Munnar

Munnar sits where three streams meet at about 1,600 metres in the High Ranges of Idukki, and almost everything about it, the roads, the bungalows and the clipped green geometry of the tea, comes from the decades after 1877, when John Daniel Munro leased the Kannan Devan hills from the Poonjar chief and Scottish planters followed. The Tata Tea Museum on Nallathanni estate keeps the old rollers and driers running, and the plantation roads make the best walking in South India: contour paths between waist-high bushes, silver oaks for shade, and women plucking with shears into a bag slung from a headband. Above the town, Eravikulam National Park protects the shola-and-grassland slopes that hold the largest surviving population of Nilgiri tahr, largely unbothered by people, below Anamudi, at 2,695 metres the highest peak in India south of the Himalaya; the park closes for roughly two months in February and March while the tahr are giving birth.

Once every twelve years the neelakurinji turns these hills blue, most recently in 2018. A good day starts before six with a jeep to Kolukkumalai, reputedly the world's highest tea estate at around 2,400 metres, for sunrise over the Tamil Nadu plains, and ends at Top Station or Mattupetty with cardamom tea and a plate of pazham pori.