mountains and spices and trucks

After relaxing in the backwaters it was up, up, up into the mountains. We had a 4 hour-ish ride to Thekkady which is inland. The first part of our ride took us through the backwaters which was a very beautiful ride and also gave us an additional view into daily lives in such rural areas. We saw lots of people dressed up waiting for the bus to go to Sunday mass; we saw women doing laundry in the rivers, which includes them smacking the clothing on big rocks, which is, I think, to get the dirt out, it seems rough on the clothes, but seems to work; we saw more of the Chinese fishing nets, much smaller than the ones we saw at Cochin; and just generally people going about their business.
After a brief relatively uninteresting bit of driving we started the climb up the mountains. That was interesting both for the view and for the driving. See the way that people drive in India is basically to look forward, not behind...ever; if you are passing someone it is your job to honk to let them know you are coming because they won't look before changing lanes. When traveling on small roads and you can't see ahead of you the rule seems to be that you honk to let oncoming traffic know that you are passing, if you hear a honk back, don't pass, you don't hear a honk, you can pass.
At first it is confusing but once you understand it you can see how it kind of works.
Well, after going over the mountains we arrived at our hotel, named the "Treetop" hotel because it was up in the trees. It was a bit cooler since we were in the mountains and the weather must be nice year round because the reception area was completely open - not sure what happens during the monsoon season, I guess they are closed. Our "rooms" were individual little cottages, and there was even a hammock that I could sit on (although getting out of it was a bit of an adventure). After having lunch and getting settled we headed off to visit a spice garden. During our ride we noticed lots of farmland and different plants (including rubber trees, which I thought were super cool), this area was spice central so a visit to a spice garden was in order. It was very interesting, we saw 4 different types of coffee plants, some plants used for homeopathic remedies, some plants used for cooking, including a really popular one called cardamom. I had noticed at lunch that one of the dishes had this sort of sweet, but kind of cinnamon taste to it, turns out that is cardamom; it grows quite a lot in kerala and is used in lots of their dishes. It was yummy. During the tour it was very tricky to understand the girl leading us because of her accent, but I managed to 'translate'; and she was very impressed when my parents knew some of the plants.
For your viewing pleasure today a truck; well, the cab of a truck. A lot of trucks, and even cars for that matter, in India have decorations on them. Usually it is the owners that decorate them to make them their own, sometimes you can see their names in their somewhere. These ones in Kerala were the most decorated I've seen. Pretty cool huh. Oh, and since most of them don't have AC they are built without doors. Not sure how safe that is, but it is practical.