I have to admit I have a somewhat academic relationship with travel. I do like the idea of traveling but I don’t seem to get out much, or at least not as much as I would like to. It doesn’t help that my family and I have, well, slightly different attitudes when it comes to travel. I usually want to travel the next day, or maybe the coming weekend if I am in the mood for planning. Maybe it’s because of all those last minute business trips, or maybe it’s just me. My family on the other hand, thinks of travel from the next month onwards, or when they feels spontaneous, the next weekend. From time to time, we hit the sweet spot of immediacy and planning that works for both of us, and manage to get out. This time though plans were being set in motion, months in advance.
For some time, we had been thinking about taking a road trip to a place where we could see nature and get away from the madding crowd and their frenzied pursuits. You know that feeling when you are watching Planet Earth or some other program about nature and travel, and you think, “if that is planet earth, what planet am I on?” With so much budding desire to reaffirm our earthling-ness, when another family asked us if we could accompany them to Munnar, we agreed immediately. We had spent time together as families earlier, and had enjoyed the company of one another. So that was something nice to look forward to.
Munnar is a hill station in Kerala, located about 1600 metres above mean sea level, in the portion of the Western Ghats that lie south of the Palakkad Gap. Like many places in India its spelling does not tell you quite exactly how it should be pronounced. As we learned later after hearing the locals say it, it’s pronounced “moon-aar” and it means “The Land of Three Rivers” in Malayalam . It was clear this was going to be a road trip given that actually getting to Munnar required some amount of driving no matter how you approached the place. And then we hit the Ghat Section ….. to be continued next month ….
By Jobin Joseph
Thks mr tom ❤️❤️