Wednesday 23/11/05 – Munnar
Munnar is a low-rise town of dirty shacks set amid luscious tea plantations. It has the feel of a mining town, and with good reason – it’s where the British brought workers in the late 19th century, paying them in special money that was only accepted in local shops in order to stop the pickers leaving on pay day.

But the Tata Tea Company owns the plantations now, and the cloud-capped hills are stunningly beautiful, the stench of slavery washed away by the heavy rain that falls vertical, unmoved by the slightest breeze.

What’s the aesthetic appeal of these tea fields, these remnants of colonial deforestation? It’s the beauty of topology stripped bare, the undulations of the hills beneath a blanket of flat-topped tea trees separated by chaotically ordered picker-paths – man and nature in beautiful harmony… or maybe… maybe man winning against nature, taming… maybe it’s the domestication of the landscape that appeals. It sounds wrong, but it looks right.

Either way, this middle earth will stay with me for years.

After visiting the tea factory in Munnar we take a Tuk Tuk to Top Station. The journey was breathtaking – reservoirs, tea, elephants, monkeys – but at the peak we found our views obstructed by clouds. India was once again unknowable, incrutable.

Perhaps this is because we’re visiting at London pace, spending two weeks on a whistlestop tour that the travellers we meet say should take months. Perhaps. But more likely India is unknowable in its totality – its essence is beyond comprehension. It is a country understandable only in glimpses and glances.


ISD. STD. ODI, KSRTC… India likes acronyms. Enigmas.

Next up: Rules of the road