Rainbow Cottage Kumily

... a two hour bamboo raft we stopped for lunch and had a nice chat with the others.

After lunch we rafted back and saw more of the same then ended with another 2 hour trek. We saw a herd of bison, more wild boar and the climax....a python! It was huge, over 3 meters long and really thick. The guides were really excited as a python is a rare siting but it was just slithering across the path. It was amazing to see a snake ...

... statue of oversize mary with undersized dying jesus on her lap. A few days later there was another nightly parade, this time by the Syrian Orthodox Church. St Thomas' festival i believe. Lots of all night sound systems, parading priest with plenty of incense-swinging and bunting along the streets. Apparently Kerala is a Syrian Orthodox Church strong-hold, having resisted Catholic and other sorts of Christian persuasions ... The really big festival was the Hindu ...

... homey and new. We spent a whole day out in the wilds on a jungle safari, trekking and on a row boat. We saw many langur monkeys, birds, butterflies, buffalo, sambar deer, frogs, wild dogs, buffalo and giant jungle squirrels which really are giant. Also a lot of leeches, quite a few of them from a little too close up. No tigers, but since our guide has been working in the park ...

... We've booked an early morning walk up in the hills tomorrow to see things from up high. LATER..............Overall, I have to say, the wildlife park is a bit underwhelming. The landscape is beauitful but it's far too busy to see any animals. You can take a boat trip but we heard the water level is very low at the moment so it's not really worth it. We did the "clouds walk" early one morning which was good. We had an entertaining guide who burped and ...

... the pachyderms. One of the guides ominously checked whether the guard's rifle was charged. They even considered the possibility of taking the bamboo rafts out again to avoid the elephants. There were four adults and two adorable babies. They all looked so benign. We city slickers had no idea that wild elephants were so dangerous. We went wild with our cameras to the consternation of our guides. Eventually, the elephants moved towards a semi island in the lake, and the guides ...

... and often held by twine so they grow straight and tall. When trees were more than seven years old we'd see them with the slanted cuts, indicating where they are milked every other day. Since it had been raining recently, many of these trees had plastic wrapping or overhangs over the cuts so that water wouldn't get into the milk. All in all I got the impression that the rubber trees are coddled like ...

... to the following: Biju K. Joseph, Immanuel Orphanage Account A/C: 553802010000778 Union Bank of India, Kumily Branch Kerala, India. You can also contact Brother Biju at +91 9447387251 for additional information. Other than the orphanage, we had a nature walk in the natural reserve, played some highly competitive games of ********, ******* and Cheat (aka ********) to the sounds of 2pac and other ...

... to say, I made it to the safety of Periyar House (although it was significantly further than half way to the lake), and the rules about people not being allowed to wander through the wildlife sanctuary after 6 pm, or on their own ever, didn't appear to be taken particularly seriously by anyone. (The few tigers still left in the region learned long ago to steer well clear of people - my trek guide had only seen a tiger four times in nine years of trek guiding.) But you get ...

... front. Anyway we eventually got to the ticket windeow at 7, feeling nervous about reaching the booking office for the walk in time, and our rickshaw driver, who was supposed to meet us at the other side of the gate after we had bought our entry ticket, had disappeared. Then a bus crashed into the side of a rickshaw, blocking the road, so we decided to just walk to where we could book our trek. This took longer than we'd ...

... We got up at 4:45 yesterday morning, just before the alarm went off; to the sound of the morning Muslim call to prayers over the town loudspeaker. It's a pretty beautiful sound to hear, intermixed with A LOT of roosters who also notice its morning. The chickens run free in the streets, there are a bunch of new chicks outside our home stay. We heard a couple screaming as we were walking to use the internet today, they must have given their lives for someone's ...