Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Sooo...a drive of about 5 hours and we were up in the hilly bits again watching tea pickers at work on our way to Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. Having seen a leopard's behind in Sri Lanka we felt old hands at this game. The driver (Sanjeev - nice chap) said we should look at our hotel room first..we should have listened to his advice. Basically two hours later and we had checked out of our second consecutive hotel and left with much finger wagging and telling off unhelpful staff. No info, no clue and a wild goose chase to find out anything at all. All we saw were a few monkeys harrasing tourist coaches.
two English girls had tipped us off about "Claus garden" in Kumily so we headed there for a nice welcome from german ex-pat Claus and his Indian wife. All good, we were coralled into a trip with an Aussie family, American excahnge student and two more German travellers to se Claus's mate, harry and his farm....Well a monsoon, six leech attacks later (Nic got bitten - lots of blood like a gunshot, very messy but no harm done)we found Harry in his splendid isolation having left Germany 16 years ago never to return..somethiong about harry was a touch Conradian as in "Heart of Darkness" I could imagine martin Sheen being despatched to "terminate with extreme prejudice"...Harry was very clever, selling coffe to Germany, making cow dung into bio fuel, running ebay sales etc but rather a strange existence.
From Kumily it was on the houseboat at Allepey......lovely scenery but we got the boat with the learner driver (literally) and thus we were overwhelmed with crew as driver had instructor, instructor had Captain all standing around while we were supposed to be having some sort of idyllic moemnt on the backwaters. Never mind. We were looking forward to getting from the boat to Varkala for a bit of beach life afterwards.
- comments