Idukki · Kerala
Munnar, Thekkady and the high range
Tea to the horizon, cardamom under it, and a lake with a forest around it.
When to come
September to May. The monsoon shuts the views in cloud, though the tea has never looked better than it does wet.
How long
Two in each, and three in Munnar if you are walking.
Getting there
Cochin airport to Munnar, 110km, three and a half hours — a slow, climbing road, and the drive is part of it. Thekkady is three hours on from Munnar.
Munnar is the high range: hills planted with tea in every direction until the planting stops and the grassland starts, at sixteen hundred metres, cold enough at night that guests who packed for the backwaters spend the first evening buying a shawl. Stay on an estate rather than in the town — the difference is the difference between a view and a place.
Thekkady is the other half of the district and a different climate: cardamom, pepper and coffee, and the smell of them on the road in. Periyar is the reserve, a reservoir made a century ago with drowned trees still standing in it, and elephant and gaur in the forest around it. The boat on the lake is what everyone does; the better hours are walking with a guide, or in a spice garden with somebody who can tell you what you are smelling.
Together they are the middle of a Kerala journey — down out of the tea, two nights in the spice hills, then on to the water.
Idukki, in photographs
Where we would put you
Worth your time, or not?
Tell us how many days you have and who is coming, and we will tell you whether Idukki belongs in them — and what to leave out to make room for it.