Well, this place is not called the ‘spice belt’ with­out rea­son. There are spice shops around every cor­ner. And dozens of dif­fer­ent fra­grances entice you as you walk by. And of course, the shop ven­dors try their best to attract your atten­tion and get you inside.

It was fit­ting there­fore to begin the morn­ing with a visit to a spice plan­ta­tion, dur­ing which we were given all the inside details on how var­i­ous spices like car­da­mon, black and white pep­per, cina­mon etc. are grown and prepared.

We spent about an hour, wan­der­ing around the plan­ta­tion look­ing at var­i­ous spice plants. Our guide Benni (who’s even writ­ten a small tourist book­let) seemed to know his stuff, so I know my spices much bet­ter now!

In the after­noon, we took a pleas­ant ride around Peri­yar lake (all other times being booked). It was pretty hot on the upper deck of the boat, but there was a wind blow­ing which made the noon sun a lit­tle bear­able. Unfor­tu­nately, no tiger or wild ele­phant sight­ings for us. If you’re lucky, some­times you can see them come down to the water for their daily water intake or their bath. The last time I saw an exotic ani­mal (and I mean out­side the zoo!) was the one horned rhino in Kazi­ranga. I must have been about ten. So, I am def­i­nitely keen to see tiger in the wild, but this is obvi­ously not that time!

There was quite a lot of excite­ment in the boat when we finally sighted some sam­bar (wild deer). If not the tiger, at least we’d had a glimpse of it’s prey! Though they were pretty far away, but we got a good view of them. Then we saw some wild bison, boars and (what I hope were) exotic birds. The lake is huge and bounded on all sides by the for­est. The trip took us about two hours of leisurely cruis­ing. The for­est trek is prob­a­bly a bet­ter way to see ani­mals and birds but with the state of my foot, I had to give up that hope.

I’d rec­om­mend trav­ellers to Ker­ala to spend a few days in Thekkady and do the dif­fer­ent treks (day, night) that are con­ducted by the For­est depart­ment. Every­thing, is pretty well organ­ised round here, as we’ve found, but you def­i­nitely need about 3–4 days to really expe­ri­ence this place.