December 13, 2014. Green Thekaddy

We left Munnar after breakfast and drove about 3 hours through the jungly mountain.  We saw 2 different cars stopped to let passengers throw up from carsickness, due to all of the curves.  It was a beautiful drive through fields of  coffee,  cardamom, bananas, vegetables, tapioca and hibiscus.  

Thekaddy is a lovely town.  It has several names including one that means teak wood forest.  Our hotel is wonderful.  It is called Spice Village, and is seriously into the environment.  Our Eco-friendly room has toiletries in cute little refill jars.  The hotel makes its own paper, from spent cardamom processing, using it for lampshades, brochures, and jewelry.  They even provide reusable cloth laundry bags.  

We went on a boat tour of the wildlife preserve.  Usually, wild elephants are seen, but recently there has been a lot of rain, so they arenot coming to the lake to drink.  We did see breathtakingly beautiful kingfishers, wild boars, deer and gaur.  

They made everyone wear life jackets.  

At first, we balked at this, then saw other sunken tour boats and left them on!

There were a lot of monkeys around.