Kerala Bhraman- Spices, Tea and Chocolates

To catch up on our first day in Munnar, climb up to the cottage and join us, in Kerala Bhraman- The Theater Of Tea Plants.


Morning in Munnar. The night before was a drowsy one which was filled with the constant groaning of the trees as the breeze loaded its branches. In the morning, outside, there was light. The floating tortoise (Gundumally) stood frozen at its place, gawking at the puny cottage people seeming amazed by the hills around them.

View from the cottage

“What’s so new about it?” It wondered in silence.

Definitely, nothing was new. We had seen the same green scarf clad hills the previous day and it had rained all day. It would probably rain today as well. But, we wanted to pour into ourselves, each and every bit of the beauty of Munnar, imagining that this is what heaven looks like. Heaven and the court of the gods.

The usual drapery of white clouds returned and it rained. We watched the rain drops tapping on the window panes while having tea. With the last sip, we removed the last bit of the last night’s sleep and asked the cook to serve breakfast.

We were going to try out Appam with chicken stew for breakfast and mama was sure that we would lick our fingers in the end.

Indeed we did. It took ten minutes barely to clean my plate of Appam. The light and succulent chicken stew had won our hearts and the recipe was immediately in demand.  
  

Appam and chicken stew

      

Outside, tea pickers in uniform walked on the shimmering road by the garden; the duty was on the verge of beginning. The tea gardens were so steep we wondered how the tea pickers kept themselves from tumbling. It was a tough job.

The park around the house was embellished by an array of flowers, all drenched and nodding with the rain. As if in staunch agreement to whatever was told to them.

Thekkady wouldn’t have been complete without its rainforest, Varkala wouldn’t have been complete without its picturesque beach and its fables, Munnar wouldn’t certainly be complete without the shops in the main city market selling tea and spices.

We had decided that we would visit the market that day. After our customary tour to our respective bathrooms, we were off in our white Innova.

As we descended the hill, my mother was intent on sighting elephants and stayed on her window seat, skimming through each shrub and garden we passed. The stark watchmen of the tea gardens didn’t flinch when the rain drops fell on them and stood still with their crescent branches stretched upwards.

Jishnu

Mama had called shotgun and was doing a better job than me; he wasn’t sleeping. In fact he wasn’t letting Jishnu (our driver) sleep either. He kept him awake with his constant questions about stuffs in Munnar and Kerala all together.

And when mama would go silent, Jishnu would put on his earphones and talk to someone on his phone. Constantly guffawing. Probably joking about the crazy family he was driving around Munnar.  

He joked on the phone while we joked among ourselves. Neither understanding the other’s language.

Mattupetty Dam

Before going to the market, we hit the Mattupetty Dam. We got down at the tourist market where they were selling fancy hats and umbrellas. It was drizzling as we walked to the bridge over the dam and looked at the lake below us. Several men and women had flocked at the bank and were waiting for their turn for boating, pouring the depths of the lake with their usual pouts and duck faces.

Men gave horse rides at the market. Boys wearing bandannas rode the buffy brown horses as the horse boy followed and the friends clicked pictures of their mate.

The day wanted some time alone with the lake and was utterly disappointed of the invasion of the tourists. The rain fell harder in response and people started running for cover.

We decided to move back as well. As far as pictures went, we had clicked to our fill.

The Kanan Devan Hills Plantation outlet was bustling with the daily crowd of tea and spice lovers. The walls of the shop were adorned with the glimpses from the past of the company; all black and white. Of course, none of the attention was focused on the stills. That was one side of the outlet. Completely barren save the pastry counter.

Life began abruptly on the other side. Families, friends, groups of tourists and localites had gathered at the long spice, tea, coffee and chocolate counter. Leaving little or no place for someone else to get in.

I was summoned to choose the chocolates which I would like to take back to Dehradun.

“What’s there to choose? Chocolates are chocolates!” I thought.

Inside the KDHP outlet

I would soon be proved wrong when the shopkeeper would place on the counter before me the following boxes- coffee chocolate, orange chocolate, tea chocolate, spicy chocolate, white chocolate, bitter chocolate and what not.  

The chocolates

  

After much introspection, I picked up the spicy one. It would be fun to watch the look on my friends’ faces when they would take a bite of those.

The shelves behind the shopkeepers were stuffed with all kinds of Munnar tea and coffee. Green tea, Oolong and lots more. 

After leaving the outlet, we stopped at a nearby shop to buy some homemade chocolate and chips for snacks. There was one shop that was selling tiny exotic wooden massaging devices apart from nuts, spices, chips and oils.

Once again, we drove up hill, braving the pebble like rain drops pelting on the windshield of the Innova. We had forgotten what sunlight felt like in Munnar.

Back in the holiday home, we had lunch and retired to the common room reading and snoring.

Mama and baba went on to play a game of carom in the adjoining library.

Munnar city

On the other end of the library was a door to another room. From behind the shut door came the constant guffawing of Jishnu and the butler and the cook.

Probably joking about the crazy family.

    

The clouds had shut the  house from the outside world. The trees bent due to the weight of the breeze and the creaking sound sent shivers down our spine.

There was no electricity but there was enough diffused sunlight in the room and it was pretty cool as well.

At night, the generator roared again and the tiny spot in the somber Munnar hills was incandescent.

Sleep lay upon us like a sheath and after dinner, we crept beneath the comforting blankets. Silently, sleep closed our eyes and we dropped into a deep rabbit hole.

Some time at night the generator stopped blaring and only the wind blew.

We didn’t do much the next day. It rained and it never stopped raining for the remainder of the day. 

Jishnu asked us if we wanted to go and watch a Kathakali dance performance in the city or a display of the popular Keralite martial art. But we declined and stayed up in the hill instead.

I peeped at Gundumally from the common room window when the clouds cleared for some time.

On that word-less day, in the quiet room, there was nothing to do to kill time. The book that I had brought with me turned out to be a total bore so I put it away and slipped into my usual reverie.

I saw myself floating in the sky, flying over the enormous green tortoise. Then over a temple and the tiny Lego dwellings before settling on a traipsing patch of cloud. From where I was, our cottage was a distant spot slowly getting behind the clouds. The lofty trees swaying like colossal fans fanning the throne of a cottage.

Such a fine sight! Should I ever return to myself, siting in the cottage’s common room; amidst the four walls?  

Or should I stay back and enjoy the view.

Alas, like all other thoughts this too vanished in a snap. “Not now brother!”

Of all the nights we had spent till now, the last nights were dreadful. Questions which hadn’t bothered us up till now popped up immediately.

“Why does time fly so fast?”

“Will we return to Munnar?”

“Do we really have to leave?”    

 Answers to which were truly unfathomable.

That night seemed much shorter. So much where we accustomed to the routinely blare of the generator, that we never noticed when did it stop. The only thing that came crashing back in a much eminent form was the orchestra of the night. It played a slow and a melancholic farewell song and dissolved into the darkness of the night just like every other time.   

Kerala Bhraman- The Theater Of Tea Plants

The jungle walk was an invigorating experience! Did you miss it? Walk back to Kerala Bhraman- The Trail Of The Elephants.

The morning began with footsteps frantically moving across the suite on the first floor of Aranya Nivas. Between stuffing belongings into our suitcases and getting dressed, we shot glances at the wall clock to keep track of the time. Any moment now.

Aranya Nivas gate

We had had a quick breakfast of fresh cut fruits and cereals in the morning and were trying to keep up with the schedule for the day. 

As the bell boy carried our luggage down to the lobby, we proceeded to do the final formalities at the reception. An Innova was parked out front and a tall, slender young man in white hopped out of it and skipped into the hotel lobby. Jishnu who was going to be our driver for the remainder of our trip greeted my father and paced for the luggage. Within moments, he was stuffing our suitcases into the trunk of the car.

The lounge adjacent to the entrance of the hotel had the company of a family who was being entertained by a documentary being played on a loop on a television. It depicted the year round transformation of Thekkady and flaunted the abundance of its flora and fauna; it simply supplemented my jungle excursion the previous day.

We boarded the Innova- our companion for the next few days and it quickly left the driveway and out of the resort compound.

The bustling parking lot and the giant turtle model invited us at the mouth of the wicket gate. It took some time to cut through the crowd of eager tourists who seemed to be getting lured to the stunning aura of Thekkady.

Jishnu would slow down every now and then near some tourist spot; an elephant orphanage, elephant ride, and safari. “Sir, would you like to drop by?” he would ask, his bead-like eyes searching the sign boards and his hands on the wheel.

But, it was necessary to reach our destination first lest we were late so we refused to stop.

The Kumily town was for some reason still wrapped in the same spicy mist which had been present two days ago when we had arrived. It felt like some sort of a magnetic field, the sort which would try to suck a weary traveler into the sanctuary of the sumptuous evergreen forest.

It was only when the cityscape began to disappear that we sensed that the field had vanished.

Pretty soon we were ushered out of the town by a dense foliage on the right and an array of spice gardens on the left. The owners stood outside in order to get hold of travelers and give them a tour of their garden. “Sir! Please come in. Welcome to our garden. Take a whiff of the cardamom and the cloves. Would you like to buy some clove oil?" And so it went.

But we moved on, our eyes on Munnar- paradise nestled at around 6000 feet above sea level. My hands fished for my jacket in my rucksack just to ensure it was nearby; it was going to be super cold up there. But super awesome!

If you loved the beach and you were on a journey to one of the most haunted beaches in the world. What would be your reaction? You would be drooling even before you had set foot on the sand!

Mountains were my thing. The long folds of land which seem so tiny from up above but so imposing when you are down below had always given me the chills. They shone under the sun and took to fur jackets when it was cloudy. I had recollections of the guidebook about Munnar which I had read before our trip, it said-

“Munnar is situated at the confluence of 3 mountain streams- Mudrapuzha, Nallathami, and Kundala.”

So apparently our next stop in God’s own country was going to be drool worthy!

Munnar drew in pictures of sprawling tea gardens, mountain ranges so high up in the clouds that you couldn’t see their tops, cabins by the gardens and families enjoying a cup of freshly brewed coffee or tea on the porch of their house, the fragrance of cardamom and cloves mingling with the mist.

So, I had pictured it all in my head and was eager to see how much I was up to it once we reached our destination.

From that day on, my uncle- Mama and grandmother- Didan were going to join us for the journey. It was going to be fun. Mama was going to fly in all the way from Delhi while Didan was coming from Kolkata. 

The ride had not been much exciting so I had dozed off until we had reached Munnar town. The sky cast a grayish hue on the town market. The town's wide roads along with the cramped shops of spices and chocolates by the road gave out the usual aura of a hill station. The roads, wet due to the rain glistened and the horizon was filled with mounds of green. We drove past the shops and were about to make our way to the hills once again when our driver suddenly spoke up.

“The hill road is very risky at night. Animals linger in the dark and tend to come out on the road. Especially elephants”

“Elephants!” My mother asked convulsively. “Will we see elephants on our way?”

“Possibly,” Jishnu replied without much concern.

It was a matter of concern indeed because Mama and Didan were going to come in from Kochi so it was inevitable that they had to make the journey to the hills in the dark of the night. As we were stripped off the network, we were unable to make any contact with them. We rode on hoping to get in touch with them soon.

The hill roads have an elusive way of telling you when they begin. In fact, they don’t tell you at all! It is only when you start seeing things getting smaller below and the roads getting narrower that you can tell you are going uphill.

The road bent around the corner and we were in the company of cars and trucks. At every bend, our driver craned his neck sideways to get a glimpse of any oncoming vehicle. The Innova hopped throughout the ordeal. Mountain ranges became visible on one side of the road. Clouds floated on their tops slowly and settled somewhere while several white and thin strand like streams rubbed down the rocks to the abyss below.

Waterfalls were a usual sight amongst the ranges. We came across the Chinnakanal Falls; it won’t be wrong to say that it looked like someone had spilled milk and it had come all the way down the mountain rocks.

Chinnakanal Falls

A few minutes later, I felt a shrug at my shoulder and I followed a finger pointing outside the windscreen. My eyes met with a constant layer of dense, dark green velveteen on an undulating, sloped land. "Tea gardens" I whispered.

A deluge of imageries stormed into my head. The small shrubs of tea looked like green colored stools and collectively the garden emitted an appearance of a theater of tea plants. Each garden looked alike with the myriads of tea plants and a line of three to four tall trees standing at attention at the center of the field. They were interestingly bare and had crescent shaped tops which gave them the appearance of scarecrows with arms reaching high.

The acknowledged history of the plantations dates back to the late 19^th century when the planters from Europe started the plantations. Munro, a British resident of Travancore traveled to the city and took an instant liking to its idyllic ambiance. He sought the colossal Kanan Devan (named after a landlord) Hills as a potential for plantation. The royal Poonjar family admired Munro’s confidence and his innate entrepreneurial charisma and granted the hills on lease to him in 1877.

Munro quickly began his operation and after forming a society of planters, he began planting coffee and cardamom. These crops were alas abandoned once tea began to be seen as the suitable crop for the soil. Thus, tea got the center stage. 

The Kanan Devan Hills Plantation Company which is reputed to be South India’s largest exporter of tea and the largest producer of green tea in the country was born when Tata Tea bid farewell to the plantations in 2004. Mr. Alexander who headed the company there on proposed that the employees should buy the majority stake and become owners.

The journey for the company only went uphill after that- reaping profits and increasing productivity.

 I found a good read about the transformation of the KDHP management model. You may read it here.

Lego houses

The solitary Sothupara Bungalow in the Gundumally Tea Estate stood in solidarity with its surroundings. It was over 17 kilometers away from the town. A tiny wisp of smoke rose from its chimney and it reminded me of the small illustrative houses from fairy tales. The bungalow had an old colonial architecture, white in color with huge vertical glass windows and tiled roof. Seated on immaculate gardens and lawns, the Sothupara Bungalow overlooked the tea gardens and the mountain ranges which were so green that it looked like someone might have hung the grasslands upright. 

Far off, we could spot tiny Lego houses, temples and the estate colony, lost in the comfort of nature. It was difficult to praise the beauty of Munnar without having your teeth to chatter. The temperature was low and the wind blew vigorously. As a result, clouds drifted down and took the mountains out of sight. What could be seen was just a white curtain.

Hallway in the bungalow

Slowly almost generously, it began drizzling and so we walked indoors. Inside, it was cozy and warm. A delicate fragrance of lentils and curry leaves floated in the air which indicated that lunch was being prepared. 

The living room was magnificent complete with couches, carpets and a fireplace. Adjacent to the living room was a recreational center where there was a table for carom and a shelf filled with magazines and books. The home was adorned with antique wooden furniture and the walls had pictures of episodes from a British man's life in Munnar.

The cook and the butler greeted us with a Namaste and asked us to freshen up while lunch was being served.

The bungalow

After a light lunch. We retired to the living room sofa and took to watching the dynamic scene outside the window. The wind whistled through and crashed on whatever came in its way. The solo swing set in the lawn swung to the orchestra of the wind. The tall trees which stooped over the swing bore the brunt of the ferocious wind; the wood creaked each time the trees swung.

Beyond the trees tiny specks of the distant mountains could be seen; a striking massive bulged rock on the mountain looked like a turtle's head with its flippers on each side trying to swim towards the bungalow desperately. But it couldn’t. 

Slowly the white clouds engulfed everything and the drama ended. Everything reduced to nothingness beyond the bungalow.

At night far off in the mountains gleamed the lights of the city. But the Sothupara Bungalow was dark and cold. The butler had told us that they could only afford to keep the generators on for barely three hours as then it would run out of the quota of diesel for the day. Besides, it would be unethical to the creatures that lived in the neighborhood if the generator ran on through the night.

Bungalow driveway

Electricity was a luxury up in the mountains and a sheer necessity as well. So, we asked the butler to switch the generator on. A little while after the butler disappeared into the kitchen, a loud rumble followed and within seconds the bungalow was illuminated. The white bulbous lights glowed in the driveway outside and the rain drops bombarded on the roof.

Anytime soon, we would hear the Innova halt in the driveway; we had asked Jishnu to bring Mama and Didan from Kochi where they had landed some hours ago. We had no news from them. The network was meager and it had left us completely incommunicado.

  

We were watching some Laurel and Hardy flick when we heard the car enter the driveway by virtue of the raindrops hammering on its body. As the car stopped and the gates opened, we quickly ran to get the door. Soon, two figures- Didan followed by Mama entered the foyer. We hugged in turns in the foyer and exchanged pleasantries when the butler came up and greeted them.

At dinner, we chatted as we ate and the butler kept handing the courses through a serving hole in the wall. We chatted about life and food and planned our agenda for the next few days. Mama had been to Munnar long time ago and had amazingly remembered a lot of the things he had seen and done at that time. One time when we were discussing what to have for breakfast the next morning, Mama came up with this idea.

“Have you had Appam with Chicken Stew?”

We hadn’t. In fact, we had never imagined of that sort of thing. We asked him if the consequences would be good and he replied with a single nod, his eyebrows curving high on his forehead. After dinner, when the butler and the cook made an appearance to ask how the dinner was and the time when we would like to have tea next morning, we asked him to prepare Appam with chicken stew for breakfast.

The cook was evidently not getting anything we told apart from the names of the dishes and the time at which tea was to be served. He simply gave a gentle nod and smiled.

We retired to our rooms waiting eagerly for the wonders of the impending breakfast. This trip was keeping up with the vow to bring new adventures in our way.

Tea garden

The rain and the wind persisted. I cuddled myself in bed and wrapped into a double layer of thick blankets. Later, in the dead of the night, the generator that had been singing its dutiful song went quiet and the bungalow was dark once again. Only the wind whistled and the tall trees swayed and creaked, sending horrific vibes all around. The idyllic peace of the place up high in the mountains was eaten away by the ghoulish night.