Athirapally

This weekend we went back to the waterfall we'd driven by on our way home from Thrissur a few weeks ago, Athirapally Falls. It is in the Western Ghat mountains, north and east of Kochi. It's only about 25 miles from our apartment as the crow flies, but it took us two hours of frenetic highway driving and hair-raising mountain road to get there (we didn't drive, of course! We hired a taxi).

We stayed at a small hotel right on the Chalakudy River, just a little bit downstream from the falls.

It was beautiful! 

You never really know what a hotel will be like till you get there, but we lucked out here: it was right on the river, with a beautiful open-air balcony where we could eat all our meals. This was breakfast one morning: curry, omelets, toast, noodles, and coconut milk (you're supposed to put the noodles in the coconut milk and eat it like rice pudding). 

When we ate our dinner there at dusk, though, we got dive-bombed by bats who zoomed through the open space (it only lasted for a few minutes, till it got really dark). And there were lots of little house geckos who stuck themselves to the walls, eating insects. (Agatha loves them, of course.) In fact, it was a little bit like glamping; we had a lovely bed inside and the kids slept on the floor on soft mattresses, but our bathroom had a permanently open window. (Venting to the outdoors is common in Indian bathrooms, and you are meant to keep the doors to bathrooms closed at all times-- that's how they are in our apartment. But usually there are screens on the window.) In the middle of the night we were awakened by crashing and thumping inside the bathroom. It got quiet, but then we were awake and Michael really had to pee. It was 3 am. He tried to ignore it but he couldn't. I urged him to pee over the balcony but he wouldn't. Finally we talked ourselves into the theory that a bat had come in and bashed around and then flown out again. But what if it was a creature who was waiting inside for us to open the door only to run out and scamper over my sleeping children? Cautiously, he opened the door and turned on the light. No sign of anything. Relief.

There was also a nice pool. As long as kids can get in the water, happiness is assured (this hasn't changed since their toddler days. I read that once in a parenting book: when all else fails, put the child in water. It works). 

We were there Friday and Saturday night, and sadly, we were the only guests in the hotel. I think tourism is really suffering since the big floods last August. We tried to order a lot of food and tip lavishly to spread the wealth around a little bit. 

Saturday morning we hiked down to the waterfall. The kids didn't love it. Can you tell?

There were plenty of (domestic Indian) tourists there-- tour buses pull up and the passengers walk down to the falls and then back to the bus and off they go. This was a busload of beautifully dressed and decorated young women heading to the trailhead:

We were a little disappointed we couldn't swim or explore by the falls; it was all roped off and tightly controlled (new since the floods, I've heard). Plus it was hot and dusty. 

There were lots of monkeys, who were used to eating human food from the tourists there.

But that was kind of sad.

So we walked back to the hotel and spent the rest of our visit playing in the river there. Happily, we did see a band of wild monkeys playing in the trees and swinging on the vines on the opposite riverbank. 

The hotel manager showed us the traces of an elephant's visit right next door to our hotel the night before we arrived: tusk marks on a tree truck, and big old footprints in the dust: 

And when we swam to the opposite riverbank, which is national forest land, we saw piles of elephant poop. But no actual elephants.

The river is a living resource for the people who live nearby. In the evenings people came to wash their clothes and themselves, and to socialize. 

The hotel manager said that while the dam was open and the river was high, it was ayurvedic to drink the river water, which was infused with the goodness of the jungle and forest plants (don't worry, we did not do this). Rivers are sacred in India and we were lucky to spend a lot of time in this one.