14th Feb - Munnar

Neither of us realised it was valentines day til we arrived back for the day getting ready for bed! no advertising for it here, tho you get a tiny bit of it on tele, so that was quite refreshing, so possibly not v romantic :P
den was really keen to find a scooter or motorbike to ride round the hills but we really struggled to find anything so we gave up and took a rickshaw to a view point. and christ then did we walk. bout 6km ...luckily most of it was downhill and we had a few crisp breaks. the scenary was awesome, all the tea is chopped off the top so everything the same height its so beautiful! met a tea picker on our way, they seem to be always women, and they basically just use secuters (sp???) with a bag attached to one end. they have to lift massvie bags of the tea so its quite ahrd work but sounded like there was quite a lo of gossiping going on! so with no english she showd us how they cut it and den asked her for a picture which she happily obliged with the most loveliest smile. Den gave her 5 rupees and her and her bemused workmate just giggled and laughed as we walked off! we later found out that they only get paid 70 rupees a day so spose it was a bit of a bonus! TATA is the tea company and seems that they are starting to take over India – cars, tea, phones, trucks, buses plus all these other random unrelated things. The tea women apparently get quite god hours, 10-4 with 1 hour lunch and TATA also run the local schools and provide a special school and post-school work for disabled children of the tea workers. So perhaps they are better employers than most in india...or that the communist state government as something to do with workers rights...
anyways the waterfall was nothing amazing but lovely to stick our hot feet in the COOOLLLLD water. yum. then we had a monumentous climb back up...personally i blame the altitude for the struggle. (we're about 1000 metres). once i'd got my breath back (the cursing didn't help...) we caught the local bus back.
Dinner was an interesting affair, it took at least 1.5 hours to get our dinner! I'd almost passed out even tho we are getting used to indian relaxed service, and then inhaled my food once it arrived. Even den (who you'd think is used to me) was amazed with how much i managed to put away and then got scared and moved the food away...