Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

I don't have proper reviews of all the collections, but they are linked in this thread: The Asian Zoo List of Chlidonias

 

Last little bit from Sri Lanka:

I spent 87,626 LKR during the 26 days, which makes an average of 3370 LKR per day (about NZ$31.90). Given the price of the accommodations and the costs of some of the parks, this was actually less than I had been expecting and in fact makes it the cheapest of the three countries so far. Somehow.

Here are the latest country stats:

MALAYSIA:
*1192.10 Ringgits spent over eleven days (NZ$397.50, US$284.85, UK£232.90, €261.70)
*Average spent per day: NZ$36.10, US$25.90, UK£21.20, €23.80
*114 birds seen, 2 lifers (c.2 percent of total)
*23 mammals seen, 2 lifers (c.9 percent of total)

INDIA:
*43,068 Indian rupees spent over 25 days (NZ$896, US$635.50, UK£507.50, €590.50)
*Average spent per day: NZ$35.80, US$25.40, UK£20.30, €23.60
*95 birds seen, 14 lifers (c.15 percent of total)
*9 mammals seen, 4 lifers (c.44 percent of total)
(The low animal numbers are because most of the time was spent in Ladakh)

SRI LANKA:
*87,626 Sri Lankan rupees spent over 26 days (NZ$829.60, US$594.45, UK£470.75, €561.10)
*Average spent per day: NZ$31.90, US$22.85, UK£18.10, €21.60
*158 birds seen, 64 lifers (c.40 percent of total)
*25 mammals seen, 18 lifers (c.72 percent of total)

 

I am now back in India, having flown into Madurai in the south (the Western Ghats area) and hopefully then moving northwards up towards Gujarat and the Delhi area again. I'm not sure what's going to happen in the next few weeks to be honest. I left India because of their financial "issues" and had hoped that things would be manageable in a month's time when I came back, but that may have been a bit optimistic.

My original plan for India was to start in the north (Delhi) and leave from the south (Kochi) after about two and a half months. So I already have a Thai Air Asia flight from Kochi to Bangkok for the 11th of January. But then I had to skip to Sri Lanka which messed that up. I figured that when I came back the worst case scenario would be that the ATMs still wouldn't be working and I'd have to just stretch out the Indian rupees I'll have on me (obtained by changing foreign currency) until my 11th January flight, but that means I'll basically be restricted to the south and probably not able to do very much. Middling case would be that the ATMs work but only for limited-amount withdrawals - they were talking about daily limits of 2000 rupees (about NZ$40) - which could mean either the same as the worst case situation or perhaps it would be workable. (The problem with limited-amount withdrawals is that my bank charges NZ$6 per transaction from a foreign ATM so I usually try to get out about two or three weeks worth of cash at a time - if I have to make withdrawals every one or two days the fees will add up too fast). Best case scenario is that the ATMs can give out enough money at a time for me to continue as planned and see all the places I intended to, and then I'll probably fly out of the country from Delhi or somewhere. I couldn't book any flights in advance because I didn't know what would be happening. However my fingers and toes and eyes and heart were all crossed.

To ensure that I actually had money for the worst-case scenario, I got out a bunch of Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) from ATMs in Colombo and when I got to the airport I changed 71,000 LKR into US$466, so that when I got to India I could change that into Indian rupees (INR). The reason for that is because foreigners can't take INR into India - you can only get it in-country. There's a bit of confusion around this because India made a recent law-change which allows foreigners to carry 26,000 INR on their person and some internet sites interpreted this to mean import 26,000 INR which it does not. I had also been told that you couldn't change LKR outside of Sri Lanka (because, like India, legally you aren't allowed to bring it into Sri Lanka from outside so why would anyone outside the country be willing to accept it). So the best idea seemed to be LKR to US$ to INR, even though I'd be losing money during each transaction. I think going from 71,000 LKR to US$466 to 27,200 INR I lost over NZ$100 along the way. And as it turned out the money changer at the Madurai airport does take LKR so I could have saved a step, but better safe than sorry.

Speaking of currency issues, a weird thing is that all the shops in the Colombo airport departure terminal have everything priced in US dollars. I didn't understand this - some Asian countries such as Cambodia and Burma have US dollars as their currency (alongside their own useless currency) but this is Sri Lanka. There were only three places to eat - two coffee shops and Burger King. The cheapest thing I could find was a burger and fries for US$10. Ten US dollars!!

I had 300 LKR left in my wallet, and I thought I'd just buy a juice or something on the plane. SpiceJet wouldn't take Sri Lankan rupees, only Indian rupees. Two points here. One, I don't normally buy things on planes because I'm cheap, but every other international flight I've been on accepts the currency from the country they are coming from and going to, given that the passengers may have one or the other but not necessarily both. And point two, it is illegal for foreigners to bring Indian rupees into India, so why are they expecting foreigners to be able to pay with Indian rupees on a flight going into India?

Still on the subject of oddities, I never did find out why there are posters of Fidel Castro all over Sri Lanka. Whenever I saw one I would think "okay, I'm going to ask someone what that's about" but then I would forget. I just googled it and (unknown to me because I'm travelling and don't follow world news) Castro died last month and Sri Lanka was a big supporter of his government. As I just saw on one Sri Lankan site, "The world mourns the passing away of Fidel Castro. The world has lost one of the most illustrious leaders of our time." The things you don't know.

It's only an hour-ish between Colombo and Madurai. We touched down at 3.40pm to 31 degrees Celsius. Immigration was quick and painless (unlike trying to leave Sri Lanka, where the person at the SpiceJet check-in desk gave me the third degree, apparently thinking it unusual that I would be going back to India). The money exchange counter at Madurai does a weird thing as well, probably because it is such a small airport - when you change money they can only give you 5000 INR in cash, and the rest is put onto a Visa card which you can then use at an ATM to withdraw as needed with no extra charges. It wasn't until this was all sorted that I clicked onto the very obvious problem that if the ATMs still weren't working then I'd just uselessly locked all my safety money away where I couldn't get it! Fortunately the lady at the counter said that the country's ATMs were all working fine now, so no problem. Outside while waiting on the bus into town I asked a couple of other people and they also said the ATMs were working as normal. As I found out later though, they are currently restricted to a daily withdrawal-limit of 2000 INR. This isn't a problem right now, because I can use the Visa card from the airport for withdrawing money, rather than being charged fees on my own card, but it might become an issue later.

I had booked a not-very-cheap hotel in Madurai for the night, because the buses to Munnar only seem to run in the morning and it was the cheapest one on booking. com. The hotel's called the Kathir Palace and cost 900 INR for the night (about NZ$18). Outside the airport the taxi drivers wanted to take me there for 250 rupees, but I knew the bus to town would only cost 11 rupees and the hotel was then only a kilometre from the bus stand. 11 rupees is about NZ$0.20 and 250 rupees is about NZ$5, so although it makes me sound like an utter skinflint I wasn't paying that much of a difference for a ride. I had to wait for an hour for the bus, but I can be patient when it comes to saving money. I got let off the bus in the city and told to just walk straight down the road until I came to the Meenakshi Temple and the road my hotel is on was behind it. The directions weren't exactly precise, because there were a fair few turns along the way and I had to ask several times for directions, but I got there in the end. Airport to hotel, thirteen kilometres, 11 rupees.

 

so.... it seems southern India doesn't do WIFI. It has been impossible finding almost anywhere that has it (at least in the cheap places I stay at). Currently I'm in a town called Mananthavady where I found an internet cafe which has WIFI so I can post the blogs I've written on my laptop.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. Kerala is a hard-core Christian state so everyone here does!

 

MARAYUR AND THE CHINNAR WILDLIFE SANCTUARY, PART ONE



I had sort of been expecting southern India to be much like Sri Lanka. Madurai sure wasn't. It was your typical manic filthy Indian town. I got into the city after the sun had gone down though, wandering through the dark crowded streets trying to avoid tuktuks and motorbikes and cows until I found the hotel, so perhaps during the day it would be nicer.

In the early morning I took a tuktuk to one of the bus stations to catch the 8am bus to Munnar, which is up in the highlands of Kerala's Western Ghats (Madurai is in the lowlands of Tamil Nadu). The guy at the hotel desk had said to get there early to be sure of getting a seat, so I arrived at 7am and there was another bus just leaving bound for Theni. I wasn't sure this would actually save any time (I figured the Munnar-bound bus would probably be the one I ended up getting on in Theni) but I took it because it was there. The trip to Theni took two hours, and then indeed I waited there for an hour for a Munnar bus. It wasn't the direct one from Madurai, but we caught up with that one at the border point between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It is almost four hours between Theni and Munnar, due to most of it being winding mountain roads which the bus was often creeping up at what seemed like a walking pace. Every few bends a car or other vehicle would come screaming downhill round the corner and slam on its brakes to avoid hitting the bus, as if the driver was astounded that there should be any other traffic coming round the blind corners.

I was sitting beside the door, which on the Indian buses are always open for people to jump in and out. I was keeping one hand firmly on my pack - there's nowhere to put larger items of luggage except somewhere on the floor around the seats - but at one point I was momentarily distracted during my conversation with the girl sitting next to me and in the second I took my hand off the pack the bus swept round a sharp bend and the pack shot straight out the door. That's something that has never happened to me before! Luckily on this particular bend the door was on the uphill side of the road and not the downhill side or I would have had a loooooong climb down to find it. I had to run about a hundred metres back up the road to retrieve it, and at least it wasn't my smaller bag which has breakables in it (camera, binoculars, etc) so no damage done.

My plans for Munnar were the Eravikulam National Park (home of Nilgiri tahr) and the Pampadum Shola National Park (home to Nilgiri langurs and Nilgiri martens). There are also lots of endemic Western Ghats birds around here like the Nilgiri flowerpecker, Nilgiri flycatcher, Nilgiri woodpigeon... you get the idea. I also wanted to visit the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary which is in a rain-pocket so has a dry-forest ecosystem rather than a wet hill-country one. A couple of the mammal species there are typical Sri Lankan species (tufted grey langur and grizzled giant squirrel). They were the reason Chinnar was in my plans originally, because I wasn't going to Sri Lanka so this was the only place I'd be able to see them easily. Even though I have already seen them now I kept it in my return plans anyway. The nearest town to Chinnar is Marayur (really barely a village), about 40km from Munnar. I had decided the best order would be to do Chinnar first, going straight to Marayur as soon as I arrived in Munnar. This would save some of a travel day and also I could start off this part of India with seeing some Sri Lankan species again before getting into the "new" mammals. Makes sense.

The tuktuk touts around the Munnar bus stand told me not to go to Marayur because it is too hot and there's nothing there - I do get a bit sick of people constantly telling me that I don't know where I want to go! I tried to get out another 2000 rupees from an ATM in Munnar (a different bank from the one I used successfully in Madurai the night before) but it wouldn't accept the Visa card I got from the airport money exchange. I hoped that wouldn't turn out to be an issue in the rest of Kerala. When I got back to Munnar after visiting Marayur I found another ATM in town and that one gave me money, so worries averted for now.

The road from Munnar to Marayur is horrible. An hour and a half of constant weaving round hairpin bends that had several passengers (not me) throwing up out the windows. The return voyage wasn't nearly as bad because the bus is going uphill, so moving slower. We passed the entrance to the Eravikulam National Park on the way, only a few kilometres from Munnar. Most of the route was through tea plantations - kilometre upon kilometre of tea plantations. They are like the highland version of oil palm plantations, but you never hear anything about the wholesale destruction of the montane forests that continues to happen to produce tea. An unexpected highlight was seeing a pair of Malabar giant squirrels out the bus window, hanging in a tree like overcoats thrown over the branches.

In Munnar, at the restaurant where I'd had lunch, the owner had told me (as had the taxi touts) not to go to Marayur, and added the information that there is nowhere to stay there. Of course that is completely untrue, there are loads of cheap hotels there, most of which are called either "tourist homes" or "lodges". I went first to the Calwin Tourist Home, directly opposite the bus and taxi stand, but they were full, so I chose the Marayoor Holidays a few buildings along the street which is 350 rupees per night (about NZ$7) and perfectly good. It is directly next door to a mosque which at 5am blasts out the morning prayers over a loudspeaker, so that might be a problem for some people. Me, I'm either already getting up or if not I just turn over and go back to sleep. But there was a French couple there on my final night who changed hotels the next morning because of it. French people, eh?

If you're wondering about "Marayoor Holidays" (apart for looking like it's missing a word from its name, or at least needs three dots after it), the spelling of town names in India and Sri Lanka are often pretty fluid. Munnar is also spelled Munnur or Moonar, depending on where you see it written (Moonar is closest to the pronunciation). Marayur is usually spelled Marayur on maps, but in the town itself it is always Marayoor.

Another interesting fact, in Sri Lanka and (at least southern) India "hotel" is the name given to a little roadside restaurant. Some also have rooms available, and then will have a sign outside saying "rooms available". Then, just to be awkward, there are also actual hotels called hotels. So in Colombo I stayed in a hotel called the New Colonial Hotel which was just a hotel, but on either side were several other hotels which were just restaurants. It isn't difficult to see whether an establishment is for sleeping or for eating when you're standing outside, but if you've just got off a bus and are looking down the street for a hotel, all the signs saying "hotel" which aren't hotels is confusing.

After putting my bags in my room I went off to find an ATM. In the hotel's yard was a group of bonnet macaques, which are the Indian version of the Sri Lankan toque macaques (and at one time considered to be conspecific). These were very common here, always hanging around near the bus stand in the hope of hand-outs. The bonnets are actually very different in appearance to toques - the toques are a bright golden-brown in colour with a much more noticeable hairstyle, while the bonnets are drab greyish-brown.

There is only one ATM in Marayur, and it was closed for the day. A guy in a little shop opposite called me over to talk, and then wanted to take my photo in front of the closed ATM. "You look like a bad guy," he said, showing me the photos. Turns out he did the local newspaper and was going to use the photo in a story about the financial situation India is in. I had quite a bit of trouble finding a shop which could change one of the 2000 rupee notes I already had into 100s. The problem with the ATMs now, apart for them having a daily-withdrawal limit and randomly not working, is that they only give out 2000 rupee notes. Because the government got rid of the 500s and 1000s, the currency now has a massive jump from 100 rupees to 2000 rupees. You get out a 2000 rupee note but then can't use it to buy food or transport or anything, because nobody can provide that much change. Even the hotels often can't change it if you try to pay with it.

There's an advert on tv here promoting the government's idiotic demonetisation. It goes something like this: "The demonetisation movement in India will mean less undeclared wealth, which will make the government richer [from taxes], so they will spend way more on infrastructure, attracting more foreign investment, which will mean booming success, which will create a more bullish world market, which may end global recession." There you go, India is saving the world. Just like when North Korea introduced demonetisation, or when Burma did it, or when the Soviet Union did it. Hmm, maybe those aren't the best examples. But India is different!!

 

MARAYUR AND THE CHINNAR WILDLIFE SANCTUARY, PART TWO


There are two "entry" points for the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, although both are on the same public road which runs through the middle of the park. The park officially can only be entered with a guide and on foot (there are no jeep safaris here, and you apparently aren't allowed to just get out of your car and wander along the road). But the opening times are not great for birding, with the first possibility for getting a guide being 9am when it is already well past all the morning bird activity. The first "entry" point (i.e. where you can get a guide) is Alampetty, 6km from Marayur, which has two trails leading to a waterfall and some rock paintings respectively. The second one (the main one) is called Chinnar Check Post, 18km from Marayur, and also has two trails running through dry forest. The owner of my hotel, Sreejesh, said that the waterfall trail from Alampetty would be the best option for birds in the morning, and then to go to the Chinnar Check Post in the afternoon.

There's a bus passing through Marayur to the town of Udumalpet at 7.30/7.45am (i.e. it arrives at 7.30 and sits there for 15 minutes before continuing on), and it only costs 8 rupees to Alampetty. I got to Alampetty at about 8am, and there was nobody there, just a couple of locked buildings. Sreejesh had told me that the guiding started at 8.30am (it is actually 9am) and I'm not one to ignore national park regulations, even if they are annoying, so I waited around for some staff to arrive. A starving dog came up to me in a crawling beg, wagging its tail pitiably. Normally I'd just tell the dog to get a job but today I gave it all the biscuits which I had brought with me in lieu of breakfast - everything opens late in India, so when a restaurant tells you it opens at 7am they really mean they open the door at 7, or maybe 7.30 or 8 depending on when they can be bothered, but you can't actually get anything to eat until much later; so I had bought biscuits from a shop to eat. There weren't any birds to speak of around the buildings, so I went up on the hillside a little. At 8.30 there was still no sign of anybody arriving, so I just headed off into the scrub. If anybody encountered me I'd plead ignorance. Although I would never promote such a thing, you could easily catch a tuktuk to Alampetty at 6 or 6.30 in the morning when the birds would all be active, and at about 8am head back to Marayur without anyone causing you trouble.

The Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary was created to protect the grizzled giant squirrel, which in India is rare and restricted to specific areas. It wasn't long before I came across one of these squirrels, and even managed to get some photos of it. This was the only one I saw, so it was a good thing I just went off by myself instead of waiting around. The colouration is similar to the dry-zone race in Sri Lanka (it is considered to be the same subspecies, dandolena), but it looked smaller than the ones I had seen there. I'm not sure if this is actually the case or if it was because I had just seen Malabar giant squirrels yesterday, which even from the bus were huge! I spent a couple of hours wandering around the little tracks snaking about the hillsides, not far from but out of sight of the buildings, but there weren't a lot of birds seen. Tawny-bellied babblers were new for me. It is nowhere near as hot here as at Wilpattu or Sigiriya (the dry-zone areas in Sri Lanka) but it is pretty warm during the day and the bird activity was low. Or maybe just the specific area I was in was low in birds.

When I decided there wasn't much point still looking - the giant squirrel was mainly what I had been wanting to see, after all - I cut down onto the road and walked along to Alampetty where I was intercepted by one of the guides who wanted to know where I was going. I said I was just walking to Marayur, and he said that wasn't allowed, I needed a guide. A guide to walk along the road to Marayur? Yes, it is very dangerous because of elephants. I pointed to a couple of local women walking along the road and said it didn't seem too dangerous for them, which he ingeniously countered by simply repeating that it was too dangerous. So I ignored him and walked off along the road. When a bus came past I jumped on for the rest of the way. There is probably zero chance of encountering an elephant on the road during the daytime here (except very early morning or in the late afternoon), and in any case when you go out with the guides they are only armed with a stout stick a couple of feet long. I'd like to see one of them divert an angry elephant with their stick.

In the afternoon I was going to go to the Chinnar Check Post and get a guide to go "trekking" as they call it, in search of birds and the other Sri Lankan mammal I mentioned, the tufted grey langur. There are two thoughts on the langur's subspecific identity, with some authors saying it is Semnopithecus priam priam like in the other areas of India, and some treating it as the same subspecies as in Sri Lanka (S. p. theristes). I went to the bus stand at 1.30pm but I didn't know when a bus would be along next and I wasn't keen to pay for a tuktuk, even if it would only be about 200 rupees. I went into a hotel (as in a little restaurant) to ask if they knew when the next bus was. The owner said not until 3pm, but he was going to Udumalpet soon if I wanted a lift. So that worked out well. And he said he was coming back to Marayur at 5.30 and he could give me a lift back from Chinnar if I wanted. Even better.

The Chinnar Check Post is an actual check-post, with a barrier arm and a log-book in which all the vehicles passing through need to register their details, I think because this road leads to the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. I got dropped here, and went to the office to get a guide. There were bonnet macaques all over the place but no guides. This was, to put it mildly, baffling and annoying. You have a park which requires you to have a compulsory guide to enter, but not enough guides that you can get one if there are more than a few other visitors there. The last time for "trekking" was 3pm I was told, and none of the guides would be back by then. The only option I could have was to go to the watch-tower - but I had to wait for one of the guides to return to take me there. This despite me being able to see the watch-tower right there, and there being more than a few people just hanging around doing nothing who could have just walked me over there. Instead I sat and waited for forty minutes, watching the bonnet macaques running up to every vehicle which stopped at the barrier arm, hoping for food.

Eventually a guide turned up. The fee for going to the tower was 80 rupees (30 entry plus 50 for the guide). At least it saved me the 600 rupees for the "trekking." Bright side and all that. The guide (plus one of the other guys who had been hanging around the offices, who apparently wasn't good enough to have taken me to the tower by himself) led me along the road for a couple of minutes and then down a dirt track for another couple of minutes. This was what a guide was needed for. Five minutes walk. He didn't even have a stick - what if an elephant attacked us!?! Then we climbed up the tower where obviously I needed more baby-sitting. It was just ridiculous. The tower itself is really high but it is surrounded only by scrub. The point of a watch-tower is that it overlooks something - for watching. Here, if you go to the top, all you can see is the top of the scrub which is useless. The guide and his friend went to the very top, I stayed at the lower level where I had the possibility of seeing birds. After ten minutes it started to drizzle and the guide came down and said we had to go back now because it was raining. Ten minutes!! Yeah, I really was not being impressed by Chinnar today! I told him I wasn't going back after ten minutes given that I'd been waiting forty minutes. His friend went back to the offices. After another twenty minutes the guide tried again to say we should go back because he was getting wet, and I again refused. The park didn't close until 5pm and so I was going to stay here until then. Just after this I finally saw some tufted grey langurs, a big troop of them in a distant tree. So at least there was that. And a couple of sambar made a brief appearance. I saw a few more langurs closer, on the roadside, while on the drive back to Marayur (but without stopping). So I saw the langurs and the giant squirrel, but otherwise it was a bit of a wasted day all round.

Sreejesh (the owner of my hotel) had told me about another good place for wildlife nearby, called the Sandal Forest. Marayur, I found out, is famous for having sandalwood forests due to its dry climate, and the Sandal Forest is a large reserve about four or five kilometres back along the road towards Munnar. It's free, no guides required, and he showed me a photo he'd taken on his phone of a herd of gaur there. So that's where I went the next morning at 6am. The tuktuk there cost me 70 rupees. A shared-tuktuk would cost about 10 or 15 rupees per person, but of course at 6am there's no-one to share a tuktuk with. Coming back I was going to walk or wait for a bus but a guy on a motorbike stopped to give me a lift instead.

The reserve is said to be a natural forest but it looks like a plantation left to go wild. There are a couple of paved roads leading to villages in the reserve, but also many foot-trails straggling everywhere, so I spent the morning just wandering randomly where-ever my fancy took me. There are a lot of chital (spotted deer) in here, mostly quite shy unlike the ones in Sri Lanka, and I saw a couple of muntjac as well. Malabar giant squirrels, one of the most beautiful squirrels in the world, were also common. I saw five over about three hours. Birds were still not particularly evident, despite it being early, but amongst them were yellow-crowned woodpecker and grey junglefowl. There are only four species of junglefowl, and the grey junglefowl of India was the final one I had yet to see (the others being the Sri Lanka junglefowl, the green junglefowl of Indonesia, and the red junglefowl which is found all over Asia).

I went back to Marayur for lunch, and while there Sreejesh told me his friend lived in one of the villages by the reserve, that he was a birder, and he had some owls living behind his house. Sounded good to me. Also sounding good was that Sreejesh said he would take me out there and back on his bike that afternoon. Surprisingly his friend wasn't just someone a bit interested in birds as I had expected, but an actual birder. He had even built a traditional mud house on his property to act as a guesthouse for birders. I can't for the life of me remember his name unfortunately, so I'll call him Bob. We went round behind Bob's house and after a couple of minutes looking he found a pair of Indian scops owls roosting in the bamboo scrub. The whole area around here was full of birds, much more so than in the part of the reserve I was at in the morning. Most of them were ones I'd already seen in either India or Sri Lanka, but beggars can't be choosers.

Originally I had only been going to stay at Marayur for one day, just to go to Chinnar. Then I made it two days after Sreejesh told me about the sandalwood forest. While at Bob's house he said that early morning at his house was excellent for birds, and so I asked if I could come back tomorrow, and that turned my one-day visit into three days. Bob's own house (or rather his wife's house) was in Marayur, so he said he would pick me up from the hotel in his car the next morning to go birding, which was unexpected and saved me a tuktuk fare. I had thought we were just going to go straight to his guesthouse, but after he picked me up we instead headed to Chinnar. It was only 7am so there were no park staff at the checkpoints, and we basically drove slowly along the road and stopped whenever we saw something interesting or at points where he usually saw particular birds. It is a stretch of about 12km between Alampetty and Chinnar Check Post, and a lot of it is very birdy. Definitely worth doing even if I don't think you're supposed to.

It had been drizzling early on and there was a thick fog to start off with. The first birds we saw through the gloom were a pair of Malabar parakeets on top of a tree. Visible enough to see what they were, but not quite enough to see their colours properly. They make the eighth Psittacula I've seen in the wild - only five left, although one is only on Mauritius and another is in a no-go area for foreigners in the Nicobar Islands, so I doubt I'll ever complete the set. The fog didn't last long luckily. We stopped for a while at a place with lots of bird activity, including two species of woodpeckers (yellow-crowned and brown-capped pigmy), two of minivets (scarlet and small), white-browed wagtail, black-hooded orioles, and lots more common species. A grey-bellied cuckoo was a nice bird to find, and in a nearby dead tree perched a crested hawk-eagle and an Oriental honey buzzard being harrassed by jungle crows. Another cuckoo wasn't seen well enough to ID, and something yellow that looked like it should have been a golden oriole flashed past but didn't stop. A jungle owlet, however, did sit tight on his branch, enabling some photos to be taken. Bay-backed shrike was another new bird for me.

Just before we reached the Chinnar Check Post we turned around and went back to Marayur. Tufted grey langurs were common along the road this morning and I got some photos. And on a distant hillside, too far for photos but close enough for binoculars, was a small herd of gaur. In India gaur are ubiquitously called bison. It pains me to have to call them bison but if I don't then Indians generally have no idea what I'm talking about. I've seen them before, in Assam in 2014 and then in Vietnam last year, but they are always good to see again. Here they apparently only come out in the early morning and evening, spending the day deep in the forests.

We stopped in Marayur for some food, and then continued on to Bob's guesthouse. He and his friend had to paint the bathroom there, so they left me to head up onto the hill behind. This is the same place we were at the afternoon before. It was nearing midday now and so it had grown a bit hot for many birds to be around. However there is a tree there with mistletoe growing on it, which Bob said attracted Nilgiri flowerpeckers. Sure enough, there was a pair buzzing around the tree although a male purple sunbird did not appreciate their presence and kept trying to chase them off. I waited there for a couple of hours, sort of managing to get some photos of the flowerpeckers, and while there saw another new bird when a male red spurfowl wandered past.

The next morning I got a bus back to Munnar.

 

ERAVIKULAM NATIONAL PARK



Just outside Munnar, only about four or five kilometres along the road to Marayur, is the entrance for the Eravikulam National Park, which was created in 1978 to protect a kind of mountain goat called the Nilgiri tahr. There are only three species of tahr in the world. One is from the Himalayas (the Himalayan tahr - this is the one introduced to New Zealand and South Africa), one is in Oman and the UAE (the Arabian tahr), and one is in the Western Ghats (the Nilgiri tahr). Because I was going from Marayur to Munnar on a morning bus, and Eravikulam is only about twenty minutes by bus from Munnar, I contemplated going to the park in the afternoon after finding a hotel in Munnar, and then going back again early the next morning (partly for tahr and partly for birds). Passing by on the Munnar-bound bus, though, I saw lines of people heading in and thought better of it. The sign outside saying that ticket sales were limited to 2250 per day wasn't reassuring either. Early morning it would be.

Unlike some parks where large numbers of people might spread out and not interfere too much with the peace, I knew that wouldn't be the case at Eravikulam. Here when you go in you get put on a bus which takes you up the mountain. There's no walking allowed along this part of the road. Once let off the bus there's just one walking road leading onwards, so everybody in the park is concentrated along one stretch of road. The park itself is very large, but only this road is accessible to visitors. However the tahr are common here (or so I had read) and quite used to people.

The park opens at 7.30am. There's a bus heading towards Marayur at 6am, and then the next one was supposed to be at 8am (although I saw one go past the park just after 7.30am, so not sure on specifics). I figured I'd get the 6am one and then look for birds along the road outside until the park opened. I had also read that Nilgiri langurs could sometimes be seen outside the park, so there was that too. Surprisingly, I did actually see a couple of Nilgiri langurs in the trees just near the park entrance, but the light was still low in there and by the time I could have got photos they had moved on. Nilgiri langurs are endemic to the Western Ghats area but are now endangered due to them being extensively hunted for their skins (used for making drums) and for body-parts used in traditional medicines here. Another "Nilgiri" seen while waiting was a Nilgiri flycatcher, almost entirely dark blue, sitting on one of the powerlines.

The open country which makes up the major part of the Eravikulam National Park was formerly a hunting ground for the colonials in the tea estates. The park is not very big, covering just 97 square kilometres, but it's the largest protected area of montane grassland left in Kerala - most of the rest has been converted to tea plantations and other cultivation. Visitors can only come in at one point, and even that is barely an access, just a very short road on the southern edge of the boundary. The entry fee is 400 rupees or about NZ$8 for a foreigner (360 entry plus 40 camera fee), and then you board a bus which drives uphill for maybe two or three kilometres through a tea plantation. There were only about ten other people on the bus, and I'm glad I went early - after 9am great hordes of visitors started arriving, many of them in groups of twenty or thirty people. From where the bus stops there is a walkable road continuing upwards through the grassland. I was expecting to be able to spend all day here, or at least most of the day, but after less than a kilometre there's a sign saying that's the end of the visitor access, and there's a couple of guards sitting there to keep people out. So the entire access to the park is a piece of road less than a kilometre long.

I saw some birds on the way up, including hill swallow, pied bushchat, black eagle, and dozens of red-whiskered bulbuls. But no tahr. Just before you get to the end-point there's a little patch of trees around a tiny stream, and in here I saw the endemic Kerala laughing-thrush and an Indian blackbird. At the end-point I scanned the hills with my binoculars but there was nothing. I wandered back down the road a bit, stopped to watch the laughing-thrushes, scanned the hills. No tahr. Back up to the end-point. No tahr. This was kind of frustrating, given that everything I had read said that the tahr were pretty much guaranteed here.

I had noticed several lines meandering through the grass on one of the slopes, which were obviously trails made by the tahr as they came down, so I had been keeping an eye on that hillside particularly. It wasn't until 9am that a tahr finally made an appearance on that hill. I figured it wouldn't be alone, and some looking showed some more of its herd back up the slope. Sweeping my binoculars downwards I saw that the direction the tahr was heading should take it directly to a lower part of the road, so I quickly headed that way myself. Once at the spot I didn't have to wait long before the leading tahr was coming out of the grass and walking onto an expanse of bare rock right beside the road, where a small stream created a drinking hole. The rest of the herd, maybe twenty or so of them, were soon down there as well, all only about ten or twenty metres away. Right about then was when a big group of visitors suddenly came up around the bend, yelling and screaming to one another. There were three people standing by me (I had let them know the tahr were coming down) and they shushed at the group, which did no good at all. Right behind that group was a second large group, being equally as loud. Amazingly the tahr completely ignored all the noise. They were shock-proof, obviously well-used to the ways of Indian tourists. I suspect they probably get fed quite regularly by visitors as well, although that is of course against the park rules.

After getting my photos, and the tahr wandering further up the road, I made my way back down to the bus-point. There seemed little point in staying at the park any longer now that so many other visitors were pouring in. I'd had a frustrating wait until the tahr showed up, thinking I might not see them, but I'm glad I went in so early before everyone else. When I got back down to the ticket counter by the main road there was a huge queue of visitors waiting to board the buses up to the park, easily a couple of hundred people. You definitely don't want to go there later in the day, even if it's only late morning (this was still before 10am).

 

PAMPADUM SHOLA NATIONAL PARK



Shola is the name given to the montane forests of southern India. They are a hotspot for endemism (species found nowhere else) but there aren't a lot of these forests left nowadays. Most of them have been cleared, and are still being cleared, to create tea plantations. Often when driving around in Kerala you'll see patches of forest on ridges, surrounded by nothing but tea fields. That's the fate of most of the shola, just useless patches, like islands of extinction. But there are also some protected areas of shola and the Pampadum Shola National Park, 36km outside Munnar, is one of these.

From the internet I knew there were some government-owned cabins inside the park, but I also knew that they were expensive (they are currently 4500 rupees per night - when at the park I found out they also have rooms at the checkpoint for 250 rupees). And I knew there was a lodge called Camp Noel outside the park which mammal-watchers stay at, but that it was probably even more expensive. Because the park is just an hour from Munnar and can only be entered with a guide anyway, I figured I would therefore probably end up just doing it as a day-trip or two. When I was at Marayur though, Sreejesh (the owner of the place I was staying) said there was cheap accommodation in the village by the park. When I got back to Munnar I went to the very handy Visitor Information Centre - which, unlike the tourist offices in Delhi, actually wants to help tourists and not just take their money - and one of the guys in there said that I could catch a bus to the village of Koviloor and there was a basic hotel there called Matha Lodge. I'd still only be able to go into the park with a guide, but hopefully there would also be areas outside the park I could bird as well.

At 8am I caught a bus from Munnar which terminated in Koviloor, stopping just a few doors along from the Matha Lodge as it happens. The bus actually runs right through the park, and the checkpoint is only a few kilometres from the village. Going through the park on the bus I saw a gaur and her calf standing literally right next to the road, the closest I've ever seen one in the wild, but because I was in travel-mode my camera was packed in my bag to avoid it getting damaged. So far things were looking good. Koviloor looked like the kind of town which had lots of cheap places to stay, and within easy reach of the park.

I jumped off the bus and immediately a couple of tuktuk guys appeared, suggesting I go to some expensive lodge which cost 2500 rupees per night. I said I was going to the Matha Lodge, pointing to the building. The tuktuk guys said I couldn't stay there because it was closed due to "money trouble". Naturally I ignored this and walked over to the hotel. I couldn't see where the entrance was so asked a couple of guys in one of the shops underneath, and they pointed me into a neighbouring shop where the owner should be, except he was away somewhere eating. The guy who was in there said the rooms were 2000 rupees per night. This seemed very unlikely, given that it was just a tumbledown hotel, so I sat down and waited for the owner to return. While I was waiting I asked the people walking past and in the shops where the cheapest place to stay in town was. All of them said there were no cheap places in the area, only 2000 and upwards. Every single person. I wasn't sure what to make of this. I said straight out to one of them "so if you came to this village you would pay 2000 rupees for a room?" and he just laughed at that. For the next half an hour I got more and more frustrated at being stuffed around, getting nowhere, and the owner of the Matha Lodge never turned up. Eventually one new guy said that there were rooms at the National Park which were only 250 rupees and I could stay there. The others just shrugged when I wanted to know why nobody had said this. I mean, they couldn't all be getting kick-backs from the expensive lodges could they?

A tuktuk back to the park checkpoint would be 100 rupees I was told. I double-checked that these rooms were 250 rupees and that I could stay there, and that was confirmed by everybody. I was already pretty peeved by this time, and paying 100 rupees to go right back the way I'd come on the bus didn't improve my mood. But off we went. Where I'd seen the gaur from the bus there was now a troop of bonnet macaques. At the second checkpoint the tuktuk driver said that 100 rupees only took me this far, to get to the first checkpoint where the rooms were would cost another 40. Yeah, whatever, just get going. We arrive at the first checkpoint, and the guard at the office says that no I can't stay there because the rooms have to be booked online. This was where I'd had enough for the day. I took my bags out of the tuktuk, told the driver to get lost, and asked the guard where the nearest place to stay was. He said at Top Station which was a kilometre up the road, so I picked up my gear and walked. Top Station is the name of the village at the main road where the bus turns off to go to Koviloor. I only had to walk about half a kilometre before coming to the start (or bottom, depending on which direction you're going) of the village. There was a guy sitting outside the first house there and I asked if there were any rooms, to which he said his house was a homestay and the rooms were only 400 rupees. So much for there being nowhere to stay for less than 2000 rupees! This guy's name was James which seems as strange a name for an Indian as Bob, but the entire village is Christian so a lot of the residents have non-Indian names. And they also all thought my name was great.

So, in summary: if going to Pampadum Shola by bus and looking for budget accommodation, don't go to Koviloor. Get off at Top Station and you'll be able to find several cheap but very basic homestays. Also it is way closer to the park's entrance than Koviloor, so you can walk there within about five minutes.

Pampadum Shola is one of the parks like Chinnar, where you enter on foot (for "trekking") and you need to have a guide with you. My pre-trip information gathering had told me that there was only one walking route in the park, it was 9km long, and the entry fee was 200 rupees. In order this information was correct, possibly correct but who knows, and incorrect. Maybe for locals it is 200 rupees, but for foreigners it is 600 (about NZ$12). At the checkpoint I was told that the park opens at 9am and the last time for entry is 4pm. The trekking was for just two hours and the route was 3km long. Being India the rules were completely impossible to change. Could I go for longer than two hours? No. Could I pay more for longer? No. Could I pay to go back in for another two hours when I came out after the first two hours? No. However, on the second day I was in the park for three hours and the guide said the route we were on was 6km long, and it comes out on the road 3km from the checkpoint, so that makes 9km. Where does the 3km-maximum I was quoted come from? Who knows. Not me.

There's not really anywhere to bird outside the park. The road runs through it, and you aren't allowed past the checkpoint on foot. Between the checkpoint and the village I was staying there was a bit of forest along the road but it wasn't a long stretch. Nevertheless, while waiting for the late afternoon to go into the park for my two hour "trek", I spent some time along here and saw white-cheeked barbets which were new for me (they are endemic to southwestern India), Kerala laughing-thrushes which I had just seen for the first time yesterday at Eravikulam, and a new squirrel, the Indian dusky squirrel. Until recently there was just one species of dusky squirrel, Funambulus sublineatus, found in the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, but then it was divided in two - F. sublineatus is now endemic to this part of India, while the Sri Lankan species (which I saw earlier this month) has been named F. obscurus.

At about 3pm I was at the checkpoint. There were no guides. Just like at Chinnar, except here I think there really were guides available. There was something fishy going on at the Pampadum Shola checkpoint. All the guards were incredibly surly towards me and seemed to be being deliberately obstructive. None of them spoke very good English and later I found out that the tuktuk driver from earlier had spun them all a story which was basically the opposite of what happened and said that I was bad-mouthing them for not letting me stay there. Both the guides I got (today and the next morning) started off friendly, but soon turned frosty after a guard or two had a talk with them in their local language. Of course I didn't know this at the time, but I had some guesses. There was also a situation where, when a guide was finally produced that first afternoon, the head guard tried to give me a 500 rupee note amongst my change when I paid. I handed it straight back, letting him know that I knew it wasn't legal money any more, and the guards all laughed about it, although he did replace it with 100s.

The afternoon trek didn't amount to much. The guide they gave me knew nothing - the impression I got, actually, was that none of the guides there knew much about wildlife - and didn't even know how to use binoculars when I passed mine to him so he could look at a Malabar giant squirrel. I saw lots of Nilgiri langurs which are very common here, but they are incredibly shy so I suspect poaching must be prevalent. The only photos I managed to get of the langurs over the two days were of one animal, more or less silhouetted amongst branches. With their black fur and tawny facial ruff they are strangely reminiscent of lion-tailed macaques. In a small bird-wave were some Indian yellow tits, velvet-fronted nuthatches, a common goldenback woodpecker, and another dusky squirrel. The only other birds seen were a Malabar trogon and a Nilgiri woodpigeon. The walk was cut short by a gaur grazing along the trail. I got a bunch of photos, but finally the gaur realised we were there - or perhaps finally got sick of me taking photos - and raised up in a threatening manner so we headed back the way we'd come. On the walk back to the village, just inside the start of a logging track, I found a pair of black and orange flycatchers. If you imagine a giant panda has been turned into a tiny bird and the white bits replaced with bright orange - that's what a black and orange flycatcher looks like.

I spent an hour or so early the next morning on the little bit of road between the village and the park, seeing Indian scimitar-babblers which were new. The "trek" in the park was much better than the day before simply because we were out there for much longer. I got to the entrance at 8.30am so they couldn't try and tell me that no guides were available if I arrived at 9am, but nevertheless I was still waiting until almost 9.30 before they gave me a guide. Nobody had got to this guy yet so he was quite pleasant towards me, although he didn't know anything about birds beyond that one kind was called a bulbul. Again not a lot of birds were seen in the park. The total of species was made up of brown-cheeked fulvettas, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, Oriental white-eyes, Kerala laughing-thrushes, and a Malabar trogon. I'm not sure if it was just a bad couple of days, or a bad time of year, bad luck, or just that this isn't a very good spot for birds. Only having a limited time-period for looking also doesn't help of course.

There were lots of Nilgiri langurs and Malabar giant squirrels, although both (especially the former) were pretty much impossible to photograph due to their immediate retreat as soon as (or before) you saw them. At one point on the trail where it rose and dropped several times like a sea-serpent's spine, I saw something of a bright reddish colour ahead. My immediate thought was that it was an Indian muntjac with the legs hidden by the rise in the path, but when I got the binoculars on it I saw that it was actually a stripe-necked mongoose. I was amazed by the colour, never having imagined it would be that bright. Later I looked it up in the field guide and found that the northern subspecies (in Karnataka above Kerala) is greyish, but the further south you go into Kerala and Tamil Nadu the redder they get. The ones down this way are almost entirely red apart for the grey head and dark feet.

At the moment I think I can complete my route to the north of India on the current ATM situation, and so because I won't be using my Kochi-to-Bangkok flight (on 11th January) I'm not currently bound to a specific time-frame other than that my visa expires on the 17th of February. I'll be buying an exit flight some time soon, when I can find a cheap one hopefully, but until then I can add or remove localities from my plans, and extend or shorten stays in any place as I feel like it. I was originally going to stay for several days at Pampadum Shola to look for the Nilgiri marten but the attitudes of the staff towards me there made me feel too unwelcome and I decided to leave after that second day. Next stop, the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary in Thattekad, added to my route just three days ago...

 

SALIM ALI BIRD SANCTUARY



Probably the most famous ornithologist in India is Salim Ali, author of one of the field guides. The bird sanctuary named after him has its entrance by the little village of Thattekad, hence its alternative name of Thattekad Bird Sanctuary. I did look at going here when making my original Indian trip plans ages ago but it seemed a bit out of the way of everything else. However after it was mentioned to me a few days previously as being a place where Malabar grey hornbills are common, I had another look on the internet and asked about bus routes at the Munnar Information Centre, and found that it actually fits perfectly into a route between the Munnar area and my next destination of Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary (where black-footed grey langurs are found). And now having been there I can say it would have been a great shame to have missed it out, and I would encourage any wildlife-orientated person going to the Munnar area to make sure they get here if possible.

I'd found someone's birding blog saying Thattekad is about 25 minutes by tuktuk from the town of Kothamangalam, so that was where I was aiming for. But in the Munnar Information Centre I was told to catch the Adimali-bound bus to the village of Neriyamgalam instead and go by tuktuk from there because it was closer to the sanctuary. So I changed to that plan. But then when I was saying this to James and Viji at the homestay in Top Station they said the 10.15am bus which goes past their house is a direct bus to Kothamangalam, so I changed back to that one again. As it turned out this was a good (third) decision. The bus actually went through Neriyamgalam on the way, and I contemplated getting off there, but that would have been a mistake. It was about an hour further on to Kothamangalam, and from there Thattekad is only 12km away. Also Neriyamgalam is after Adimali, so catching that bus to get there wouldn't have worked anyway! (Although having just now looked on Google, there actually is a shorter road directly from Neriyamgalam to Thattekad, but it is the same distance (12km) as from Kothamangalam to Thattekad, so it doesn't really matter).

As far as I could tell there are only a couple of places to stay near the sanctuary, the primary one for birders being a homestay called Jungle Bird Homestay owned by one of the park guides, but that was far too expensive for me. I figured the best budgetty option would be to stay in Kothamangalam in a cheap hotel, and just go to Thattekad the next morning in a tuktuk. I'd have to be paying for the tuktuk there and back whether I stayed at Thattekad or not, so having a cheaper hotel in Kothamangalam made more sense to me.

I got into Kothamangalam at 2pm (so almost four hours, including a half-hour stop in Munnar), and quickly found the Janatha Tourist Home round the corner from the bus station. I also quickly found that nobody here seems to speak English. Normally this doesn't bother me, I manage to communicate with people just fine without a common language, but there's something about Indians who don't speak English which completely stumps me. I just have no idea what they are trying to make me understand, and vice versa. Even something as simple as a hotel room (i.e. one person, how much it costs, how many nights) becomes a nightmare to arrange. I had to round up a passing English-speaker (after about ten attempts!) to help me get this easy task sorted, and got a room for 500 rupees.

I wasn't sure what time the sanctuary opened, and I hadn't been anywhere with WIFI for the last week so I couldn't check online. At 6.30am the next morning I went over to the bus station to find a tuktuk. In a coffee house there I discovered that the guy behind the counter spoke really good English, and he said that the sanctuary opened at 9 or 10am which was incredibly late for birding (especially given that it is very hot here) but I had kind of expected that seeing as how everywhere in India seems to open late. I figured I would just go along anyway and look for birds outside until it opened, so I got a tuktuk out there for 240 rupees. When we arrived I discovered that it actually opens at 6.30am which frankly was a huge surprise, and I also discovered that it is on a direct bus route from Kothamangalam (the coffee guy had said that I'd need to take two buses because the sanctuary is on a different road to Thattekad village, which was incorrect, and so I'd taken the tuktuk in order to get there while it was still early). On the way back I caught the bus, which cost 11 rupees and took 30 minutes (versus the tuktuk's 240 rupees and 20 minutes).

The sanctuary is all dry forest surrounding several small lakes, with foot-trails running all over the place. Entry was 175 rupees plus 38 rupees for a camera. I had been under the impression that a guide was required, which would likely have restricted the visiting time to two or three hours, but in fact you are free to roam around alone for as long as you want. There are guides available but at 1000 rupees I decided not to use one. You would need a guide to find a Sri Lankan frogmouth roost, but as I'd already seen that species in Sri Lanka I didn't feel the need to pay to see them again when I could find all sorts of other birds by myself. There's also a little zoo of sorts there, which I think is for rescued or injured wildlife, but both times I was there I completely forgot about it so never went to see it.

I had thought I would come out to the sanctuary in the morning, spend just a couple of hours there (because I thought I'd need a guide), then go back to Kothamangalam, get my bags from the hotel, and catch a bus that same day towards Tholpetty. But the sanctuary was brimming over with birds, and it was so much better than I expected that I decided to extend my stay for another night and come back the next morning as well. On this first day I only stayed until midday because it was too hot by then, and I didn't have any food with me, not having anticipated being allowed to be in there for that long.

I guess my main reason for visiting here was to see Malabar grey hornbills, close relatives of the Sri Lankan grey hornbill. This proved to be easy - I saw one in a tree before even entering the sanctuary! They look very very similar to their Sri Lankan cousins, and act the same way. My progress into the sanctuary was slow, because there were so many birds in every direction. On my left there was a tree with dollarbirds, golden orioles and an ashy drongo; on my right there were grey junglefowl; ahead there were jungle babblers and a greater racquet-tailed drongo. That was pretty much how it went for the next two hours, birds everywhere. Two species of woodpeckers, three of drongos, three of orioles; Malabar and plum-headed parakeets; Indian pitta, orange-headed thrush, Malabar woodshrike, lesser hill mynah, white-cheeked barbet, Blyth's starling, fairy bluebird, golden-fronted leafbird.... it just went on and on. Most of the birds were species I had seen previously in the other parts of Kerala and in Sri Lanka, but four species were new for me so that's alright. I got only a very poor view of a half-hidden white-bellied treepie, endemic to the Western Ghats, and that sealed me on coming back the next morning to try and see it properly.

The bus back to Kothamangalam was a KSRTC bus (a government bus - Kerala State Road Transport Corporation) which means they give a printed ticket, enabling me to see that the point I got on was called "8th mile". And that meant that the next morning I could catch a bus out there without needing an English-speaking conductor, I could just show him the ticket from the previous day so he'd know where I was going. The first bus going to Thattekad from the Kothamangalam bus stand is at 6.15am, so I could get to the sanctuary not long after opening time and save on the tuktuk fare. In the event the conductor did speak English, so he understood quite well where I was going.

The afternoon before, when returning to my hotel room, I had passed a backpackerish-looking white man in the corridor and said hi, as one does. After passing I suddenly thought "I bet he was a birder" because there seemed no other reason a foreigner would be in Kothamangalam. The next morning he was on the bus to Thattekad. He was Australian and, like me, he had also needed to find an English speaker to help him with the guy at the hotel desk, he also did not fancy paying exhorbitant prices for the accommodation at the sanctuary, and he also didn't want to pay 1000 rupees for a guide if he could just wander where he wanted (and he'd also been under the impression a guide was a requirement at the sanctuary). Basically he was just like me except Australian, so only half as good - but still better than, say, English or American.

The bus today cost 12 rupees each way instead of 11, but entry to the sanctuary was 175 rupees instead of 213 (they left off the 38 rupee camera fee). The Australian guy hadn't seen a dollarbird yet, and just after entering I pointed one out in a dead tree which got him off to a good start. They are actually common here, but nobody needs to know that. The bird activity this morning was well down on yesterday, which was disappointing (I only saw about two-thirds of the species I saw the day before), but my main aim was to try and see a white-bellied treepie. Yesterday I saw half of one, and today I soon saw a whole one but still not with the greatest of views. A while later we found a pair of them in a bird-wave with hornbills, hill mynahs and orioles, and these ones I saw very well (although no photos of these or almost anything else could be obtained due to the abundance of foliage). Second-best bird of the morning was a blue-faced malkoha, which I had only seen once before at Wilpattu National Park in Sri Lanka.

I only stayed in the sanctuary for a few hours (about 6.45 to 10am) because I was intending to get back to Kottamangalam before noon and catch a bus to Mananthavady which is the town nearest to the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary. This didn't happen though, firstly because it took me longer to get out of the Thattekad sanctuary than anticipated (birds kept showing up and stopping me), then I had a bit of a long wait for a bus, then once back in Kottamangalam it took ages to find an ATM which worked, and then for some reason I couldn't find anywhere to eat which was open. Basically once it got past noon it sort of got too late to go because I needed to go first to the nearby town of Perumbavoor which takes about forty minutes, and then from there to Mananthavady takes at least seven hours. So I just went back to the Janatha Tourist Home and paid for another night's stay.

The bus I had caught back to Kothamanagalam from the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary was a Jesus bus. Kerala is a hard-core Christian state and I'd seen a few buses around with big stickers across the top of the windshield saying "Jesus". I thought this was just random, or because "Jesus!!" was the last thing you said as the bus came screaming round a blind corner and you got plastered over the grill, but it is actually the name of the bus company. The ticket print-out I got said "Jesus Bus" on it. Once I knew that it seemed quite obvious, it was just that "Jesus" or "St. Anthony" or "St. Thomas" had seemed like strange names for bus companies. Other buses have more standard names. The next day, though, I saw one which inexplicably had "Baby Goat" across the top.

 

THOLPETTY WILDLIFE SANCTUARY



I had been told that the bus from Perambuvoor to Mananthavady would take six or seven hours. It did not. It took almost ten hours. I caught a bus from Kothamangalam to Perambuvoor at 8am. I figured that was an early enough time to start off. After waiting about ten minutes at the Perambuvoor station my next bus arrived and at 9am I was off. The bus was one of the government KSRTC buses, as I almost always end up on, and it was packed. There are 50 seats on these buses but they can easily fit another thirty or forty people on in the aisles. It wasn't so bad. After an hour I got a seat, and there I remained for the next nine hours. We finally rolled into Mananthavady after dark, at 6.45pm. It had been a very long day. The sole reason I was there was because Mananthavady was the closest town to the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary - I went there the next morning to find that it was closed...

When I got off the bus in Mananthavady I looked up and down the street, and saw a sign for a Tourist Home. They were charging 700 rupees per night (about NZ$14) so I had a little walk and around the corner found another one, called the Hotel Riviera, which was 500 rupees. It was also probably the dirtiest place I've stayed in a long time. In terms of other accommodation if anyone else is visiting Tholpetty, I found out that there are several places to stay within a few hundred metres either side of the sanctuary's entrance. I don't know what they cost, but they look like average to expensive in price. There is also some accommodation in the sanctuary which would need to be booked online.

Mananthavady is up in the hills, which I didn't know, so the temperature is quite tolerable. It's not as cool as the Munnar area, but it is just hot rather than unbearably hot. Your skin might burn in the sun, but you're not risking bursting into flame as may be possible in some other parts of the lowlands. Night-time gets nicely cool.

The animal I wanted to see at the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary was the black-footed grey langur. All the grey langurs of India and Sri Lanka used to be treated as a single species, called the entellus or hanuman langur. Then they were split into about seven species based on DNA and differences in colour and habits. It seems mostly solid. The black-footed grey langur is Semnopithecus hypoleucos and it has one of the more restricted ranges of the group, with Tholpetty being at the heart. There are some disputes as to the extent of the species' distribution because some authors treat part of the southern plains langur (S. dussumieri) as this species (e.g. the Indian field guide doesn't even accept the dussumieri, instead dividing it between hypoleucos in the south and entellus in the north, thereby giving the latter species a distribution of almost the entire northern half of the subcontinent).

The sanctuary is 25km (about 40 minutes) from Manathavady and there's a road running right through the middle to the town of Kutta on the other side. Beyond Kutta is the Nagarhole National Park which has very expensive jeep safaris, out of my price range. There's a bus that does the Mananthavady to Kutta route, and this goes directly past the entry point to the sanctuary. I knew there were jeep safaris here (which currently cost 600 rupees for the jeep and 300 per person for the entry ticket), but I had also seen a couple of references to there being walking safaris as well which are preferable for me from both a birding perspective and a money perspective.

The guy at my hotel's reception said the first bus to Kutta left at 6.22am which was an oddly specific departure time. I didn't catch that bus because although I left the hotel at 6am I had to first find an ATM. I try to get out 2000 rupees every day, but as soon as you miss two or three days (usually because you can't find a working ATM, or you're in a village without any) your wallet is suddenly empty. I also didn't know how much the sanctuary might cost and didn't want to get out there and not be able to afford the guide. I couldn't find the first ATM I was directed towards, the second one had no money, the third one had no money, the fourth one had no money. At 6.30 I finally found one which could give me cash. India's great.

I caught a bus at 6.45am. On the way through the sanctuary there were chital (spotted deer) and bonnet macaques by the roadside. The driver let me off at the entry checkpoint. I had seen two different opening times for the sanctuary, 6am and 7am, both very early for an Indian park. However it was now about 7.30am so either way I was going in. Except I wasn't. Because the sanctuary was closed. There was some sort of dispute going on with the jeep drivers, and without jeep drivers there were no safaris, so no entry. What about tomorrow? Nobody knew, and I wasn't going to waste days sitting in Mananthavady hoping things would get worked out by tomorrow or the next day or the next day. The walking safaris were also not an option because everyone denied these were ever a thing. So I'd spent a long time on buses to get here for nothing. India's really great.

All was not necessarily lost though. I asked the guard at the checkpoint if it was okay to walk along the road, expecting an immediate no. But he said that was fine, so long as I didn't go into the jungle "because it is very dangerous". (Jungle in Indian terms isn't rainforest, as Westerners understand it to be, but rather the dry or scrubby forests typical of India). I was hoping I might be able to see some langurs in the forest along the roads, so I set off in the direction of Kutta which is a few kilometres further on. On one side of the road is a coffee plantation and on the other mostly scrub and patchy forest. There were quite a few birds, mostly common Indian species (including a flock of about thirty hill mynahs, and a Malabar grey hornbill). An unexpected bird was a yellow-rumped flycatcher - I knew what it was because it is a distinctively colourful species that I've seen several times elsewhere in Asia, but I couldn't find it in the Indian field guide until eventually I thought to look in the Appendix at the back for vagrants. I walked most of the way to Kutta then came back to the checkpoint and kept going in the other direction.

Just after a kilometre or so a passing jeep full of forest guards stopped and demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I said that the guard at the checkpoint had told me I could walk on the road, but they said that was not allowed and I had to go back immediately. This interference in my plan to just walk back to Mananthavady looking for birds and monkeys wasn't a loss either, as it turned out. About fifty metres back along the road there was a little stream running through a culvert under the road, and here I had caught a glimpse of what I had assumed would be the common three-striped palm squirrel. When I was walking back past I saw the squirrel had come out on the stream-bank and, although it was scooting in and out of the undergrowth, I realised that it was actually a jungle striped squirrel which is endemic to the Western Ghats area and was the last of the Funambulus squirrels I had yet to see (there are six species, all found in either India or Sri Lanka). It was bigger than I expected, roughly the size of the palm squirrels but chunkier. The back is a very dark brown through which the pale stripes run, and the head and tail have a distinctive red tint. It's not quite as nice as the flame-striped squirrel of Sri Lanka but it's close. I only got one photo, and it was not in focus.

Nearer to the checkpoint I stopped to look at a male plum-headed parakeet in the top of a tree. They are common here, but always worth looking at. Then a Malabar barbet suddenly flew in and landed almost next to the parakeet. Like the squirrel this is also a Western Ghats endemic and one I hadn't managed to see before. It sort of reminded me of a Gouldian finch with its red face and green body. Up in the air behind the tree were numerous Indian swiftlets and amongst them were some white-rumped spinetails and one wire-tailed swallow. Those latter two were the third and fourth "new" birds for the day (the first had been a crimson-backed sunbird).

So despite the sanctuary being closed the morning had turned out better than expected, with the jungle striped squirrel and four new birds. I waited for a bus beside the checkpoint. Some bonnet macaques were jumping in a nearby tree, and then a larger monkey jumped from there into a larger tree. That had to be a langur. I hurried over, and found two black-footed grey langurs waaaaay up high, maybe sixty feet up. As usual, I could see them fine with the binoculars but trying to take photos looking up at them against the light through all the leaves and branches was pretty futile. They were very nice though, and did look quite different from the tufted grey langurs.

 

let's say India has its ups and downs... sometimes at the same time.

 

did you get to Flores in the end? And mudskippers are neat, I never get tired of seeing them. I saw some yesterday actually.

 

LION-TAILED MACAQUES, part one

I spent all of Christmas Day on buses and trains. I left Mananthavady in the dark at 6.30am, and finished in the dark at 6.30pm in a town called Thirithalli (in the state of Karnataka above Kerala).

This part of the trip is all about lion-tailed macaques. They used to be called wanderoos in the old days, which makes them sound like some sort of Australian animal, possibly one with a tendency to roam, but they are actually monkeys. I seem to go looking for monkeys a lot, I'm not sure why. They just appeal to me as mammals to find in the wild. In 2013 a girl in China said to me "you must really like monkeys". I guess so. I'm currently on thirteen species of primates for this trip, by the way. (Or, not to give anything away, fourteen if I include the lion-tailed macaque). Anyway, the lion-tailed macaque is a big black monkey with a white mane like a lion and a tuft on the end of the tail (hence "lion-tailed", although "lion-maned" would probably be a better name). They are another one of the Western Ghats specialities, and like many of the animals of this region are now endangered through hunting and habitat loss.

Most people who go looking for wanderoos make their way to a place called Valparai. I imagine that's where Pertinax saw his ones. Valparai is tea country, somewhat near to Munnar. In fact to get there you start in Munnar, bus to Udamalpet (which is the town next on from Marayur, where I stayed when I was visiting the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary), then bus to Pollachi, and then bus to Valparai. This was my original plan way back when, but I couldn't find out much on cheap places to stay in Valparai - it all seems to be expensive estate lodges on the tea plantations. Then I happened to see a photo of a lion-tailed macaque in the Zoochat gallery, taken by toto98 at a place called Agumbe (see Lion tailed macaque (Macaca silenus) | ZooChat). I asked him about this, then made some Google searches, and decided this was much more like it for me. Agumbe is a little village in the forest 55km (about an hour) north of a large town called Udupi. There are budget accommodations in both Udupi and Agumbe, and it also makes a handy stop to break up the journey northwards (or southwards, as was the original case). I also just found out, while looking in my Indian mammal guide after getting back from Tholpetty, that black-footed grey langurs are found at Agumbe too.

It's a bit of a long haul to get from Mananthavady to Agumbe. I had been told at the Mananthavady bus station that I needed to catch first a bus to Kannur (3 hours), then a bus to Kasargode (four hours), then a bus to Mangalore (three hours), then a bus to Udupi (one hour), and then finally a bus to Agumbe (one hour). All up, twelve hours. Of course that wasn't exactly how things went although I was travelling for twelve hours without actually reaching Agumbe that day.

My first bus, the one to Kannur, left at 6.30am. I showed the conductor the bit of paper on which the route had been written, to make sure that he understood when I said "Kannur" and I didn't end up somewhere entirely different. He looked it over and said I would be better off getting the train from Kannur to Mangalore because this would take only half the time of the buses for that leg. I wasn't sure this would be an option because of the way the train system in India works - or at least how I thought it worked based on everything I had been reading before going to India - but I decided that when I got to Kannur I would hit the train station first to see if it was possible, and if not revert to the buses.

Now, the train system in India is not, so I had read, like in other countries. In most countries you go to the station, buy a ticket, get on the train. Easy. Even in China which has however many billions of people I could just go to the station and get straight on a train. In India, apparently, you cannot do that. You can only buy the tickets online, on the official government train site, and you really need to do so weeks or months in advance if you want to have any chance of actually getting a ticket. Indians are right into planning. I prefer winging it, so I figured I'd be travelling mostly on buses. To book your train tickets you first need to register with the site, and I had read of some foreigners waiting months for their registration to be verified. And just to complicate things, until just a few years ago the site would only accept Indian credit cards, so tourists had no choice but to buy from agents instead. The only ways to get tickets last-minute is with what they called Taktal where a small number of seats on each train are held off-line and released the day before travel, but these sell out within a few minutes; and for tourists there are a limited number of seats reserved specifically for them (the Tourist Quota) but only on the main routes and you can only buy these in person after much paperwork at the main train stations.

That was my understanding of the situation. All I knew in the converse was that when I was in Assam in 2014 I had bought a train ticket at the station, but I figured that must be because Assam isn't really India. So I wasn't holding out hope that I would be able to get a train from Kunnar to Mangalore. The bus conductor was sure though, so I gave it a shot. And you know what? At the station there is a ticket office and queues of people buying tickets for their trains. Same as everywhere else in the world. Stupid internet and Lonely Planet.

The bus from Mananthavady to Kunnar took almost exactly three hours as promised. I took a short tuktuk ride to the train station and bought a ticket for the 10am train, which cost just 75 rupees. The train, perhaps expectedly, was not on time. It instead arrived at 10.30 and departed at 10.45. I had no idea what was written on the ticket because one, the printing was so faint; and two, none of it was in English. I asked a few people around and they said there are no seat or carriage numbers, you just get on and sit anywhere. This wasn't entirely accurate, because there are different prices for sleeping carriages, seated carriages, and A/C carriages. When a ticket inspector came through and found me in one of the sleeping carriages he informed me that my ticket was for a seated carriage, but he was perfectly nice about it because I was a foreigner and because he collected foreign currencies. I gave him a one Ringgit note from Malaysia and a 500 Dong note from Vietnam. Then I was his best friend and he let me stay where I was.

The train got into Mangalore Central Station at just after 1pm (so just under 2.5 hours). I had some lunch at the station then jumped on a bus for Udupi which was parked right outside. This bus left at 1.20 - and went straight to the Mangalore bus stand five minutes away where it sat until 1.50. Then we were underway - to another part of town where we sat for another ten minutes. Then we were underway! Yes? Yes. An hour later I was in Udupi.

There were a lot of buses at the Udupi bus stand, no English signs, and no apparent main office. I asked a guy at one of the food stalls where I could get a bus to Agumbe, to which he replied that there was no bus to Agumbe. This didn't seem right, especially as I was one hundred percent positive that there was a bus to Agumbe. But no, he said the road was under repair so there were no buses or any other form of transport on the Udupi to Agumbe route. This was a small wrinkle in my plans. I next asked a passing bus conductor and he pointed me towards a nearby bus. There I was informed that there was no bus to Agumbe because of the road repairs, but I could take this bus to Thirtalli and then from there I could get a bus to Agumbe. The bus was leaving at 3.20 and would get to Thirtalli, where-ever that was, at 6.30pm. But there were no Agumbe buses at that time, so better I stay in Udupi and go the next morning. I asked if there were any cheap lodgings in Thirtalli, to which they replied in the affirmative, so I got on the bus. I'd rather just go now and only have a half-hour journey from Thirtalli to Agumbe the next morning, than have to spend almost four hours getting there then.

The bus did indeed arrive in Thirtalli at exactly 6.30pm - buses are obviously more punctual than trains in India! Opposite the bus stand was a lodge which I don't know the name of but which only cost 250 rupees for a room (about NZ$5). And then the next morning at 7.45 I caught my final bus to reach Agumbe.

 

LION-TAILED MACAQUES, part two

Agumbe is a little village half an hour (30km) from the town of Thirtalli or, on the usual road, an hour (55km) from Udupi. There are a small handful of cheap places to stay in Agumbe, the one I chose being the Mallya Residency which is by the bus stand and costs 500 rupees (about NZ$10). Right on the edge of the village is the Someshwara Wildlife Sanctuary, which is where the lion-tailed macaques are found. The road from Udupi runs right through this forest, and given how narrow and winding it is, it was actually good that it was currently out of action because it meant that when I was walking on it there was almost no traffic. There was some traffic because only part of the road was being resurfaced, so motorbikes and a few cars were still using it, and there were trucks carrying gravel for the job, but none of them were that regular.

I had got into Agumbe at 8.15am but couldn't get a room at Mallya until check-out time which was 9am, so I wandered off to find some breakfast first. After all that was sorted I headed off towards the forest. From the hotel it is maybe half a kilometre to the start of the forest where there is a checkpoint and a sign saying you need to get permission to enter. But there was no guard there (ever) and nobody seemed to mind that I was walking through. At one point a forest guard on a motorbike stopped to say I needed a permit and guide in the forest but if I was just on the road then that was fine.

Before getting to the checkpoint you do need to run the gauntlet of dogs. There are a lot of dogs in Agumbe. As I was getting off the bus a pack of about ten of them charged past barking and snarling. They were actually after another dog, possibly because he didn't have rabies yet and they were going to teach him a lesson, but the group of girls that had been on the bus started screaming in panic which did not make me think that dog attacks were unknown here! I didn't have any trouble with the dogs in the end. Most were cowardly and harmless. A few liked to bark. I have recently developed a technique whereby when a dog is acting aggressively, instead of running away and crying like a little girl, I just throw it a couple of biscuits which I carry for that purpose. Then the dog is suddenly all "ooh, a piece of candy" and forgets to be aggressive. Then next time I see the dog it thinks we're friends. Probably doesn't work with actual guard dogs or rabid dogs, but for the average strays and dogs-about-town it works well.

I haven't been adding many new birds lately. Most of the species I see in southern India are ones that I saw in Sri Lanka or elsewhere. In the first ten days or so I saw about 120 species in the Western Ghats, and only 29 were lifers. Today I saw quite a lot of birds, but none of them new ones. Also lots of bonnet macaques and four Malabar giant squirrels. The subspecies of giant squirrel further south in Kerala is maxima which is very dark-coloured - apart for the pale belly and head it is otherwise all black with maroon saddle. The subspecies here in Karnataka is indica which has all the black areas replaced with maroon and it is even more attractive.

At the Mallya Residency I had asked the chap at the front where the best place to see the lion-tailed macaques was and he had replied without hesitation "Sunset Point". This is about two kilometres along the road through the forest. A hundred metres before you get there, there is a small lake for boating and a checkpost. There was a squadron of bonnet macaques lined up along the lake's fence, waiting to be fed by visitors. I asked one of the guards where the best place to see lion-tailed macaques was, and he also immediately said "Sunset Point". There were, as might be guessed, no lion-tailed macaques at Sunset Point, which is a concrete viewing platform sticking out from the road over the downward slope of the mountain.

The road from this point turned into a series of hairpin bends. There didn't seem any reason I shouldn't keep walking, so down I went, for just over seven kilometres - I know this because I passed the end of the roadworks and the foreman told me that only the top 7km are Agumbe's concern, all the rest belongs to the Udupi district and it is up to them to sort it out. So the road was closed just for the top 7km to be resurfaced. Just about everyone who passed on a motorbike or who was working on the road wanted a photo with me. I guess not that many white tourists end up here.

There were more bonnet macaques along the road down here too, and I also saw a jungle striped squirrel and a group of black-footed grey langurs. Those last two mammals were what had made me think the Tholpetty jaunt wasn't a total loss. Of the four new birds I saw at Tholpetty the wire-tailed swallow and white-rumped spinetail are both more common further north so I'll probably see them again; and the crimson-backed sunbird is very common at Agumbe (just about every small bird I got my binoculars onto here was one of these sunbirds). I won't see Malabar barbets anywhere from now on, so that becomes the sole species from Tholpetty that I didn't or won't see elsewhere. When I had found out the langurs were found here at Agumbe I thought maybe they would be more difficult to see than at Tholpetty, but in fact they are very easy to see, although still quite shy.

After quite a lot of walking, thinking about how maybe just round the next bend there would be a lion-tailed macaque, I decided to call it quits for the morning. It was getting very hot, the return walk was going to be all uphill, and I had a suspicion that the roadworks would have made sure the macaques were keeping away from the road. It turned out that the roadworks may have been keeping them away but for a different reason than noise or smell - with the road mostly not being used, there were no motorists coming along to feed the monkeys. Like at Valparai, the reason the lion-tailed macaques are easy to see here is because they have become habituated to being fed and so remain next to the roadsides.

In the afternoon I returned through the forest to Sunset Point. On the way I saw two different groups of black-footed grey langurs, and I think I may have even got some passable photos of some of them. There were still bonnet macaques at Sunset Point, but no lion-tailed macaques. Back at the hotel in the evening I was filling out the registration book (because the owner Suhindra hadn't been there in the morning) and when I said I hadn't seen any lion-tailed macaques everyone expressed surprise. I just needed to go down "six bends" on the road and the macaques were "always there". I dislike when someone says an animal is "always there" or "guaranteed" because it usually means you are not going to see it! Suhindra said one of the guys would take me down to the spot on his motorbike the next morning and I would definitely see them. No need to be early, ten o'clock is fine for the macaques - they are "always there". Hmm.

At 10am I met up with Anankumar who, it turned out, worked as a guide for trekking in the forest. Normally this month is busy for him but with the Udupi road closed there was almost nobody coming to the area. He also said that maybe I could see one or two lion-tailed macaques at Sunset Point but only sometimes. So that's not the best place after all. Down the road we went (many more bends than six!), and at about 8km there was suddenly a male lion-tailed macaque standing on a big rock, waiting. Just one kilometre more and I would have seen them yesterday! There were a few more visible here and there in the trees, including some tiny baby ones, but they didn't seem eager to show themselves. There were also black-footed grey langurs in the trees, equally shy, and bonnet macaques on the roadside, not shy at all. Three monkey species in one spot.

Anankumar said if we had some bananas I would be able to get photos because then the lion-tailed macaques would come out, so I waited there while he shot off on his bike to the village of Someshwara a kilometre or so further on. Soon he returned and the second he opened the box in which he had put the bananas he was swarmed by bonnet macaques. The lion-tailed macaques came galloping out onto the road but mostly missed out. Anankumar said normally the macaques will take the food by hand, but there were so few people passing by lately that they were all famished. That's one of the obvious issues with monkeys becoming habituated to being fed at roadsides - they lose the habit of going and finding their food naturally. I did get a lot of photos of the lion-tailed macaques, and some of them are probably good ones (I've only looked at them on the camera screen so far).