LUNCH at the wonderfully comfortable home of a Kerala family, owners of a rubber plantation - one with a commanding tree top view of the Western Ghats and surrounded by fruit trees, pineapple fields and groves of towering rubber trees.
We learned how the family got into the rubber production business more than forty years ago as a means to retain ownership of their land (threatened with government confiscation until converted to rubber trees, an exempt land use category championed by the current owner's grandfather in the Kerala assembly).
We watched a demonstration of how tree tapping is done – each of their eight employees taps 300 trees a day once every three days, in essence taking care of 900 trees as their contribution to the plantation's production.
We also met and talked with members of the family, including a visiting son working towards his CPA certification and a daughter's first child, the owner's first grandchild.- THE DRIVE BETWEEN PERIYAR AND KOCHI through the Western Ghats which took us through some fantastic, lush mountain scenery on a bright, sunny day with just enough short stops along the way to keep us from going stir crazy on our tour bus. The wild flowers and water falls along the way were particularly memorable.
The enormous tea plantations were also fascinating! Shaded by Silver Maples from Australia (with pepper vines growing on each tree trunk) and each bush sheltering cardemon plants, the whole operation made excellent use of agricultural space.
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER with an Orthodox Christian procession in the midst of a four day walking pilgrimage across Kerala to the grave site of the group's founder and first saint who died in 1902, a trek undertaken each year to honor his memory on the anniversary of his death.
Hundreds of devotees walked along the side of the road or rested briefly nearby; several talked with us to explain what was going on – as did their spiritual leader (who blessed us all, one by one, with a touch to the head before we re-boarded our bus to continue our own pilgrimage here to the capital of the province in Kochi).
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