Munnar

Where it sits. Munnar lies at about 1,600 m in Idukki district, high in the Western Ghats where Kerala meets Tamil Nadu. The name comes from munnu and aaru — three rivers — for the confluence of the Muthirapuzha, Nallathanni and Kundala at the town centre. The surrounding country ranges from 1,450 m to 2,695 m, the upper figure being Anamudi, the highest peak in India south of the Himalaya. Temperatures run between roughly 5 °C and 25 °C in winter and 15 °C to 25 °C in summer, and the Sevenmallay area has recorded −4 °C. What makes the landscape immediately recognisable is not the altitude but the pruning: tens of thousands of hectares of tea clipped to a continuous waist-high surface, so the hills read as a single green upholstered form with silver oaks punched through it at intervals.

The story behind it. Malayarayan and Muthuvan communities lived in these hills long before anyone surveyed them. Benjamin Swayne Ward made the first survey in 1816–17, camping at the meeting of the three rivers. Sixty years later John Daniel Munro judged the land suitable for plantations; he and the Turner brothers obtained rights over the Kannan Devan Hills from the Raja of Travancore and began clearing forest around Devikulam in 1879. By 1894 there were 26 estates, all losing money. The Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company was registered in 1897 to consolidate them. A ropeway went up in 1900, monorails followed, and a narrow-gauge Kundala Valley Railway opened in 1909 to move tea down to the plains — until the catastrophic flood of 1924 destroyed the track and much of the road, after which a ropeway and then, in 1930, a proper road took over. About 11,000 hectares were under cultivation by 1952. Tata and Finlay acquired the company in 1964 and opened India's first instant tea factory; a 1971 negotiation with the Kerala government left the company about 23,000 hectares. Most estate labourers, largely Tamil families brought in generations ago, still own no land, and the 2015 plantation strike — organised and led by women workers, outside the established unions — remains a live reference point in Kerala politics.

On screen. Ang Lee filmed part of Life of Pi (2012) here. Principal photography began on 18 January 2011 in Puducherry, at the Holy Rosary Church in Muthialpet, and after the Puducherry schedule wrapped on 31 January the production moved to other Indian locations including Munnar in Kerala, before the long Taiwan schedule where the ocean sequences were shot in a purpose-built wave tank. The tea country supplied the film's early Indian texture — the green hill light, the plantation roads — against which the Pondicherry zoo and the Pacific were set. Munnar has since become a standing location for Malayalam and Tamil productions, which use the estate roads, the mist and the tunnel of trees on the Mattupetty stretch as reliably as Bollywood once used Switzerland.

What you actually see today. The town itself is a small, congested strip of hotels, spice shops and bus stands, and the point is to leave it. The KDHP Tea Museum on the Nallathanni estate runs through the machinery of orthodox and CTC processing and ends in a tasting. Eravikulam National Park, about 13 km north, protects the largest surviving population of the Nilgiri tahr, a stocky mountain goat that grazes within a few metres of the visitor path at Rajamala; the park closes for calving, usually February to March. Anamudi rises inside it. Mattupetty dam and Kundala lake, Echo Point and Top Station — the last a viewpoint at about 1,700 m looking east over the Theni plains of Tamil Nadu — string along one road east of town. Above them lie the Kolukkumalai slopes, often described as the highest tea estate in the world, reached only by jeep on a rough track. The Neelakurinji shrub that blankets these hills in blue flowers does so roughly once every twelve years; the last major bloom drew enormous crowds. North-east of Munnar, Marayoor holds India's only naturally growing sandalwood forest along with a scatter of megalithic dolmens, and the road there passes through the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary in the rain shadow, where the vegetation changes to thorn scrub within a few kilometres.

Getting there and timing. Cochin International Airport is about 110 km away, and the drive up through Neriyamangalam takes three to four hours. The nearest railway stations of consequence are Aluva and Ernakulam. September to March is the reliable window: clear mornings, cool nights, tea in full flush. June to August brings very heavy monsoon rain, landslides on the ghat roads and leeches on every path, though the hills are at their greenest and hotel rates fall sharply.