After the pretty but hot Backwaters, I headed to Wayanad. It’s a mountain region in Northern Kerala that’s slightly cooler (sweat actually dries off when you don’t move).
I stayed at the beautiful Varnam homestay, which is inside a forest farm. Forest farms are a sustainable form of farming that mimics the layers of a forest. So it’s all interplanted. Most of the food we ate was from the farm! Elephants and wild boar from the nearby forest can do a lot of damage to a farm. Therefore they had an electric fence around the perimeter. Although elephants are smart enough to push a tree onto the hot wire and then step over it. If there is no tree nearby, they even bring one from the forest!
Some pictures I took during a farm tour. They also had a lot of medicinal plants and a fish pond)
Safari at Nagarahole Tiger Reserve (actually in Karnataka). The tiger was out today but lots of elephants, which I have never seen before in the wild. They are very different when they are free.
My homestay hosts were Orthodox Syrian Christians, so didn’t really celebrate Diwali. But some other guests brought sweets and some of us went to a local temple to see same lights. People at the temple were really nice. The celebration was actually over but they lit some more oil lamps for us and gave us holiday sweets! I’m wearing a lungi, didn’t plan too go out in it but I was told it’s fine. It did feel a little weird to go to a temple like this as a westerner but people said it really ws fine, maybe a white lungi would have been more appropriate.
There was also a Christian Orthodox celebration that I was invited to. Orthodox Syrian Christians trace their ancestry back to the first century!
My host family took me to their relatives’ house. Auntie made some delicious duck curry and gave me the recipe. We also went to an abandoned old family home way up the mountain, very secluded with monkeys messing with the roof tiles 🙂
Some more random pictures…
Toddy, it’s an alcoholic drink from palm sap. Kerala is famous for it. I found it’s an acquired taste but people really like it. The sap is tapped by experts and sold at local toddy shops. It ferments within hours and you can see groups of happy men around the shops (it really seems like a men thing).
A really nice “Ammu” who stayed at the homestay. She’s 80 and still working as a doctor at a dialysis center. I asked her if I could take a picture of her and she insisted that I should be in the picture, too.
Ginger farm
Black chicken! They look like they belong to the Addams family! I was told that their meat is almost black, even the bones. Even the chicks are super dark. Only the eggs were normal white with yellow yolk (I had some).
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