I finally left Munnar on the 26th, heading south through the Cardamom Hills to Kumily 65 miles away. I got to the bus stand about 11 for the 11:30 bus, which left almost an hour later than scheduled. But I got a window seat for the beautiful ride. First, we headed southeast as we rose about 1000 feet through tea covered hillsides with good views of the rounded, rocky mountains beyond. These tea estates had some of those lilac blossoming trees, but with only a relatively few blossoms, but lots of new green leaves. As we crossed the pass at about 6000 feet, a long, wide valley appeared to the west.
Heading south we passed lots of cardamom growing beneath the trees after the tea disappeared. The road was winding and slow, and we made lots of stops. The bus aisles were usually full of people going short distances. We passed through several small towns and descended to about 3000 feet elevation, going up and down. The first half of the trip was definitely more scenic than the later half. We started passing lots of Syrian Orthodox churches, some quite big. An engineering student from Indore but studying in Chennai and getting ready to work for the Bank of America subsidiary in Hyderabad sat next to me, and he was interesting to talk to. We reached the small, tourist town of Kumily, at the gates of Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, just before 5 after a four and a half hour journey. I found a hotel and then walked around a bit until dark.
Kumily is somewhere around 3000 feet in elevation, so it is warmer than Munnar, at 5000 feet, but it still was chilly the next morning. I changed to a better and more convenient hotel in the morning and about noon walked along the road from the sanctuary entrance to the boat jetty on Periyar Lake. The lake was created when the Periyar River was dammed by the British in 1895 to provide water to the much drier area to the east in Tamil Nadu. The Maharaja of Travancore created a wildlife sanctuary around the lake in the 1930's and built a small palace on an island in the lake, now a hotel. I came here in 1979 and stayed in a simple, inexpensive lodge near the boat jetty. Now the hotels inside the park are expensive and most people stay in Kumily.
It is only about a two or two and a half mile walk from the sanctuary entrance to the jetty. It was hot at noon and I sheltered under my umbrella despite the tall trees of the forest on either side of the road. You are required to stay on the road, but I saw some animals. I saw a barking deer and its very small fawn eating and then scampering away. Barking deer are small to begin with, and the fawn was about the size of a puppy. A bit later I spotted a big sambar deer only about 30 feet away in the trees. He looked directly at me and then turned around and ran back into the forest. Near the lake are some beautiful big trees and the jungle beyond throbbed with the sounds of insects making a cicada like noise.
I wandered around near the boat jetty and met some other tourists. At 2 we bought tickets for the 3:30 boat that travels along the lake in hope of seeing animals coming down to drink. I had done this on a rainy day in December 1979 without much success, spotting two elephants far up a hillside. I had a small lunch and then we left at 3:30. Five boats made the journey, with several hundred people in all, I would guess. I was on the second deck of the thrid boat, at the front, so I had a good view. The trip is said to go about four miles and then turns around and comes back the same way. The water level seemed to be maybe 30 feet below the high water mark. Lots of leafless and usually branchless dead trees stick out of the water. I am a bit surprised that they are still around, if they were submerged in 1895.
We passed some sambar deer and a lone wild boar along the lake side, the deer in the trees and the boar on the grass. Then we spotted a herd of about 20 gaur, or Indian bison, munching on the grass near the lake. The herd included some big black males, which can be six feet high at the shoulder and weigh a ton, and several brown calves. The females are also brown. There were birds, cormorants, egrets, and others, on the dead trees, and storks along the shore in places. At times we could hear the cicada like noise of thousands of insects from the jungle. We passed the Maharaja's former Lake Palace, now a hotel and seen just barely through the trees, and then another lakeside herd of maybe 20 gaur and a lone sambar buck with big antlers.
On the way back we again passed the herd of gaur and the sambar. A big flock of cormorants flew by and then settled atop the water. Later we spotted a big herd of sambar and later still three sambar who hurriedly ran down to the lake from the forest, waded in for a short drink, and then ran back to the forest. There are tigers in Periyar, about 40 of them altogether, but rarely seen.
As we were nearing the end of our trip we spotted an elephant mother and her male calf, with small tusks, trotting along the shore. At first the calf huddled against his mother. Later both of them gave themselves dirt baths, using their trunks to scoop up dirt from the shore and then sprinkle it onto their backs. They ate some grass and then walked away from us. We passed some gaur again and then reached the jetty about 5. From the jetty I could still see the elephants up the lake with my binoculars.
From the jetty area I watched a black and white kingfisher diving for fish. There were also lots of egrets and kingfishers along the shore, and a few white necked storks. I wandered through the big trees near the jetty and at about 5:30, after most of the cars and vans had left, started walking back to town. Six to eight wild boar were foraging among the garbage left by the Indians in the parking area. They seemed relatively unafraid of people. Macaque monkeys were around, too. In the trees were several black furred Nilgiri langurs, which seem a bit smaller than the more commom gray furred langurs I've seen all over India. These Nilgiri langurs have a sort of mane of reddish brown fur around their black faces. There were babies among the adults in the trees, and they were all excellent leapers, jumping from tree to tree. They have long black tails.
The forest was beautiful in the late afternoon. About half way back I heard something running rhough the forest and a reddish furred dhole, or wild dog, ran across the road maybe a hundred feet in front of me. He really sped by. Just a bit later I heard something else running in the forest and a second wild dog ran by, following the first. First time I've seen wild dogs. They are supposed to be one of the most dangerous animals in the jungle, hunting in packs.
My hotel faced the forest and the next morning I could hear the hoots or whoops of the langurs, along with bird calls, including the "brainfever" call of a small bird. It repeats its call over and over, more shrilly each time, and sounds like it is saying "brainfever."
I took an auto rickshaw to the jetty in the sanctuary as I had signed up for an all day trek and bamboo rafting trip starting at 8. Nilgiri langurs were feeding in the trees near the jetty. We set off right at 8, with our party consisting of five tourists, two guides, and a guy with a rifle. We trekked through beautiful jungle, speckled with sunlight from above, for about two hours. The cicada like noise was deafening in places, and our guides pointed out the insects that make the noise. They called them crickets and they are brown, quite large (close to an inch long), and look a little like a beetle. You could see several at a time on the tree trunks. However, the ones we saw were dead and in fact hollowed out, though still clinging to the tree trunks. They apparently die after giving birth. I guess the live ones we heard were higher up on the trees.
We spotted more Nilgiri langurs and a Malabar giant squirrel eating a round piece of fruit, with juice dripping from it. He had a long, bushy tail and was very attractively colored, with a black tail, white forepaws and breast, and two shades of brown, one quite reddish, on the rest of his body, if I remember correctly. He seemed smaller than the ones I had seen in Wayanad, and the guide told me there are three species. The guides and the rifleman were very good, pointing out interesting plants and other things in the jungle. One tree was covered with tiger scratches, done both for territorial reasons and to clean their claws.
We came out of the jungle and had breakfast under a shady tree near the lake shore. A couple of spotted pigeons wandered quite close, probably looking for crumbs. After breakfast the eight of us boarded a bamboo raft and paddled along the lake in hopes of quietly approaching animals along the lake shore. In the middle of the day, though, there were no animals and it was very hot in the sun, with no roof for shade. We did pass a few birds on dead trees.
After about an hour we came ashore. The guides unwrapped a tarpaulin that had a water snake, which had accompanied us on our raft trip, concealed in it. It wriggled away and headed for the lake. I followed it as it crawled over grass and dirt and finally reached the lake. It hung vertically in the water for a few seconds and then submerged. One of our group asked one of the guides if it was dangerous and he said no, though they had carefully unwound the tarp once they noticed the snake. She asked if it was poisonous and he said, "A little."
We left our lunches and paddles on the tarp and set out for about an hour's hike through hilly, forested terrain, drier than the terrain we had traversed in the morning. We didn't have much luck spotting wildlife, though, seeing only a reddish mongoose, and that only very briefly. We came back to the tarp and rested for more than an hour, eating our heavily starchy lunches while the guides and rifleman napped.
About 2:30 we boarded the raft and headed back the way we had come. It was still hot, but there was a bit of a breeze. We spotted nothing but birds. Back on dry land, we walked back to the jetty, not through the cooler forest but for the most part along the lake in hopes of spotting wildlife. All we spotted was a wild boar. We were back at the jetty about 4:30 after about an hour's walk.
Back at the jetty we had a very good view of two elephants and three sambar deer eating grass in a meadow just across an arm of the lake. After eight and a half hours and 2000 rupees, about $33, on the organized search for wildlife, we had by far out best views after it was all over. I watched them for more than a half hour with my binoculars. The elephants were the same mother and juvenile male seen from the boat the day before. It was quite interesting just to watch them eating and wandering around a bit.
My feet were sore from wearing shoes for the first time since December, but I decided to walk back to Kumily. There were lots of macaque monkeys near the boat jetty. I stopped at the Periyar House, a government hotel near the boat jetty. I have an aerogram from 1979 showing I had stayed at Periyar House. I remember it as small and wooden and cheap. The Periyar House now is large and made of stone. I noticed a foundation stone stating it was the new block of Periyar House, opened in 1978. The one I stayed in must have been torn down.
Walking back to town I came across about 50 Nilgiri langurs in the trees. It was fascinating to watch them jump from limb to limb and tree to tree. The young ones seemed to pause a little bit longer before making the long jumps from tree to tree.
Before breakfast the next morning I walked into the grounds of a beautiful hotel in Kumily, the Spice House. The bungalows all have elephant grass thatched roofs, said to be very good against both heat and cold. One of them was being repaired and that was interesting to watch. The bar is on the site of the former house of the first forest officer at Periyar, dating from the 1930's and named after him. The bar is full of old photos, including some of the dour looking forest officer alongside elephants and bison that he had shot. The beautiful grounds have lots of different trees, many labelled. I spotted several Nilgiri langurs in the trees and enjoyed watching them eating and leaping from tree to tree. The hotel seemed almost deserted.
I had a late breakfast atop a rooftop restaurant and after eating watched more Nilgiri langurs in the trees eating fruit and then crossing across the front part of the balcony of the building I was on. They were fun to watch. Several were carrying babies clinging to their stomachs, occasionally allowing them to roam free and play with each other. After lunch I talked with the Egyptian guy running the restaurant and then spent a leisurely afternoon. I read on my hotel balcony and later spent time at an internet cafe and later still went back at the Spice Village to read through the exhibits in their nature center and to read one of their newspapers.
The next morning I was reluctant to leave the cool hills for the hot coast and so decided to spend one more day in the hills. I got up early and about 7 started off on a walk to the boat jetty in the sanctuary. On a cool, sunny morning I saw lots of Nilgiri langurs in the trees and spotted a giant squirrel hanging upside down and eating bark. His two feet clung to a branch while his long, bushy tail seemed leisurely draped over another branch. Periodically, he swung over to the branch and tore off another piece of bark. Some of the langurs were in the same tree. The multi-colored giant squirrel looked beautiful in the sunlight. I spotted another giant squirrel on a nearby tree and watched as he made his way from limb to limb and tree to tree and eventually chased the other giant squirrel from the bark patch and settled down to eat some bark himself. I walked slowly along the road, taking about an hour and a half to reach the boat jetty. I spent about a half hour there, watching the crowded tourist boats come in from the early morning boat trips. Walking back, I saw only a few langurs.
I ate breakfast and read the newspaper in the rooftop restaurant again. Then I read in my room until lunch at about 2. Before 4 I started on another walk to the boat jetty. The sun was hot but the road mostly in the shade of the trees. Nearing the parking area near the jetty I spotted a solitary langur in a tree and then three sambar deer just inside the forest, though they soon scampered off. I stopped again at the Periyar House, where a group of langurs were in nearby trees and later on the roof. Six to eight wild boar were rooting around the garbage in the parking area, which was full of cars, buses, and vans on this Sunday afternoon.
At the jetty I watched the tourist boats come back and then, after almost all of the tourists had driven off, walked back to Kumily. At one point I came across quite a few langurs in the trees. One by one they made their way to a high tree on one side of the road and then made long jumps to a high tree on the other side of the road. I also spotted one langur on the forest floor, the first time I had seen a Nilgiri langur on the ground.
Heading south we passed lots of cardamom growing beneath the trees after the tea disappeared. The road was winding and slow, and we made lots of stops. The bus aisles were usually full of people going short distances. We passed through several small towns and descended to about 3000 feet elevation, going up and down. The first half of the trip was definitely more scenic than the later half. We started passing lots of Syrian Orthodox churches, some quite big. An engineering student from Indore but studying in Chennai and getting ready to work for the Bank of America subsidiary in Hyderabad sat next to me, and he was interesting to talk to. We reached the small, tourist town of Kumily, at the gates of Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, just before 5 after a four and a half hour journey. I found a hotel and then walked around a bit until dark.
Kumily is somewhere around 3000 feet in elevation, so it is warmer than Munnar, at 5000 feet, but it still was chilly the next morning. I changed to a better and more convenient hotel in the morning and about noon walked along the road from the sanctuary entrance to the boat jetty on Periyar Lake. The lake was created when the Periyar River was dammed by the British in 1895 to provide water to the much drier area to the east in Tamil Nadu. The Maharaja of Travancore created a wildlife sanctuary around the lake in the 1930's and built a small palace on an island in the lake, now a hotel. I came here in 1979 and stayed in a simple, inexpensive lodge near the boat jetty. Now the hotels inside the park are expensive and most people stay in Kumily.
It is only about a two or two and a half mile walk from the sanctuary entrance to the jetty. It was hot at noon and I sheltered under my umbrella despite the tall trees of the forest on either side of the road. You are required to stay on the road, but I saw some animals. I saw a barking deer and its very small fawn eating and then scampering away. Barking deer are small to begin with, and the fawn was about the size of a puppy. A bit later I spotted a big sambar deer only about 30 feet away in the trees. He looked directly at me and then turned around and ran back into the forest. Near the lake are some beautiful big trees and the jungle beyond throbbed with the sounds of insects making a cicada like noise.
I wandered around near the boat jetty and met some other tourists. At 2 we bought tickets for the 3:30 boat that travels along the lake in hope of seeing animals coming down to drink. I had done this on a rainy day in December 1979 without much success, spotting two elephants far up a hillside. I had a small lunch and then we left at 3:30. Five boats made the journey, with several hundred people in all, I would guess. I was on the second deck of the thrid boat, at the front, so I had a good view. The trip is said to go about four miles and then turns around and comes back the same way. The water level seemed to be maybe 30 feet below the high water mark. Lots of leafless and usually branchless dead trees stick out of the water. I am a bit surprised that they are still around, if they were submerged in 1895.
We passed some sambar deer and a lone wild boar along the lake side, the deer in the trees and the boar on the grass. Then we spotted a herd of about 20 gaur, or Indian bison, munching on the grass near the lake. The herd included some big black males, which can be six feet high at the shoulder and weigh a ton, and several brown calves. The females are also brown. There were birds, cormorants, egrets, and others, on the dead trees, and storks along the shore in places. At times we could hear the cicada like noise of thousands of insects from the jungle. We passed the Maharaja's former Lake Palace, now a hotel and seen just barely through the trees, and then another lakeside herd of maybe 20 gaur and a lone sambar buck with big antlers.
On the way back we again passed the herd of gaur and the sambar. A big flock of cormorants flew by and then settled atop the water. Later we spotted a big herd of sambar and later still three sambar who hurriedly ran down to the lake from the forest, waded in for a short drink, and then ran back to the forest. There are tigers in Periyar, about 40 of them altogether, but rarely seen.
As we were nearing the end of our trip we spotted an elephant mother and her male calf, with small tusks, trotting along the shore. At first the calf huddled against his mother. Later both of them gave themselves dirt baths, using their trunks to scoop up dirt from the shore and then sprinkle it onto their backs. They ate some grass and then walked away from us. We passed some gaur again and then reached the jetty about 5. From the jetty I could still see the elephants up the lake with my binoculars.
From the jetty area I watched a black and white kingfisher diving for fish. There were also lots of egrets and kingfishers along the shore, and a few white necked storks. I wandered through the big trees near the jetty and at about 5:30, after most of the cars and vans had left, started walking back to town. Six to eight wild boar were foraging among the garbage left by the Indians in the parking area. They seemed relatively unafraid of people. Macaque monkeys were around, too. In the trees were several black furred Nilgiri langurs, which seem a bit smaller than the more commom gray furred langurs I've seen all over India. These Nilgiri langurs have a sort of mane of reddish brown fur around their black faces. There were babies among the adults in the trees, and they were all excellent leapers, jumping from tree to tree. They have long black tails.
The forest was beautiful in the late afternoon. About half way back I heard something running rhough the forest and a reddish furred dhole, or wild dog, ran across the road maybe a hundred feet in front of me. He really sped by. Just a bit later I heard something else running in the forest and a second wild dog ran by, following the first. First time I've seen wild dogs. They are supposed to be one of the most dangerous animals in the jungle, hunting in packs.
My hotel faced the forest and the next morning I could hear the hoots or whoops of the langurs, along with bird calls, including the "brainfever" call of a small bird. It repeats its call over and over, more shrilly each time, and sounds like it is saying "brainfever."
I took an auto rickshaw to the jetty in the sanctuary as I had signed up for an all day trek and bamboo rafting trip starting at 8. Nilgiri langurs were feeding in the trees near the jetty. We set off right at 8, with our party consisting of five tourists, two guides, and a guy with a rifle. We trekked through beautiful jungle, speckled with sunlight from above, for about two hours. The cicada like noise was deafening in places, and our guides pointed out the insects that make the noise. They called them crickets and they are brown, quite large (close to an inch long), and look a little like a beetle. You could see several at a time on the tree trunks. However, the ones we saw were dead and in fact hollowed out, though still clinging to the tree trunks. They apparently die after giving birth. I guess the live ones we heard were higher up on the trees.
We spotted more Nilgiri langurs and a Malabar giant squirrel eating a round piece of fruit, with juice dripping from it. He had a long, bushy tail and was very attractively colored, with a black tail, white forepaws and breast, and two shades of brown, one quite reddish, on the rest of his body, if I remember correctly. He seemed smaller than the ones I had seen in Wayanad, and the guide told me there are three species. The guides and the rifleman were very good, pointing out interesting plants and other things in the jungle. One tree was covered with tiger scratches, done both for territorial reasons and to clean their claws.
We came out of the jungle and had breakfast under a shady tree near the lake shore. A couple of spotted pigeons wandered quite close, probably looking for crumbs. After breakfast the eight of us boarded a bamboo raft and paddled along the lake in hopes of quietly approaching animals along the lake shore. In the middle of the day, though, there were no animals and it was very hot in the sun, with no roof for shade. We did pass a few birds on dead trees.
After about an hour we came ashore. The guides unwrapped a tarpaulin that had a water snake, which had accompanied us on our raft trip, concealed in it. It wriggled away and headed for the lake. I followed it as it crawled over grass and dirt and finally reached the lake. It hung vertically in the water for a few seconds and then submerged. One of our group asked one of the guides if it was dangerous and he said no, though they had carefully unwound the tarp once they noticed the snake. She asked if it was poisonous and he said, "A little."
We left our lunches and paddles on the tarp and set out for about an hour's hike through hilly, forested terrain, drier than the terrain we had traversed in the morning. We didn't have much luck spotting wildlife, though, seeing only a reddish mongoose, and that only very briefly. We came back to the tarp and rested for more than an hour, eating our heavily starchy lunches while the guides and rifleman napped.
About 2:30 we boarded the raft and headed back the way we had come. It was still hot, but there was a bit of a breeze. We spotted nothing but birds. Back on dry land, we walked back to the jetty, not through the cooler forest but for the most part along the lake in hopes of spotting wildlife. All we spotted was a wild boar. We were back at the jetty about 4:30 after about an hour's walk.
Back at the jetty we had a very good view of two elephants and three sambar deer eating grass in a meadow just across an arm of the lake. After eight and a half hours and 2000 rupees, about $33, on the organized search for wildlife, we had by far out best views after it was all over. I watched them for more than a half hour with my binoculars. The elephants were the same mother and juvenile male seen from the boat the day before. It was quite interesting just to watch them eating and wandering around a bit.
My feet were sore from wearing shoes for the first time since December, but I decided to walk back to Kumily. There were lots of macaque monkeys near the boat jetty. I stopped at the Periyar House, a government hotel near the boat jetty. I have an aerogram from 1979 showing I had stayed at Periyar House. I remember it as small and wooden and cheap. The Periyar House now is large and made of stone. I noticed a foundation stone stating it was the new block of Periyar House, opened in 1978. The one I stayed in must have been torn down.
Walking back to town I came across about 50 Nilgiri langurs in the trees. It was fascinating to watch them jump from limb to limb and tree to tree. The young ones seemed to pause a little bit longer before making the long jumps from tree to tree.
Before breakfast the next morning I walked into the grounds of a beautiful hotel in Kumily, the Spice House. The bungalows all have elephant grass thatched roofs, said to be very good against both heat and cold. One of them was being repaired and that was interesting to watch. The bar is on the site of the former house of the first forest officer at Periyar, dating from the 1930's and named after him. The bar is full of old photos, including some of the dour looking forest officer alongside elephants and bison that he had shot. The beautiful grounds have lots of different trees, many labelled. I spotted several Nilgiri langurs in the trees and enjoyed watching them eating and leaping from tree to tree. The hotel seemed almost deserted.
I had a late breakfast atop a rooftop restaurant and after eating watched more Nilgiri langurs in the trees eating fruit and then crossing across the front part of the balcony of the building I was on. They were fun to watch. Several were carrying babies clinging to their stomachs, occasionally allowing them to roam free and play with each other. After lunch I talked with the Egyptian guy running the restaurant and then spent a leisurely afternoon. I read on my hotel balcony and later spent time at an internet cafe and later still went back at the Spice Village to read through the exhibits in their nature center and to read one of their newspapers.
The next morning I was reluctant to leave the cool hills for the hot coast and so decided to spend one more day in the hills. I got up early and about 7 started off on a walk to the boat jetty in the sanctuary. On a cool, sunny morning I saw lots of Nilgiri langurs in the trees and spotted a giant squirrel hanging upside down and eating bark. His two feet clung to a branch while his long, bushy tail seemed leisurely draped over another branch. Periodically, he swung over to the branch and tore off another piece of bark. Some of the langurs were in the same tree. The multi-colored giant squirrel looked beautiful in the sunlight. I spotted another giant squirrel on a nearby tree and watched as he made his way from limb to limb and tree to tree and eventually chased the other giant squirrel from the bark patch and settled down to eat some bark himself. I walked slowly along the road, taking about an hour and a half to reach the boat jetty. I spent about a half hour there, watching the crowded tourist boats come in from the early morning boat trips. Walking back, I saw only a few langurs.
I ate breakfast and read the newspaper in the rooftop restaurant again. Then I read in my room until lunch at about 2. Before 4 I started on another walk to the boat jetty. The sun was hot but the road mostly in the shade of the trees. Nearing the parking area near the jetty I spotted a solitary langur in a tree and then three sambar deer just inside the forest, though they soon scampered off. I stopped again at the Periyar House, where a group of langurs were in nearby trees and later on the roof. Six to eight wild boar were rooting around the garbage in the parking area, which was full of cars, buses, and vans on this Sunday afternoon.
At the jetty I watched the tourist boats come back and then, after almost all of the tourists had driven off, walked back to Kumily. At one point I came across quite a few langurs in the trees. One by one they made their way to a high tree on one side of the road and then made long jumps to a high tree on the other side of the road. I also spotted one langur on the forest floor, the first time I had seen a Nilgiri langur on the ground.
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