Valparai

The other part of our trip down south was spent in a small little mountain town surrounded by tea plantations.  To reach the town we needed to take a three hour bus ride almost completely spent climbing up the mountain.  The road was very windy and I might have fallen out of my seat once or twice as the bus took a few sharp hairpin turns. 

The town itself is really just one main road lined with some shops, a few inns, and very few restaurants.  There are a lot of small houses on the outlying parts of town but most activity is concentrated in the “city”.  In my eyes, Valparai was one of the most beautiful places that we saw in all of India.  Many times I thought that “The Shire” would look very much like this place with its rolling hills and lush green everywhere.  The people were extremely friendly to us and in every direction you looked you could see rolling mountaintops completely covered with tea plants.

The first day we spent wandering around the town and meeting very friendly children and parents.  The children would spot us walking and come talk to us and then invite us down to see their house and meet their family.  The town isn’t much of a tourist town so our presence there was met with much curiosity.  In one instance, we saw a group of people playing cricket down in a field from the road and they saw and and begged us to come down to watch them play.  When we finally agreed and started to walk down to them we were met with a round of applause from everyone on the field.  They didn’t make us feel unwelcome or like a spectacle, they were just happy to have some foreigners watching them play.

The hotel we stayed at (Hotel Myra Lodge) was one of the more unique hotels we’ve stayed at our entire trip.  It was in the upstairs of one of the shops on the main road.  The manager spoke little to no English, but it didn’t matter, he was a jolly man happy to have us stay at his guest house.  The hotel had one main hallway, about three feet wide, with all the rooms leading off of it.  The rooms had no natural light, but we didn’t mind, the only time we spent in the rooms was at night anyways, it was too beautiful outside to do otherwise.

 

The second day we tried to make it out of town to take a tour of a tea estate, but when we got there the security guard told us it was not possible.  Instead, we told the rickshaw drivers that we would just walk back to town and we enjoyed a beautiful, sunny afternoon walk back to town.  Even though our time there was short, Valparai was easily my favorite part of our trip down south.