We woke up early this morning so Murali could take us to meet our tea safari jeep about 5 miles away. It is called a tea safari because where they take you is up steep, twisty dirt roads through the tea estates and through elephant territory. There are many opportunities to see wildlife while going up through this back-country. We will see if we are lucky enough to find any elephants, guar, sambar or sloth bears. We met our jeep on a road in the middle of nowhere. One thing you can always expect here in India, is some random unexpected thing, like meeting your jeep on a road in the middle of nowhere instead of say, at the jeep safari kiosk in a town. You just have to trust that it is OK, and it always is. We met our driver Deepu and agreed on a price of 1500 rupees ($30US) for the all day safari. We weren’t sure exactly what to expect, which made the day exciting.
Deepu
As we left Murali behind, Deepu started driving into the high backcountry. He began to explain how the jeep was going to be providing us with an extra perk of a full body massage today as we would be driving over extremely crude dirt roads on the entire journey. Good thing there are extra handles for us to hang on to. He then began telling us all about the tea estates and how they operate and pointing out interesting landmarks, etc. as we went along. Deepu was such a delightful young man, very knowledgeable and funny. Also, quite the photographer as you will see. He was just delightful to hang out with all day.
The easiest way for me to explain our adventure is to start posting photos with captions. The beauty will amaze you.
This is elephant lake. Deepu said wild elephants come here to drink throughout the day and night.
As we began to enter the tea estates, the intense green was breathtaking.
This truck is loaded with bags of freshly picked tea. There are little housing villages throughout the tea estates where entire families live, usually close to the tea processing plants. Because of the areas remoteness, every plantation has its own doctor to provide medical services for the between 100 and 500 families who live and work on the estates.
This woman is carrying a bag of her tea picking on her head.
The tea bushes live for many years (over 100). Only the very young pale green leaves at the top are picked, all the others are left. When a bush has been picked, it takes about 15 days for the new pale green leaves to sprout again.
Yes, our cow friends are everywhere! Luckily, they don't like to eat tea leaves.
Deepu stopped the jeep and decided we needed a photo of us standing in the tea bushes.
As we headed up towards the mountain tops, we passed a security checkpoint. We didn't realize it was actually a border station. We were now passing into the next state, Tamil Nadu. The Kolukkumalai tea estate we are headed to is in Tamil Nadu. The roads now became rougher and narrower and more twisty. When we got to the summit (now over 7000 ft), we had spectacular views of the Kerala side to the west and the much more dramatic Tamil Nadu side to the east.
No comments:
Post a Comment