There is, in my opinion, no one single "Most Beautiful Place in the World", but many. And whenever I run into one, it takes my breath away.
Today I added another Most Beautiful Place in the World to my list. It is, so far, only the second agricultural entry on my list - the first being the Yuan Yang rice terraces in Yunnan province, China. The other nominees are mainly ancient structures built for the glory of deities or natural formations and landscapes. The place I saw today was nature pruned and fine tuned by man and the end result is just beautiful. May I present: The tea plantations of the Nilgiri mountains (Blue Mountains) of Tamil Nadu.
I have seen tea plantations in many countries, but never ones as visually stunning as these. The plantations were on steep slopes, so trees were dotted here and there to keep the top soil in place. These trees' limbs were pruned so that they wouldn't cast too much shadow on the tea plants below.
The tea plants were planted into more or less straight lines
or as a more loose formation, the latter of which made the texture look somewhat like the surface of a (green) brain. This may not sound good, but it looks good!
The result is a landscape, which was obviously sculpted by man for his purposes - but also looked lush, green and hilly - somewhat like the Shire, home of the hobbits, in the movie Lord of the Rings. Except with a more dramatic background of mountains.
A local bus from the town of Connor dropped me off at Delphin's nose, a touristy view point. From there I walked the 8 km to Lamb's Point, another touristy view point. In my oppinion neither of these two was much to write home about. Though they did house a very tame group of monkeys.
However the curvy mountain road between the two offered some truly stunning topography and scenery.
The bus, the only one servicing this district, ran every hour in one direction and the next hour back to Connor. The driver (in the mirror) and ticket sales person were interested in my project of walking from A to B. They passed me a total of six times coming or going, honked and waved every time and made sign gestures to ask if I wanted to get onboard. I don't think they were too impressed with my rate of progress, since I was mesmerized and constantly stopped to stare in awe - or take photos, since I was sure that every new vista was better than the one before.
Apart from my encounters with the friendly local bus, I was, once again, all on my own, with only the tea pickers to keep me company. They were very friendly - I got several invitations to share their lunch with them, which I politely declined. One the lunch offers was from Govindra in the photo below.
I couldn't, however, decline their request to take selfies with them with my camera. Much as I love my camera, it's not exactly the perfect tool for selfies, but they seemed pleased enough with the end results.
I found myself laughing aloud from joy - and a kind of disbelief: It was hard to accept that a landscape like the one I saw in front of me truly existed.
Part of the disbelief was from the improbably vivid green colour of the tea plants. Since the top leaves are routinely picked for the best quality tea, the plants are in a constant state of leaf regrowth and the top leaves are that impossibly vibrant shade of green you see in late Spring / early Summer in Finland.
Today I feel truly blessed to be where I am, humbled to be seeing what I am seeing, living the life.
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