High on a hill with a lonely goat...

While in Munnar I kept finding myself singing songs from "The Sound of Music". Why did India remind me of Austria? Well, because there were lots of mountains around and as we discovered one morning, a few (not lonely) goats...

See, as beautiful as the tea plantations were, you couldn't just sit and stare at them all day, so we went out and about in Munnar. On the itinerary that had been put together for us there we had a "soft trek" in Eravikulam National Park. I wondered what exactly did they mean by a soft trek? After deciding that it must mean a short walk though soft terrain I discovered that I was totally wrong, but a soft trek was in fact a good description of what we did. After getting the tickets to the national park we hopped in a shuttle bus which took us up up up even further into the mountains on very twisty-turney (read: scary) road for a few kilometers. We were then let out to explore the park which was our soft trek. So we slowly walked up, stopping every two seconds to take the amazing views and also to say hi to the Nilgiri Tahr, a type of very tame mountain goat that walked alongside us, and so, as you can see, I was, in fact, high on a hill with a bunch of goats...and so I started singing the song (quietly, to myself, I'm not one to burst out in song in front of strangers). It was a lovely little walk, we were probably there for a little over an hour (long enough for me to get a sunburn even though I put sunscreen on twice – oops! I guess the sun is closer at 9,000 ft high). It was very beautiful, if you are ever in Munnar definitely go there.
In the afternoon we explored the nature via boat, taking a ½ hour motor boat ride around one of the reservoirs, then on to "echo point" which had an amazing echo but was a bit too full of people wanting to take my picture for my sanity so we moved on to another reservoir with a high dam. It was interesting learning about the water and how people manage to use the rains from the monsoon throughout the year. Basically the water fills up during the monsoon season and by the end of the dry season these reservoirs (which are pretty huge) are practically empty because the water has been used throughout the year to sustain life and the crops.

All very interesting...and quite picturesque too.

For your viewing pleasure today, two goats looking at me while I took their picture. I didn't zoom at all, they were maybe 10 feet away from me. Cool, huh.