The yearly outing for 2010 could not be finalized until the very last weeks, due to various constraints. But, once decided as Munnar, it turned out to be a fantastic one. The arrangements by Embassy Travels of Chennai turned out to be very good, in that we were received by their contacts at the Cochin Airport very promptly. Earlier the travel to Cochin by the early morning flight of the 1st June was very refreshing.
After a vile breakfast , where we had Idaly (!) , we proceeded to the much publicised Athirampally falls where films like புன்னகை மன்னன், ராவணன் were shot. May be due to high expectations, the realistic scenario of the falls was not that impressive though it promised that during the heavy rainfall, it will be a sight to behold. After some delightful waterfalls on the way, we reached Munnar by the fading lights of the day and stayed at the impressive Greenridge Hotel.
Munnar is a place , which was exactly what we were looking at: pleasant weather - not very cold but pleasant to roam about, not many places to wander and get tired but handful of places to visit which could be ideally distributed across the three days of stay and lot of free time to spend time with the family. The best part of the trip, the hours to always cherish and re-live are the evenings we spent at the small balcony of the hotel room, facing out to a small hillock, fully green scenarios and the slowly enveloping cold clouds. The evenings were made memorable by the choicest songs (we had earlier carefully selected), coming out of the Nokia Express music with the extra speaker provided by Karthik. The evenings , chats, discussions were amazing and worth miles of trekking. If a tired family, always running around through the week looking forward to the weekend but ultimately finds the weekend always flying past want to spend some quality time together, away from the din and bustle, Munnar is the ideal hideout !
The days were carefully planned to be spent across Rajamalai , echo point, natural tea gardens, Tata Tea museum and some walkarounds. At Rajamalai, one should not miss out on the வரை ஆடு , a type of goat which is found only in Australia , other than this place. The specialty of this goat is it will climb steep rocks without much ado.
We also saw the சோட்டானிக்கரை பகவதி அம்மன் temple on the way back and wound up the trip in five days between the 1st and 5th of June, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment