Woke up (relatively) refreshed and spent the morning catching up on essentials like washing underwear!! Took our time getting ready, enjoying the hot bucket shower and space in the room to actually both move at the same time. Headed up to the roof top veranda and ate some bread, jam and Nutella. Used the fact that all the guests were out for the day to abuse the wifi to get up-to-date with blogs and uploading photos to various cloud spaces. Chatted with the owner of the hotel for a bit, in which he spoke about how he has found that Indian tourists have become increasingly lazy over the past few years. In fact, one family refused to stay here because there was no restaurant attached – even though there are several a few doors down in either direction. Apparently it was too far for them to walk… Once we’d finished doing our ‘work’, we went for a leisurely stroll around the town. Aptly described as the Disneyland-in-the-ghats by the Lonely Planet, it is a town full of western and Indian tourists with the shopping choice to match! I’m always surprised at how many shops can be in a row, selling exactly the same stuff and make any kind of money – row upon row of spice shops, dried fruit and nuts, home-made chocolates and ‘Indian’ clothes that I’ve never seen an Indian person wear, line the streets opposite the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. We walked around for over an hour, trying to find somewhere to have an early dinner, getting ourselves lost in the back streets and finding the main road within a couple of turns! As we walked, we saw coffee trees growing by the side of the road – I have to admit, I never thought they looked like that! But it was great fun finding the berries that had fallen on the floor, cracking them open and finding 2 coffee beans inside!! Ended up returning to the place just down the road to have some food. Paid 220INR for the smallest glass of red wine (it was a hobbit glass!) but the food was amazing so it kind of made up for it! As did the Westlife music playing in the background!! They also had the cutest resident kitten in the restaurant who spent most of the evening curled up on Jayne’s lap. She is a self-confessed dog person, so it was really nice to see Jayne melt at the affections from a cat… I might still be able to get a kitten one day!! 
Shared a cold beer whilst watching ‘The Chronicles of Riddick’ being projected onto the restaurant wall and listening to a near-by tour group be loud and irritating – smugly enjoyed the fact that the waiter then quoted them 20INR extra for their beers…
Thursday 21st January 2016
Trans Travels 