As my train pulls away from a small station in a small town in the Western Ghats, I look out at the dawn light creeping up over the Indian countryside knowing that this will be my last view of it, at least for some time. This is a 3-hour journey to my final destination, and having last night witnessed the fourth full moon since my arrival in Varanasi, I am about to leave a country that has begun to feel like home.

Three young men greeted me on the platform this morning with "Hello again, remember us from yesterday?" - well, maybe, but a lot of people wanted to make friends with me yesterday - they don't get too many tourists in this place. A group of men on the train up here were quite bemused when I told them about the event I would be attending. "We've never heard of it", they said, "Why don't you go to the famous one at..."

But the day could not have provided a better climax to my time in this diverse and fascinating country. Costumed people arrived in their droves during the afternoon, coming from all over Kerala to demonstrate their own particular customs and rituals. The largest of these were sixteen huge makeshift horse effigies being carried on wooden platforms by groups of men, each from a different town. The horses were carried in turn to face the temple and bounced up into the air with huge roars from the crowd.

The event was the Chinakkathoor Elephant Pooram, an annual temple festival held once a year. So it wasn't just people and pretend horses that were in attendance - no less than twenty of the big, grey floppy-eared mammals put in an appearance an hour or so before sunset. They bore riders under tall umbrellas who later turned out to be the main entertainment, dancing on top of the animals to the rhythm of the drums below. Arranged in two rows of ten elephants, facing each other across a large field full of revellers, it was a spectacular sight. It was due to go on right through the night, but I'm afraid large Indian crowds with all their pushing and shoving are something I only have a certain amount of time for.

It has been a busy week, so a second short tale from the Western Ghats managed to escape capture on the blog. Between Alleppey and Kannur (Feb 12th to 14th), I visited Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary at Kumily/Thekkady. I had been itching to get into the hills for some time, but I saw no point being in an area good for hiking with a knee injury. After the massage seemed to have worked miracles, I raced up to this area on a rickety local bus and found a couple of English ecologists and their friend who had arranged to do a long hike through the jungle and over the hills bordering Tamil Nadu. We had to take with us two experienced guides and an armed guard, as tigers, bears and 1500 wild elephants roam the park. The most we saw though was a giant squirrel, a few interesting birds and the shed skin of a king cobra. It was great to be hiking again, but the descent from the hills proved costly. My knee was becoming fairly painful again, and has been ever since! But for this, and the high costs of hiring guides and park entrance fees, I would like to have stayed in that area for longer.