Wow! I didn’t share it, but a week ago, I was still debating each and every day if I should call it quits and fly home early. For the moment, that’s off the table.
I’ve visited a bunch of places - stunning beaches and cliffs in Varkala, hot and busy Kochi (pass), and now the hill station Munnar, the tea producing area of Kerala.
To say that it’s beautiful here is an understatement. It’s so lovely that it’s ridiculous. There’s also construction galore - building more and more hotels and homes. I did a car tour of the area (blech) and learned that on Saturdays there can be two hour traffic jams (from what I can tell, this is mostly caused by cars parking on the side of the roads). I also went for a gruelling 16 hike which was utterly spectacular.
There’s lots of money being made here. Tea plantations, spice plantations, tourism, and at the bottom of the food chain are the tea pluckers - women who are working in gruelling heat and then throughout monsoon to harvest the tea which makes this area so popular. They earn 420 rupees a day ($7 canadian), assuming they reach their quota of 27kg of tea. Without these workers it would all fall apart.
If you go back and look at the little dots on the left side of the tea plantation - those are the tea pluckers, the ladies who get your cuppa and ensure this whole industry thrives.
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