Munnar...Heaven on Earth

Munnar

We started at 10.00 am from Cochin. On the way to Munnar we had an amazing elephant ride. We paid Rs 300 per person. My husband and I sat together on an elephant. It was a 30 minute ride. It was a nice experience. The way elephants balance while there is a slope and the way they are trained to walk was impressing. Only by a few words from trainer in their language were enough for an elephant to understand things.

We then went to our hotel Nature Zone.

En-route Nature Zone

This resort has not gained much popularity yet but it is worth going there.

The resort is located on a high hill. We had to leave our AC Indica Car down and a special four wheel drive from the resort came to pick us up. It was Jeep of Mahindra in which we had an adventurous ride of about 8kms over the hill.

The driver hardly knew few words in English but we could communicate the basic things and his so called broken English we did understand things. It was a 8km stretch which was divided as 3kms was normal tar road and rest was ‘kuccha’ road.

This ‘kucha’ road so actually made in between the tea plantations. It was so beautiful site to see but yes it was a very bumpy ride upwards, you feel you are in some ride in some amusement park. On the first day we were the only couple in the jeep and to be very frank our driver looked a bit scary atleast to me, don’t know about my husband.

We sat in the jeep and slowly in his broken English he started narrating us few stories which were real life incidents, we are not sure how true they were but they must be 10% true. I can say this because after his story we did face a similar situation like what he narrated.

He started saying that as this was a jungle where there are lot of tea plantations and also cardamom plantations junglee elephants use to roam around and pass by the street. He also showed us the rock where elephant had recently scratched his body; we did see the footmarks of elephant en-route our way to the resort. Now that was scary. He then also stated that few months back elephant killed 2 women who were tea pluckers etc. And after all this, he is telling us that elephants do come nearby the resort also, that scared me all the more.

I was already scared and it was the beginning of evening and after coming up so much by ‘kucha’ road I could see no sign of resort, no name plates nothing, all this forced my mind divert in wrong and negative direction. I started thinking what if this man was a fake and there is some fraud and this guy takes us on top and tells us give all your money and all bad thoughts started running in my mind and I was telling this to my husband, and he was like relay all is fine.

After few minutes, I did see an entrance and I was so relived. It was a huge property, actually in jungle. The receptionist greeted us and then we checked in our room.