In Kottayam we experienced for the first time that the hot months are approaching. We are in the middle of March and people warned us that April and May are bloody hot. Some people even told us that walking outside in these months isn’t possible. Of course, we thought that these people we exaggerating. However, for the coming weeks the heat wasn’t that importance for us. We travelled into the mountains. Kumily is located on an altitude of 1000 meters and is a perfect escape for the heat in the lowlands. Many tourists, both foreign and domestic, travel to Kumily to visit the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. The popularity is mainly based on the fact that there is a high chance to see wild elephants. And we did. We took a safari walk with an unmotivated park ranger. During the walk we saw two different groups of elephants. We also saw quite a lot nice birds which made the trip for us worthwhile. In the late afternoon we also did a boat safari on Periyar Lake, but this tour was more a Disneyland experience than a visit to a nature reserve.

After Kumily we took the very scenic bus ride to Munnar. This hill station is famous for the tea estates that dot the areas around town. It is a great destination for walking and also the bird watching in the area is interesting. Many endemic mountain species are relatively easy seen here. The weather was perfect; 25 degrees Celsius with a clear blue sky. Eventually we stayed for a week and with reluctance we travelled down to the lowlands again. Our destination was Kochi, the most famous city of the Kerala province. Kochi is an old colonial town in where some old churches and buildings stood the test of time. The town is again a great escape for the rest of India. It is a quiet place with some great home stays (hotels) and restaurants that cater for western tastes. We decided in Ernakulam, the sister city of Kochi, located on the other side of the river and only 20 minutes away by ferry. Ernakulam is hot, chaotic and dusty, but is has much cheaper accommodation and real Indian food. However, during the day we were in Kochi where the shade provided by century old trees and the sea wind made the temperature bearable. At night we stayed in a small Ernakulam hostel without air-conditioning, and the temperature in our room never came below the thirty degrees Celsius.

By the way, Ernakulam was also the city where we had a very sad experience. Somebody approached on the street and told us that he preferably would like to smash our skulls because we (western tourists) were in his opinion the culprits for the increasing food prices in his city (see also our column: preferable, I would like to smash you skulls right now). Fortunately, he never turned his words into deeds. Temperatures seemed to increase day by day. On the BBC we saw that the temperature in Mumbai (on our travel itinerary the coming weeks) reached the 43 degrees Celsius, so we were quite lucky with our 36 degrees in Kochi. But a day later, while enjoying a good coffee at the air conditioned Café Coffee Day, we decided to leave India. Temperatures were too high to make sight seeing enjoyable and the predictions were that the ceiling wasn’t reached yet. We read on the Internet that Air Asia still had good prices for their flights to Kuala Lumpur which made the decision easy to return to Malaysia. A little bit more than 24 hours later we left India and in the middle of the night we arrived in Kuala Lumpur. We decided to stay at the Mc Donald’s restaurant of the airport where we took some coffees to stay awake. This was also the place where we made the first plans to go back to Indonesia again. It is now more than three years ago, and also this country has many more places we like to visit. Today we applied for the Indonesian visa here in Kuala Lumpur. Let’s hope they honour our request.