Skip to main content

Beyond seas and hills

On Kozhikode beach in early 1990s


The oceans and the mountains have their unique charms. The mystery of the mountains and the infinity of the oceans can hold us spellbound. Sometimes they invite us to meld into them and vanish altogether. The cliffs have often invited me to jump off them and the seas have stirred similar longings.
 
At Malampuzha Dam in late 1980s
There are other places too without seas and mountains but with a lot of charm and grace. They may be the trails through a village whose pristine beauty has not been swallowed by the octopus of development. Even a desert has its own music to entice us with.
 
Maggie melding into a shrine at Mahabalipuram in late 1990s
A year ago I visited Mango Meadows, world’s first agricultural theme park. It is in central Kerala, 30 acres of land tucked into typical Keralite villages. It has an amazing variety of plants which were once used in Kerala’s traditional medicines. Apart from them, there are also other trees and plants which are on the verge of vanishing from the face of the earth because of ‘development’.

I loved the place for its sheer natural beauty with all those plants and trees as well as the lake in which you can go boating. You can also go cycling on the narrow lanes within the park. I loved that too.

Here are some pictures from that visit.

A view of Mango Meadows

Even the art in the park is in tune with the park's theme

There's even a traditional rowboat!

I loved the cycling 

PS: Written for In[di]spire Edition 253: #Travel

Comments

  1. Bookish delight and joyDecember 21, 2018 at 7:35 PM

    Very interesting

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2018 at 11:30 PM

      You must have been surprised to see one of your old friends.

      Delete
  2. dee NambiarDecember 22, 2018 at 7:49 AM

    Mango Meadows sounds like an interesting place.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. dee NambiarDecember 22, 2018 at 7:54 AM

      I just looked up the site from the link in the post. Impressive! :)

      Delete
    2. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 22, 2018 at 8:47 AM

      I liked the place. It is quite unique as you must have understood from their site.

      Delete
  3. Neeraj KumarDecember 22, 2018 at 9:58 AM

    And I thought that it was only me who thought of diving into the seas and jumping off the cliff when encountering them. The Pics are really refreshing sir. And the first pic seems as if a still from a movies having all its heroes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 22, 2018 at 11:25 AM

      Glad to meet a kindred soul. 😃
      The first pic belongs to those wanton days of thoughtless youth.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...
62 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, chastised in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4 ...
10 comments
Read more