After a 4 hour drive we arrived at Periyar, this little town is 150 metres above sea level.The temperature was good, it was hot but hardly any humidity which was nice.We arrived in the afternoon and checked into our hotel and did some washing and chilled out until we met the group again at night and took a walk around the town and went to see a "cultual show", which was em.....interesting haha.It was all about the ancient South Indian language which is spoken through hand gestures and facial expressions, they ran through what they all mean at the beginning but there are so many its really hard to tell what is going on when they are telling the story.It was really good to see, just maybe an hour was a bit long when you didnt have a clue what was going on.

We didnt get up to much after, just went for something to eat and off to bed as we had a very early start the next day.

At 6am the following morning we got up and headed off to Periyar Tiger Reserve, this is a very large reserve which is designed to protect the Royal Bengal Tigers from extinction.There are around 40 tigers in the reserve, 1100 wild elephants and lots of other animals.We were doing a 2 and a half hour trek through this reserve to see if we could find any tigers.

Well.....once we were in the heart of the jungle, Shay was pooping herself, adiment that if the tigers were hungry they were going to hunt us down and get us haha.It didnt help that the guides didnt have any sort of protection with them at all.After about 15 minutes of walking we stumbled across some elephant dung and it was very fresh, so we knew there were some elephants very close.The guides left us and went to try and find them, after about 10 minutes they came to get us and we heading off the track and into the trees and we seen a herd of wild elephants, there were a couple of big ones a a few babies about 50 metres away from us, it was so amazing to be standing there just watching them.Well worth gettting up for.

We still had another hour or so of treking to do, it was fairly uneventful apart from then the elephant roared and Shay thought it was a tiger and ran about a mile haha.Apart from that it was just a nice walk through the jungle, we didnt see any tigers and I think Shay was quite releaved lol.Seeing the wild elephants made it worth while and appartently we were pretty lucky as most groups come on the trek and dont see anything.So we were happy.

At night we heading out to see a Martial Arts show, it was good to see, very choriagraphed though, but it still took skill to do it all.They did some impressive jumping through fire hoops at the end, where Jonny managed to take a very good action photo, mid jump through the fire hoop.....he is very impressed with this photo haha.

After the show we found a nice place to eat and then headed to a hotel nearby to play some snooker, the boys played snooker and the girls had a cup of tea :) it was a good night.

The following morning we heading off to Varkala to the beach part of our tour and the final two days.Both really looking forward to some beach time to work on our tans haha, which are non existant at the moment.

J+B