As we moved out of the tiny roads and headed closer to Munnar, we passed through the famed tea plantations of Chinnakanal and Devikulam. The transition from dense forest to cultivated terraces of tea was so sudden that I was left astounded. I had to lift may jaw off the floor after the sheer magnitude of the plantations and how splendid they looked had registered in my brain. Some of you might think this is an overreaction, but I had never ever seen a tea plantation before, and whatever I had imagined it would be like, I had never imagined it like this. Standing in the middle of the road, everywhere I looked there was tea – from the top of the hill on my left to the bottom most point of the valley to my right. Tea as far as the eye could see. Thankfully, the Santa Fe, being an automatic, allowed me to keep one eye on the road and the other on the scenery rather than having to worry about shifting smoothly on roads that were full of crests and dips.
After stopping for a few minutes to enjoy the fresh air, during which time I tried to capture a permanent imprint of the stunning visuals around me in my head, and failing which I remembered I had a smart phone and promptly put it to use instead, we set off again, our destination now very, very close. Munnar was also quite unexpected, but in a way that was entirely different to the tea plantations that came before it.
When you think of a hill station, you think of quiet, calm, soothing places full of peace and leafy greens, right? Munnar was the exact opposite. The traffic was chaotic, the place was loud, and the people were boisterous. Luckily, the Santa Fe’s cabin was relative quiet, allowing one to hear the tooting of the horn behind you, but not much else, which went a long way towards helping me maintain a calm disposition when navigating through the reams of traffic and pedestrians that seemed to pour out of every nook and cranny. After a long search for parking, we finally made our way to the marketplace and found a spot to grab a quick bite of lunch at. After wolfing down my meal I was ready to leave this quirky, totally hipster (because living up to the hill station cliché is too mainstream) hill station behind me. So we set off for Ooty in mid-afternoon, hoping we’d make good time.
