Rain Clouds and a Ghost

The rain was relentless, the wind along with the trees outside were howling non stop for a few hours at least. As it is with all hills in the middle of nowhere with the kind of rain we had there wasn’t any power. The place already didn’t have mobile connectivity so we had no problems with the phones running out of charge. It didn’t matter to me, hated messing with my plans for a road trip, The Wife wasn’t having any of it, she wanted to leave the place since the news from the Kerala floods was getting worse by the hour. With the argument going nowhere some silence ensued, it was all but shattered by the trumpet of an elephant right next to our room. The dogs went wild barking and I was having kittens, with the power out the electric fencing around the cottage was all but useless.

So how did we arrive at this beautiful place….

Between our work schedules and The Wife’s weekend classes it was getting impossible to plan anything, we finally got sometime between all this madness. We decided to take the entire Independence day week off to go somewhere. With this in mind I did all the bookings by July End. The plan looked like this

August 13th – Bangalore – Megamalai

August 14th – Megamalai

August 15th – Megamalai

August 16th – Megamalai – Munnar

August 17th – Munnar

August 18th – Munnar – Bangalore

Well then it started raining like nobody’s business in Kerala and the news just got worse every day. Concerned parents and in-laws started questioning the sanity of the plan, this just seemed to continue a trend

Sep 2014 – Srinagar – The worst floods in J&K we were there on our Leh roadtrip

Dec 2017 – Bali – Mt. Agung Eruption in more than half decade, we were there on a diving holiday

A couple of phone calls to the resort to Munnar and it looked highly unlikely that we would make it there. We decided to wait till Aug 14th before taking a call. Everything was apparently good with Megamalai

So, we left on Aug 13th at 6:00 AM, some clicks from our drive

Before the rains decided on some modern art for my car

Seeing in the Cauvery in full flows after far too many years – near Karur

When the rains started playing hide and seek

We were in Theni by 12 and halted for lunch we started our climb to Megamalai. We said good bye to mobile networks and started soaking in the surrounding. The tea estate guys did tell me that the last few kms would be bad but they didn’t mention the place was as close to heavenly as it would get.

The ride up

An old tea factory

Who said the road to heaven was smooth, click here to watch the video

It was overcast with just a little bit of a drizzle, we were quite literally in the clouds. A cup of hot chai to keep the weariness of travelling the whole day away

I jumped out of bed the next morning after I heard the familiar whistle of a Malabar Whistling Thrush, the search was very successfull

Found this fellow peeping at me

Although we just wanted me to stop badgering him for photos

So in peace I left him, its was more because it was so bloody cold. I needed a jacket.

Now, with my jacket and hoodie I went on a hunt and clicked this strange species..

And then spotted this fellow on the branch, he/she let me come quite close

We started walking towards the dam admiring the beautiful teascapes. Head a deer or two but couldn’t spot it. But we did spot these wild mushrooms

The Rain Gods decided that this was a good time to start blessing us. So we retreated back to the cottage given that I didn’t want to risk wetting my camera. Ironically thats where we stayed for the rest of the day trying to catch the news on the Kerala situation on TV, thats when some strange things started happening. As we were watching the set top box volume would start reducing to zero with us doing nothing to the remote. Thats when the fight with this ghost began and as soon as I saw the volume going down I would press the volume up button until the ghost gave up! This battle continued until the power gave up on us. Maybe that was also the work of the ghost 🙂

Towards the evening we started debating on whether we should wait another day or skip the next day until the elephant decided to make its presence know.

Both of us just froze when we heard the trumpet, with the torch in my hands I decided to open the curtains and peep. I was half expecting the elephants eyes looking right at me when I did that. Yeah I know too much of Jurassic Park 🙂 Its funny how your imagination is on overdrive when its all dark.

Anyway there was nothing staring at me other than my reflection and with the knowledge that I was potentially scared of my own shadow I decided not wildly flash the torch around lest it irritates the elephant. We just decided to wait for someone to get us our diner and retired for the night.

It was still raining the next morning and an tree had fallen over the gate as well which kind of helped us make our decision. We decided to leave after breakfast and head somewhere, destination unknown since we knew Munnar was definitely not doable now.

Click here to watch the ride back.

For the rest of the story please read here