep. In the evenings, the hotel arranged to have a cooking class with one of their chefs and it was great experience to learn some local cuisine from him. We ended the day with dinner at the restaurant. The food at the restaurant was quite good and hence on the first day we had decided we would eat at the restaurant whenever possible.
Day 4: Munnar
Today was our last day in Munnar and we tried to get tickets to Eravikulam National park to see the Nilgiri Thars but there were no tickets available. We did however get tickets to go see a traditional Kalaripayattu show in the evening. Since the show would only finish by 8:30 we decided to take a taxi from the hotel again. The show was supposed to start in the evening so we decided to go to the Tea museum in the morning. We thought we might not enjoy it so much but on the contrary this place was very fun and informative. They had a small documentary running which gives a brief history on how tea plantations started in India and specifically in Kerala. After the documentary, we toured the museum and learnt how tea is made in the factory. Also, there is a place where we can do some tea tasting.
We came back to the hotel for lunch and relaxed for a while before the show in the evening. before leaving for the show, the hotel informed us that the dinner in the night was complimentary and will be ready by the time we get back from the show. We took the taxi to the show venue and collected our tickets. The show was amazing. We could definitely see how martial arts evolved from our own age old Kalaripayattu.
The complimentary dinner that night was their dinner buffet and the food was very tasty. We decided to leave early next morning and asked them to pack some breakfast for us for the trip back home.
Day 5: Munnar-Bangalore
We started around 6:30 in the morning and reached bangalore around 3-3:30 in the afternoon. The journey back home was uneventful and went off smoothly. Munnar that was almost always on my travel list can now be checked off.
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| Sun rise from the balcony on the last day |
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| Foggy munnar while we were leaving |
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| Tea gardens on the way back to Bangalore |
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| Foggy roads |
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| Welcome Back to Karnataka. |
This trip was all that i had imagined it to be, only difference being i never knew the roads were so bad. Road quality once you go off the national highway near coimbatore just deteriorates. Hopefully the roads get better soon. I would love to go back to Munnar anytime of the year but I am sure there are many many more places in India for us to see. So long, until we meet again for another travelogue.
