The good old Eravikulam days

"We saw two stags, three dholes, five wild pigs and six pairs of very sore feet!" runs an exuberant entry in a visitors’ book I chanced upon recently. Maintained in a lodge deep inside Eravikulam long before it became Kerala’s first National Park, the yellowing register chronicles visitors’ experiences from 1939 to 1978.

It opens up vistas of a laidback era during the British Raj when Eravikulam’s forbidding isolation (more than 8,000 feet above mean sea level) lured many to explore it. Besides their insightful observations, the journal is a record of hunting and trout fishing.

The trout, incidentally, was introduced by Munnar’s British tea planters as early as 1920 and still flourishes in Eravikulam. Though fishing is no longer permitted, it was quite popular during the Raj. Indeed a veteran British angler wryly reminisces that the visitors’ book is "A tale of the whoppers that got away and the midgets that didn’t!"

Thumbing through the tome, one finds dated entries by many well-known figures from the world of conservation — Belinda Wright of the WWF, Dr George Schaller of the New York Zoological Society, Hugh Elliott of the IUCN, JC Daniel of the Bombay Natural History Society, noted ornithologist Zafar Futehally et al.

Interestingly, tiger sightings have been reported on and off. In 1982, Cliff Rice, an American research scholar, filmed a magnificent beast strolling near the lodge. Early on Christmas morning in 1969, John Gouldsbury heard a tiger roaring in Turner’s Valley — perhaps to herald the auspicious day. Thankfully, the feline’s still around.

Once, while fishing in Eravikulam, a British lady saw a stag, pursued by a murderous pack of dholes, plunge into the water in a frantic bid to escape. Terrified, she promptly followed suit — only to be told, on being fished out, that dholes never attack humans!

Besides badly blistered feet, trekkers often battle bloodthirsty leeches. "The parasites fed sumptuously on our blue blood — certified by Dr Balaraman!" writes one witty Indian visitor. Another was so badly bled that he all but needed a blood transfusion!

Having trekked through Eravikulam’s mesmerising interior and camped overnight in the spartanly furnished lodge on two memorable occasions in the 1980s, I could well understand why true nature lovers are irresistibly drawn to it. For Eravikulam casts its spell on all who venture to sample its charms.