Munnar Trip - Jalakanyaka's one of those last few trips.....

Thekkady: The Boat, the Bisons, and a Sky That Couldn't Pick a Color

Looking back at at 2009 trip!

I reached Thekkady around 1 PM, fresh off a genuinely gorgeous drive down from Munnar, and checked into the Ranger Woods hotel. The whole way there I'd been mildly panicking about running out of space on my camera's 1 GB memory card — yes, 1 GB, this was 2009, and photographers of that era rationed pixels like they were gold — so I made an emergency detour to buy a backup card. The hotel turned out to be a notch nicer than my stay in Munnar, with one glaring omission: no A/C in the room. When I asked the manager about it, he assured me, with the calm confidence of a man who has never personally experienced Kerala in September, that I wouldn't need one. I'd kept the A/C running both days in Munnar, where it was actually pleasant. Thekkady, by contrast, was HOT — the weather, I mean, obviously. After an hour spent recovering from the drive, I was back on the road. Joshy, my driver and guide for the trip, had already rung up a friend in Thekkady to sort out tickets for the 4 PM boat ride, so we picked up our entry tickets and drove straight in.

Joshy went off to collect our tickets from his friend while I got in line to figure out exactly how many tickets one needs for a camera (spoiler: one, though the ticket counter seemed determined to make me guess). Formalities cleared, Joshy headed back to park the car, and I wandered off happily photographing absolutely everything in sight — trees, rocks, my own shadow, you name it. There were monkeys loitering around the boat jetty, and further off I spotted a few sambar deer. The whole setting was stunning: water in a shade of blue one of my friends still calls “the mystery water color,” ringed by green hills cradling the reservoir formed by the Mullaiperiyar dam. The sky stayed a rich blue right through the evening, with white clouds doing their best impression of a screensaver. And I hadn't even gotten on the boat yet. I remember wondering just how much more “awed” I was going to get before the day was done.

After about a 30-minute wait at the departure point, boarding was finally announced for Jalakanyaka. Since three boats — Jalakanyaka, Jalatharangini, and Jalaraja — were all boarding through the same entry point, there was a brief spell of organized chaos before everyone settled in and the ride got underway. I'd seen Thekkady a hundred times before this — on postcards, on TV, on random internet slideshows — that classic shot of tree trunks poking out of the middle of the lake. Finally seeing it in person, in real time, felt like meeting a celebrity you'd only ever seen on a screen.

The setting was close to perfect, save for one minor irritation: a group somewhere behind us — not sure which state, but vocal enough to make geography irrelevant — chattering nonstop through the entire ride. A few of them apparently hadn't grasped that wildlife spotting runs entirely on luck, and that the sanctuary can't be held personally responsible if an elephant doesn't show up on schedule. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The traveller sees what he sees, a tourist sees what he has come to see.” As the boat wound its way around the lake, I spotted herds of sambar deer and flocks of birds nesting on top of the many tree trunks rising from the water. It really was a beautiful sight.

(I know the question already — where's the nest? My camera didn't quite capture it, so this time you just get the bird. LOL.)

The ride continued toward a point where a small island came into view, complete with a rather nice house on it. I briefly wondered if we'd be stopping there, but no such luck. Just as the boat took a detour past it, we spotted a herd of bison — a genuinely huge number of them — grazing peacefully in the woods. It was a spectacular sight. Naturally, the unhappy delegation of “tourists” behind us grumbled that they hadn't traveled all this way just to see “bhains” (buffalo). I couldn't help thinking they could've saved themselves the trip and just looked in a mirror. It reminded me of a trek I once did in the BR Hills, where our guide pointed out fresh bison footprints and told us to stay alert — and we still never actually saw one. And here I was, staring at a gathering of what looked like 20 to 25 bison, completely at ease.

Thinking back, I got lucky that day precisely because the boat was full of people who couldn't be bothered to really look. Nobody got up, nobody rushed to one side for a better angle — everyone stayed put, quietly unimpressed, while I got an unobstructed view for as long as I wanted. Disinterest, it turns out, is an excellent travel companion.

The dusk settling over the lake looked even more striking than it had at 4 PM, when the light was still sharp and bright. As the sun dipped lower, the reflections on the water turned into something out of a painting. What struck me most was how the water's color kept shifting by the minute — one moment silvery with the sun's glare, the next a deep, moody blue that made you wonder if the sun had been there at all.

I kept waiting for the boat to reach the point where the Mullaiperiyar dam comes into view, but I had to make peace with mild disappointment when the boat turned back toward the jetty instead. We reached the shore around 5:45 PM, greeted by a stunning sunset.

I stood there soaking it all in — a small boat and glittering water in front of me, a mountain in the background, and a setting sun overhead painted blue with streaks of clear white cloud. It was one of those moments that photographs never quite do justice to, though I obviously tried anyway.

One Last Thing

When I sat down to finally continue this blog with my Munnar trip, I'd originally planned to go in order, starting from day one. Instead, I chose to begin with Thekkady, out of sequence, because I wanted this particular post to also serve as a small tribute to the more than 40 people who lost their lives in the Thekkady boat tragedy. Just eleven days after I stepped off her, Jalakanyaka capsized in the Periyar reservoir, part of the Mullaiperiyar dam.

I first saw the news on the morning of October 1st, waking up to a report on IBN Live. The moment I recognized that green-hulled boat in the footage, my stomach dropped. All I could think about was how fortunate I — and the roughly sixty other passengers who rode with me on September 19, 2009 — had been. A boat barely a month into service, gone.

#Thekkady #PeriyarLake #KeralaTravel #Jalakanyaka #WildlifeBoatSafari.