Kumily

On the 26th of January we took a bus from Kochi to Kumily with the changeover at Kottayam. It was quite a ride again; an 8 hours trip with a fight on the bus amongst local men, most probably about politics. We could witness the communist party demonstrations and shrines throughout the way (which was a peculiar experience while reading Ayn Rand's We the Living), seasoned with an emergency backpack rescue from a puke floating with water all over the floor...

Anyway, we finally arrived to a small village called Kumily on the border of the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, which is famous of its' tigers and elephants. So the following day we entered the park with a very welcoming 12 times more expensive ticket as for the locals and planned a boat trip on the lake. After some scrolling back and forth we discovered a friendly setup to purchase tickets - separate line for women, who are always less than men in this country (guess why, we will tell about it later) - which, after 45 minutes of pushing reached a result of sold out tickets and closed cassia for the next hour. Hence we were left with the option to make a 3 hour trekking in the park with a guide and 5 other visitors, which indeed was a spectacular experience. We learnt the 5 types of monkeys living in Kerala, saw scratched trunk of wood where tigers sharpened their nails but did not show themselves being the most shy animals in the park, black tailed giant squirrels, white therms and predator tree killer plants. But above all we saw elephant families in their undisturbed environment. We were sad to learn though why elephants are men's most dangerous enemies in the forest: they have a life-length of the humans and equal long memory to remember what man have done to them. And from this it comes to my mind, that there must be something in the self fulfilling prophecies: we had another giant visitor at night, for the variety it was a 10 cm grass-hopper and for the surprise chilling on the toilet. This time I really took all my courage to fight it, but it had more than one life. I will mention only a couple of highlights: it survived 3 doses of mosquito sprays and 5 toilet flushing ending up in a seize fire around midnight with the deal that it stays on the wall next to the mirror. It did till we left the place!

Next morning we undertook a crash-course on Indian spices, which is the other big thing around Kumily. As we understood Kerala is the spice heaven in India; most if not all the famous spices grow here and is exported all around the world. Did you know that green, black, red and white pepper are all the same plant but goes through a different processing? Or that nutmeg grows on a tree and is the seed of a fruit like a yellow plum? Or that there is a plant called insulin, which leave shall be eaten for the same purpose as taking insulin shots? We saw cinnamon trees and rubber, cocoa, vanilla, coffee and pineapple. Cardamon, ginger, turmeric, chili, henna, papaya, cloves, and dare to say that it is not heaven on earth! But we won't tell all the secrets we learnt, we might make a living of it :)