A jolly good time with friends

The next day we had the morning to ourselves, we took a stroll to the nearby village- this is where the cook in our retreat lived. Spent sometime with a couple of stray pups there and then walked back till the forest check post nearby in the hope of catching some mobile cellular connectivity. No such luck though. Effectively there was no way our friends could reach us..so we just had to wait in the old fashioned way and hope to see them as they drive up to the retreat. By around 3 Pm it started to drizzle again and thats when we saw the familiar Black Bolero drive up and sure enough Shyam and Hamsa had reached!! A noisy welcome and some hurried chatter followed :) After which we asked the cook to fry us some more goodies with the ginger tea. Sure enough we had piping hot bread pakoras served up..made extra yumm by a secret ingredient he added- some yoghurt!! it added a slight tang to the pakoras and we made note to try it next time we were making bread pakoras at home!! :) Shyam is an avid photographer too...so needless to say the remainder of the day was spent discussing what all AJ had already sighted and what else we could hope to see the next day!! By the time our conversations ended it was already 10 PM and we decided to retire 'early' in the hope of heading out into the forest for some wildlife sighting the next day :)

The last day in Valparai we woke up at 6:30 and headed to the forest checkpost at 7AM, we drove thru some 12 KMS but the very preggy me couldn't take any more driving thru the narrow winding roads, so we didn't go all the way to the famed athirampally falls and instead headed back midway. We had very dismal luck with wildlife sightings and only saw some more lion tailed macaques, some malabar giant squirrels and a forest lizard that very obliging posed for our wildlife photographers!!

We spent the afternoon back in the retreat and ended up catching up on  more conversations as always. The next day it was time to leave and we headed to Coimbatore with Shyam and Hamsa who dropped us at the station in time for our Shatabdhi back to Chennai. They headed to Bangalore from there.. alas the trip to this unseen haven had come to an end!! We surely must make another trip there sometime! :)

Surrounded by tea gardens

Our lil retreat was right in the middle of tea gardens..about an acre big and teeming with birds!! So AJ was super thrilled with his choice and spent all day clicking pics of his winged subjects!! I spent most of the day watching the birds or reading a book on the terrace from where the view was spectacular. The weather was awesome, the skies were just breaking into a mild drizzle making the already green landscape look even greener! Having come form the scorching heat in chennai this truly felt like a bit of heaven that we had landed in.

The cook on the premise also fried some yummy onion pakoras and served it with some piping hot ginger tea... siiigghhh!! I just didn't want this moment to pass! :) We spent the afternoon in the resprt itself, this was to be our only day by ourselves. tomorrow our good friends Shyam & Hamsa were driving down from bangalore to join us for the remainder of the trip! I couldn't wait to have them join us...in the last couple of years it has almost become a habit for the four of us to take holidays together..their moving to Bangalore has mandated that unless we vacation together we hardly get to meet!!!

By the end of the day AJ had already sighted 15 different species of birds in the retreat itself!! The retreat had a small stream running thru it..but the access to the stream was marred by the construction work that was ongoing. So i remained perched on the terrace the whole day!

An unseen haven- unending greenery!

This was out very first visit to Valparai...having heard rave reviews of it from many of our nature loving friends, this is one destination that was on the cards for a long time for me and AJ. This April we had a special reason to celebrate and travel- we were soon expecting a baby and needed a nice quiet place to visit on our 'babymoon'. Given the complicated pregnancy I was going thru we decided against taking a flight and hence when scouting for places near Chennai accessible bu rail/road our obvious choice was - Valparai.

Tickets done and reservations in a small cosy retreat made, I was eagerly looking forward to this trip...afterall the babymoon is supposedly your last trip in a while!! Also, I think I have always been excited about visiting any new place... have been traveling since I was 15, and there are very few places in south of India that I haven't visited. Hence going to a 'new' place itself made me feel super curious and thrilled!! :-)

We left on a thursday evening by the Shatabdhi express to Coimbatore. From there we had the retreat guys pick us up in an Innova. The driver who came to pick us up was extremely helpful and stopped at the right local place for a sumptuous breakfast. Then thru the route from Coimbatore to valparai he stopped at all the right kind of places that we'd be interested in- he chatted up with AJ for ten minutes and sized us up as nature and bird lovers! :-) So made all the right stops for us. (The Alayar Dam, the nearby village to spot some lion tailed macaques, monkey falls, Solaiyar Dam). Just as we arrive near Valparai you realize this is a tea garden haven...mountains and mountains of tea estates make for such a scenic drive. it made me wonder how it had taken us so many years to get here! unlike a Munnar (which is a fav with me and AJ) this place is totally undiscovered and non touristy!! Making it an ideal getaway for a nature lover like me and a wildlife photographer like AJ. We made the driver slow down his drive so we could enjoy the scenery. By around 12PM we were at our Whispering Falls Retreat. A very small retreat with some parts still under construction. However the owner and the staff were extremely accommodating of our needs and in the peak touristy season we wanted to be away from the madding crowds. Hence hadn't booked into one of the more popular tea estate bungalows in Valparai.