Visit to Cumbam from Thekkady – A day excursion

It has been some time that we decided, a Visit to Cumbam from Thekkady .There is an element of excitement visiting Cumbam because we have been seeing Cumbam valley every day from our viewpoint at Beaumont Plantation Retreat. Cumbam is valley consist of mostly large farmlands of paddy, vegetables, grape vineyards, Mango and pomegranate farms. Just twenty kilometers downhill is Cumbam, we drive past Thekkady, cross the border and move to Tamil Nadu.

As we reach the downhill, there is a drastic change in the climate, the temperature rose just more than thirty degree Celsius, we literally started to sweat. The roads are very much straight and well tarred. We If looked carefully we could see these roads from the view point at Beaumont Plantation Retreat. We drove sometime and suddenly this idea of visiting a Pomegranate farm came up. When we look atop the mountains, we could see the Aruvikuzi waterfalls flowing down to the plains. We could see a lot of people setting up shops and selling mangoes. We stopped and bought some for ourselves, and decided to visit the pomegranate farm.

We took a slight deviation from the main road, after three kilometers we reached an “Adipoli” pomegranate farm. We never knew pomegranates required so much of sunlight, we were under the impression, and pomegranate was a hilly terrain crop. The pomegranate farm is an organic farm with a lot of livestock, a nursery; they have even got some rooms for guests who are very much fond of farms and agriculture. We headed to Cumbam for lunch, when you cross the border from Kerala to Tamil Nadu, the cuisine changes altogether. We stopped at Cumbam town for lunch, got into “Vasantha Bhavan” Restaurant, and had a wonderful vegetarian meal. Here the rice is what we generally call as “White rice” the “ponni” variety of rice as they locally say. You would definitely need a nap after lunch, it was elaborate and heavy.

We headed back to Chellarkovil through the cumbam mettu road, on our way back you could see a lot of Jeep convoys going downhill carrying cardamom estate workers. It is estimated that around 2500 jeeps ply this route every day transferring workers from Tamil Nadu to Idukki for estate work. Around 35000 workers come to Idukki in the morning and go back to Cumbam in the evening. We reached chellarkovil in the evening, and it was a very nice experience and we had a wonderful day with a lot of nice experience – Visit to Cumbam from Thekkady .