Kerala's Himalayan escape — tea gardens, cardamom mist, and elephant trails
Munnar is Kerala's high-altitude hill station at 1,600m, where British tea planters carved an entire green world out of the Western Ghats — today the rolling terraces of Tata Tea cover every hillside in ordered rows while cardamom and pepper vines crowd the forest floor. The town itself is tiny but the surrounding countryside is spectacular: the Eravikulam National Park shelters the endangered Nilgiri Tahr, and Anamudi at 2,695m is the highest peak in peninsular India. Every chai here is made with Munnar single-estate leaves steeped with crushed cardamom.
Munnar was uninhabited mountain forest until Scottish planter John Daniel Munro opened the first tea estate in 1877, followed by James Finlay and Company which eventually became Tata Tea. The British built a hill railway (later dismantled), a club, and a church in the colonial enclave still visible around the old bazaar. During the independence movement Munnar remained a company town; its workers launched one of Kerala's defining strikes in 2015 when female tea-pluckers walked off the Tata estates demanding a wage increase — and won.