So we left Kochi on February 7th, taking a train to Kottayam. The plan was to use Kottayam as a launching point to get to the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary - and we were a little divided on how to go about that. I was hoping it would be possible to rent a motorcycle and drive out there, and Leah wanted to keep it simple. In the end, simplicity won out because it would have been terrifically difficult to ride a cycle out there.
The train to Kottayam went by easily enough and we checked into the Ambassador Hotel. It was insanely hot, and the room at the hotel acted as a pressure cooker. We ate at some arabian restaurant, and here we ate chicken - one of the few times we had meat out there.
The next morning, after handling some administrative bits about flights and train times, we caught the bus to Kumily and were guided to the Jungle View guest house. This was our first home-stay and it was probably one of the nicest places we stayed at in all of India, and definitely not the most expensive at 350 rupees a night. The owner, Ramachandra took us for a night walk around his compound and we sat in the dark for about 20 minutes waiting for animal life to come around. We saw a couple porcupines, but nothing spectacular; at least the night wasn't took cold.
The next day, Abbas dropped off a motorcycle for us and we rode it into Periyar to go on the nature walk at 7am. Since Abbas was late dropping off the cycle, we almost didn't make it into a group but we managed to squeeze in at the last minute. The nature walk was really cool - it was 3 hours and because it was quite early in the morning the sun wasn't too hot. We saw two types of monkey, some wild boar, and wild elephants.
After the nature walk, we took the motorcycle into the country. I didn't really know how much fuel we would need, so I put in 5L of gas and we roared off into the middle of nowhere. Our first plan was to go to the tea factory - and everyone seemed to have an opinion on how to get there so after a few missed turns we managed to find it. The tea factory was quiet due to a power outage, but the manager was very pleasant and he took us to each of the machines and explained how they worked. Or used hand signals and very simple english really, but we asked clever questions and basically figured it out.
We got some ice cream in town, and the owner of the shop gave us some advice for an alternative way back to Kumily - this time through Tamil Nadu, the neighboring province. This turned out to be a great ride from the highlands where we were, into a hot valley and back out into the mountains again.
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