India - Kerala and Bangalore

We had organised a tour for Kerala to help us see some of the sights easily. We started in the old port town of Kochi (Cochin) looking round it's colonial era churches and buildings, and the chinese fishing nets at the mouth of the harbour. The Volvo Ocean Race was also having a stopover here at the same time so we were able to look at the boats and associated exhibitions. We stopped briefly at an elephant training camp on our way to the hill station of Munnar, 1,600m up in the Western Ghats. Here the hillsides are carpeted with immaculately manicured tea plantations (the leaves are picked on every bush every 10 days). We had a tour of a tea factory, and visited a national park to see some ibex even higher up the mountains. Even Kochi was noticeably greener (and more humid) than our previous stop, but it seemed every inch of Kerala was filled with fast growing plants, trees and spices. Our next stop was by the Periyar national park a few hours further south. Here the main crops were spices, and we took an elephant ride through a spice plantation before having the cultivation of many spices (eg cloves, cardomom, vanilla, nutmeg, coffee, pepper) explained to us. We made a couple of trips into the national park. First was a guided nature walk for a few hours through the forest, seeing black monkeys, giant squirrels, wild boar and many birds - but luckily no tigers! From a boat trip on the lake later in the day we also saw many deer and a wild elephant. We had one night on a riceboat converted to an elegant houseboat, slowly cruising the backwaters past rice paddys and people doing their washing in the waters outside their little houses. The food cooked on the boat was delicious - as was pretty much all of what we had in Kerala, though Caitlin still finds the spice difficult to deal with.



After a last night back in Kochi we flew to Bangalore. We spent one day on a day trip to Mysore to see the splendidly (or OTT, depending on your point of view) gold decorated Mysore Palace, as well as a number of other sights, and a visit to a Hindu temple along the way. Another day we spent going to Wonder La as a last treat for Caitlin. This amusement park also had a large water park area with wave pools and lots of slides. There were plenty of rides for Caitlin, although it was pretty crowded with end-of-term school groups. Much of the rest of our time in Bangalore was spent in the inevitable traffic jams, but we also got in a little walking around, It was sad to leave India after 3 weeks, but we quite looked forward to some more space and quiet - and safer driving!