Vattavada -Vegetable round

It's drizzling nice… on track of our pleasure trip…

On the way we had to collect our ‘machan’ too, so took the track in line through ‘Thodopuzha’ (touch river- main city of Idukky district). Scorpio of ‘Changali’(team leader) was buzzing through the state high way from Pala to Thodupuzha. Machan was waiting for a long time on the way – he was bit furious too.

Reached Thodupuzha at 6 pm. Way to Adimay was awe-inspiring.

On the way to Adimaly... (from left to right Machan,me, Pratheesh, Saju, cousin of Saju)

On the way to Vattavada from Munnar we had a thrilling sight. even though it was a dim vision in the head light, we met with a herd of elephants.there were 6 cows, one tusker and three calves crossing the road.

Elegant Black Family

Night was so pleasant that we slept in an air conditioned room. AC was keeping us warm all the hours of darkness. Morning was a placid one. Changali’s cousin had promised us to take us to catch snaps of wild buffalos early morning – they would have been on the road at that time-according to him. But he was under the blanket in the morning. But his friends were ready with hot black coffee, when I opened the door of our room. With the coffee mug, I went out to the biting cold wind to get some morning snaps of Vattavada.

Cool Vattavada at morn

Now only I realized what is ‘vattavada’ (in Malayalam language it means a round shaped oil fried snack: vatta= round in shape, vada= an evening snack made of black gram). The place was really a fine valley which has great green mountains around it (which gave the place that name 'vattavada'). The lush mountain had blue tinge in the early morning snow. People live in groups like a colony. Basically they are farmers, who produce carrot, cabbage, beans, beetroot etc.

Lijo selects some fresh carrots at the vegetable farm

Cabbage saplings grow in green lush

There we came across a peculiar group of people who have been living there for the past seven hundred years. They used to live in single roomed houses which seemed to be match boxes pasted together. The place known as ‘Koviloor’( means village of temples) -hundreds of tiny temples in an area of a kilometer.

We pass a peculiar 'Kovil'

The most horrible specialty of the natives is that they just call in front of their matchbox houses and wash away to clean it in the morning, we bunged our nose as we pass the lane!

Route map: