Periyer is one of the largest and most visited reserves in India high up in the tea and cardamom hills. With only 2 days and 2 nights here we booked up for a days trek in the reserve which started with a painful and chilly 5.20am start. Before we reached the reserve we stopped off for a quick drink of cardamom chai (tea) which is delicioius and warmed us up nicely. Once our breakfast of Idlly (squidgy rice cake) coconut saucy stuff, spicy tomato chutney and pineapple, (yep that's right spice and all things curried are the norm for an India breakfast) we began the 3.5hr trek to see the elusive tiger and elephants.

This was by no means a stroll in the park, rather hiking up and down steep river valleys trying to keep our lungs inside our chests, while aiming to spot the leeches making a break for our ankles and any other exposed flesh below the waist!

Rachel and I were given huge socks to tie just below the knee to keep the pesky blood suckers out, Steve and Roger on the other hand weren't so lucky as there wasn't enough socks to go around everyone trekking that day so decided to be big brave boys and go without. You remove leeches by covering them with salt so there were often calls of "Get the salt!!" coming from the pair of them, Roger had 7 on him at one point and Steve had one in between his little toe. Leeches don't hurt but you don't arf bleed once they're done with you!

After 3.5 hrs we'd seen f&*k all except 2 frogs, huge tadpolish type things, a tigers foot print and copious amount of elephant crap…..Where are they then?!!??! The walk back along the road we saw loads of huge monkeys, maybe it would've been more worthwhile to have just stayed on the road (?) rather then put everyone through what felt like bootcamp, I may be over exaggerating, but hell, it was painful! The rest of the day was spent rather less energetic, having lunch and pedaloing around the lake to the waterfall.

With disappointed faces having not seen anything particularly WOW we got in to the jee3p for the journey back. As we turned a corner 3 jeeps had pulled over and a group were frantically pointing about 400m across into the trees…..Elephants!!!! We could barely get a good view as they were so deep into the woods it was only a quick swish of their tail or flap of an ear that gave them away, they were soon walking down the hill out of sight until a driver further down the hill urgently ushered us all to "Quick quick" which we gathered meant "move it cos I can see them better here" so we all proceeded to peg it down the hill (15 of us) regardless of the fact that the noise of our pounding feet would probably cause the elephants to do one, but no we were really lucky and there they were eating away about 250m in front of us with a baby ellie in tow too.. Yay!!

It was early to bed as we had a total of 12 hrs travel the next day back on local bus and train to Varkala which is a beach/cliff town back on the south west cost of Kerala.

Not much to say about Varkarla it was very nice much what you'd expect from a beachy type resort, good food, serves beer and cheap accommodation. Overall a good place to re-charge the batteries and decide where we were off to next….