A 15 minite blog on kerala India

Kerala is the southernmost state of India, It is every green. We stayed in the mountains where there were monkeys, there were also elephants. I got to wash one, I scrubbed his ears and he sprayed me with water through his trunk. We stayed in the area were many of India's spices are grown. There was lots of pepper, cardamom, nutmeg and cloves. The cardamom has a very pretty flower that’s part of the orchid family. The food in Kerala is very spicy. 

Then we went down to the back waters. It was a very poor area; the ladies bathed and washed their hair in the river. The river wasn’t very clean. They also did their laundry in the river; they beat the clothes on the rocks and then carried their clothes home in buckets. Everybody relied on the river, there were few roads. We saw men transporting the rice by boat to the only road were a truck was being loaded. They also transported coconuts by boat. Kerala supplies a lot of India with rice but the crop that was most abundant in the lower eras was rubber, it was everywhere. Rubber it got from trees by tapping the tree and waiting for the sap to drip into little coconut husks which are tied to the trees. We also saw lots of coffee plantations. 

Then we went back up into the mountains to Munnar. Tea plantations are very labour intensive because the tea pickers have to walk many kilometres every day and must only pick the fresh young leaves of the tops of the carefully cultivated plants, every leaf has to be picked separately. They get very small wages (less than 4 dollars a day) and women get paid even less. The landscape has had a huge amount of the rainforest cleared for the tea plantation. It looks like a big green jigsaw puzzle. There are lots of big granite tors scattered among the tee plants which suggests that the soil is very acidic. This is why tea grows so well here.

(Internet's bad I'll add photos later)