Walking
Walking above Munnar, where the roads don't reach the tea
The Western Ghats above Munnar are steeper and quieter than the tea-estate photographs suggest, and the paths that cross them were mostly cut by hand, for work rather than for views.
By Arthur Penhallow26 September 20264 min read
Munnar's hills were forest before they were tea, and the change from one to the other happened quickly by the standards of landscape history. British planters, drawn by the cool climate at altitude, began clearing land here for cardamom and then tea from the late nineteenth century, and within a few decades the hills above the town had been reshaped into the terraced, close-clipped estates that now define the view from almost anywhere nearby. The scale of that change is easy to forget while walking through it, because the result looks, at a glance, like something that grew there on its own.
A landscape still worked by hand
Tea in this part of the Western Ghats is still largely hand-picked, and the paths that thread between estates were cut for the pickers and estate workers who use them daily, not for visitors. Walking them means sharing the route with people going about ordinary work: baskets on backs, secateurs at the ready, conversations continuing in Tamil or Malayalam across rows of bushes. It gives the walking here a different texture from a route built purely for its scenery, closer to moving through a working landscape than touring one.
The plantation towns built to run this trade are still very much in use. Munnar itself grew up as a company town for the estates around it, and its older buildings, planters' bungalows, a small church, a tea museum housed in a former factory, date largely from the early twentieth century, when the Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company consolidated smaller plantations into the estates that still dominate the district. The factories along the walking routes process leaf picked that same morning, and it is common to catch the smell of withering tea on the air well before any building comes into view.
Above the tea line
The estates themselves sit at a comfortable working altitude, generally between one and two thousand metres, but the paths above them climb further, into shola forest, the stunted, evergreen woodland unique to the higher reaches of the southern Western Ghats, interspersed with rolling grassland that looks almost alpine despite being well within the tropics. This mix of forest and open grass is one of the region's more distinctive habitats and supports wildlife rarely seen from a road: the Nilgiri tahr, a mountain goat found only in this range, and occasionally elephants moving between forest patches, are among the reasons the higher slopes around Munnar fall within protected areas rather than further plantation. Eravikulam National Park, a short drive from Munnar itself, protects one of the more accessible populations of tahr anywhere in the Western Ghats, and its high rolling grassland offers a walking experience closer to open moorland than to the forest most visitors expect from a tropical hill range.
The paths were cut for the pickers and estate workers who use them daily, not for visitors, and walking them means sharing the route with people going about ordinary work.
Periyar and the forest beyond the tea
Further south, around Thekkady, the tea gives way to the denser forest of Periyar Tiger Reserve, and the walking changes character again, from open estate paths to trails through genuine forest, with a correspondingly lower chance of a fast pace and a higher one of stopping often to look and listen. Several routes through this region link the two landscapes over a week or so, treating the shift from plantation to forest as the natural next chapter rather than a separate trip. Periyar itself was established as a wildlife sanctuary in the 1930s around a reservoir built decades earlier to supply water east across the Ghats to Tamil Nadu, and boat trips on that same reservoir remain one of the more relaxed ways to look for elephants and birdlife along its forested shoreline.
The right season for it
The Western Ghats sit directly in the path of Kerala's southwest monsoon, which makes June to September a genuinely difficult season for walking here: paths turn to mud, leeches become a real and common nuisance in the forest sections, and low cloud can erase the views the higher trails are climbed for. The comfortable walking season runs from November through March, when the monsoon has cleared, temperatures at altitude stay mild rather than hot, and the estates are at their most photogenic without also being their most treacherous underfoot.
By Arthur Penhallow, the name Atlas & Passage’s editorial team writes under. Prices and dates in the trips below come from the operators and can change.
