Tuesday, May 05, 2009

The Munnar Trip

Since most of my school friends will be joining college for further studies next month, we thought of going for a trip before that. Initial plan was to go for an IPL match, but soon it was ruled out once IPL was moved to South Africa and we decided upon Munnar. The trip turned out to be nice and enjoyable though we did not plan well enough.

Started on thursday evening to Cochin in KSRTC special bus. The speciality of the bus is it will start late, bus will be bit older than normal buses and we will have to rely on just one driver who will have to drive for the next 14 hours without sleeping. Anyway reached Cochin safely at 12.00 and went to Vinod's home. He had changed a bit and was talking like Major Sundarrajan, who has acted in old tamil movies. To lend more clarity, Major Sundarrajan says a dialogue in english, and repeats the same in Tamil. He was behaving in a similar way :) cant blame him, with nobody to talk in Tamil at cochin the change is expected. Anyway we started to Munnar in another KSRTC where K stands for Kerala and not Karnataka. Kerala buses resemble the buses shown in 1960 tamil movies. They definitely have a large scope of improvement. But driver's expertise in driving the bus through the hilly terrain was impressive and we reached Munnar correctly at 7.30 PM.

Once we stepped into munnar, we were sure that we are not going to get any room. Looked like tourists have invaded Munnar trying to evade the summer heat. We tried hunting for rooms but could not get anything, finally with the help of an auto driver Subramani, booked a room which i can safely call as bit expensive. We retired to sleep on that night with plans of going for sight seeing the next day.

Next day (saturday) we started towards the Mattupetty direction stopping at places wherever there was a scenic view. Soon we discovered that the entire path is going to be liked that, with Tea estates covering the entire hills and provided a pleasant in every direction. Few places of interest in that direction are Mattupetty dam, Kundale dam, Top station.

Next day (Sunday) since we had to return back to Cochin to catch the bus back to our city at 7.40, visited just the Leckam waterfalls and came back. We had stayed away from the scorching heat for two days, and Cochin heat was untolerable. The return journey was also in the same special bus, with the same driver who once again managed to bring us back to the city safely. If we had gone to Munnar directly skipping cochin, we could have got more time to spend in Munnar. Munnar will need atleast three days to rest and enjoy the weather. Also book for rooms in advance to avoid troubles at the end.

The post was more about my personal experience, check my friend's post for more details here.

Check out the snaps at http://picasaweb.google.com/sens2003/MunnarTrip#

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