Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary

We left Kochi early on Tuesday morning, to begin the long drive to Periyar. We had been told the journey time was approximately 5 hours, and as soon as we climbed into the Ambassadors back seat, I suspected I would have an uncomfortable trip. The ceiling of the car was too low, or from another perspective, my head was too tall. I managed to rotate my position between various slouches, to shuffle the uncomfortableness around amoung my neck, shoulders, back and legs.

Once we had driven for a few hours, we found our selves at the foot of the western ghats mountain range, and from then on, the incredible vistas from both sides of the car, and on every turn offered some relief from the above mentiond Ambassador Shuffle. It was stunning. We drove past some coffee and rubber plantations before cresting the top of the range, and descending the otherside to find tea plantation after tea plantation. I imagined men in white suits coming there by helicopter direct from Tetleys head office to tell them they would take the lot, and at half the price.

Periyar National Park is set within a town called Kumily, and we got to the main gate of the park, to find out where our booked accomodation was. We had called (many times, and after much fun and games with the indian phone systems) to arrange a forest cottage inside the sanctury, to find that it was actually a bamboo hut about a few miles away from the park. As seems to be the theme of this trip, we changed our plan, and decided to go into the park and check into the "Lake Palace". The king of Kerala had built this serene palace as a place for him to stay when visiting the park. You cannot get there by car. You need to go down to the dock where the tour boats leave from, and get a 20min boat across lake.

On arrival, we could tell we had made the right
choice. Here you really are in the wild, with animals roaming the nearby banks of the lake. However you are also in the luxury of a palace, so we were most happy. That was until I called the eco-tourism center to find out the plan for tomorrows tiger trail trek. Turns out we needed to go and collect the tickets that afternoon, from kumily! About 6km away ( which is where the nearest car horn was! So peaceful). So, it was 3pm, we needed to get to the ticket office by 5.30pm, but that didn't matter, because the last boat across the lake was at 4pm!

So, much stressing later, we arranged a later boat back, and headed for the mainland by boat, then an autorik into kumily to get the tickets, then back to the park dock, where we waited 40mins for a boat back, reaching our hotel room around 5.30pm. Phew.

The room was very nice, but the shower was rubbish. Shame. Also, we shared our room with a family of 3 geckos, who proved to be nice and photogenic. There had been dozens of them hanging around one of the ceiling lights while we ate dinner, and we were not sure why that was such an attractive spot for them. That was until hundreds of moths, flys and bugs decended on the light, and it was an all you can eat buffet for the geckos!

We both slept a little restlessly, and had weird dreams. We both blame the indian food. In the last 48 hours, Kevin Spacey had starred in both of our dreams, and that's a bit creepy. Wonder if he dreamt of us... In the morning we were awoken by a loud banging, I did a time check. It was 5.30am. This had better be good.

I opened the door and presented my shirtless and trouserless self to one of the hotel staff. He told me desperately that there were Elephants on the bank opposite! We dressed fast, grabbed the camera and tripod and dashed out A mother and her child elephant were plodding along the bank a few hundred meters away. Got a few shots eventually and was glad to. Turned out to be the only elephants we saw in the wild.

We had an early start anyway, so washed under a warm dribble, and had breakfast to get the boat at 7.30am. We walked to the start of the tiger trail trek, and were kitted out with water proofs and leech gaters. While we were there steph got some great shots of a giant squirrel (the name is not strictly deserved. "fairly big squirrel" would probably cut it) and some shots of a black monkey.

The trek began, and our guide, and guard lead us through a thick jungle. Leeches were every where, and we had to keep topping up our shoes and legs with tabacco powder which kills them in a few seconds. Steph LOVES leeches by the way. Ha ha ha. We were being shown plants, trees and the odd animal. We walked right past a big group of samba deer (the biggest deer in the world), and we were told how much sandel wood was worth. I think they were saying 80 quid a kilo, but not too sure.

Turns out the people that guide and run the treks are all ex-sandel wood smugglers, who are part of the conservation/rehab program. We walked for a good hour, and then got on a bamboo raft across part of the lake. Not long after reaching the other side we checked out the leech situation, and the gaters had been doing their job, and gathering dozens of leeches.

At this point, Steph decided that sleeping in the jungle that night might not be as much fun as she thought, what with all the insects, leeches and wild chickens that could attack us. So, after some confusion and much repetition, we changed our overnight trek into a one day trek. We walked on to the campsite to have lunch. Well, we thought it was lunch, turned out to be a snack, and we jumped into a rowing boat to be rowed out to see the dam at one end of the lake. Pretty big lake I should mention, about 25 sq km.

On the row about, we saw more deer, some boar and many birds. All got photographed. It was not sunny, and was raining lightly most the day, however, being on a lake apparently gives you instant sunburn, and on the way back I found myself to be very very red all over. Ouch.

We had lunch again at the campsite, the ever popular Thali. Then started to trek back. It was raining more heavily now, and by the time we got back to the main park, we were soaked through. We dripped our way to the other hotel and soggied their reception area while asking for a room. Thankfully, the room was clean and the shower was great! We chilled out, checked every where for leeches, ate some dinner and slept.

We had planned to do an elephant ride the next day, and by about 9.30am, we were in an autorik bound for elephant junction. Not only did we not end up at the correct elephant ride place, but we realised that it was not going to be as great as we thought. We tried to explain that we wanted to go to this other place, but it was getting too painful to argue, so we stayed. The elephant was on its own, chained up. Not nice. The elephant trainer unchained the elephant, but left its back legs shackled together so it couldn't break into a sprint I imagine. He whipped at his legs to manuaver it about so we could sit on top. Neither of us wanted to see that, and both wanted to take the elephant to the nature sanctuary and set it free so it didn't need to be treated like that.

Sufficed to say, the ride was also not that great. We toured a little trak just off a main road, then looped round a building site and back again. Nice. We had to watch him drag a log around before making our excuses and leaving in a taxi for Munnar, our next stop. Unfortunately it left us a bit disappointed in the morning, but the drive was going to be another series of great views of mountains, so not all bad.