Eravikulam National Park hike in Munnar : )

Early this February, I found a national park to visit in Munnar, and truth be told, if you were also boxed in a car dreaming of stepping out into the lush green tea estate that fences all the roads up and down these hills, you'd share the sentiment.

Munnar itself is located in the Western Ghats mountain range in Kerala and is home to the nearly two and a half kilometre-tall Anamudi mountain peak, a view that we actually see during our hike.

We started with a masala mango snack and coffee, which rapidly woke us up for the workout as we made our way up to a waterfall around the boundary of the park. Unfortunately, the park itself was closed for a few months since it is the breeding season of the Nilgiri Tahr goat, which this park is known to protect.

As a rule of thumb, any hill town in Kerala is flush with rolling tea greens, misty temperatures, and waterfalls. However, Munnar was a princely state that fed into the industrialisation of Kerala as it built railway tracks and exports for spices, tea, and coffee during the early 20th century. And from what we saw in the national park here, much of the land around these protected habitats is actively maintained as farmland to this day.

We were stepping over a moderately well-tracked route where water channels had been diverted and the trees were sparse enough to walk around, but we occasionally heard the sounds of a bison or owl whose sleep we were disturbing just by virtue of our trek. Speaking of animals, we even saw a monkey waltzing around a patch of tea plants, which is a sign that maybe tea is the solution to world peace—getting both animals and humans rooting together.

Keep in mind that as we walk, we are collecting thorns and seeds of every shrub we brush past, fortunately not too many of them. At one point, our guide announced, "Are tea plants trees or not?" and that's how I learnt that tea plantations prune these trees every few months to maintain the harvest! It is quite interesting that in 10 years they will strip this mountain land and replant these trees again to maintain their tea quality, so as we moved around the nearby tea factory, I was left in wonder and awe about the complexity of something as simple as chai, and how there is a story to the smallest of things around us.

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