Walking in the Western Ghats

The Western Ghats are one of the world’s first mountain systems, thought to have been formed when the supercontinent of Gondwana broke up around 130 million years ago. It’s an original in more ways than one, celebrated as one of the planet’s 36 biodiversity hotspots – and with a UNESCO World Heritage stamp to go with it.

“It’s got a tremendous amount of endemism,” says Thomas. “Some wildlife isn’t found anywhere but here. Similarly, butterflies, dragonflies and reptiles – they’re all in huge numbers and they’re still recording new species almost every year.”

All our walking vacations include a trip to one of the eight tiger reserves in the Western Ghats, including Periyar Tiger Reserve. On foot, tiger sightings are rare – perhaps a good thing – but you can also hop in a jeep for tiger tracking that covers more ground. Flying squirrels, leopards and packs of wild dogs are more common. You can also see lion-tailed (and lion-maned) macaques, sloth bears, goat-like Nilgiri tahrs, gaur, Indian wild dogs and Malabar giant squirrels with multicoloured fur coats that need to be seen to be believed.

“My favorite is elephants,” says Thomas. Around 30 percent of the world’s population of Asian elephants live in the Western Ghats. “They’re great animals and there are herds of them all across the foothills of the Western Ghats. Our guides can smell elephants; they can feel elephants.”

Great guides mean great sightings – but they can also help you avoid sightings when needed. Bumping into a tiger might sound risky, but really it’s the lone tuskers and elephants with babies who won’t hesitate about telling you where to go.

“These mountains have been forested for millennia,” says Thomas. “The first shock came from the British.”

British colonial rule started in the 18th century – and one of the first things they did was log it all, including tracks and walking paths. “In our system, we didn’t document,” says Thomas. “We passed it down... But when the British came, they documented everything. The birds, the animals, the migratory paths, the trees – everything was mapped.”

The early 1800s was the time of the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian, when Colonel William Lambton started a survey of India to work out the curvature of the earth. You might not have heard of Lambton, but you have probably heard of the assistant who succeeded him and completed the task: George Everest. The original maps are still in Mysore.

“There’s very little difference in what we can do with the latest technology and what those soldiers did with a sexton then,” says Thomas. “They were the first ones to map out this huge mountain system.”

The Opium Wars put a stop to tea being shipped from China to Britain, so the Crown eyed up their other colonies for tea growing potential. “That’s the time when the real destruction of the Western Ghats started,” says Thomas. “Before that it was completely forested. Elephants used to move over 600km; now they can’t move 100km because it’s tea plantations and roads.”

Plantation owners chipped away at the forest throughout the narrow states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, pushing Indigenous people out and into forced labour, before expanding their plantations into Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra.

“What we are seeing right now is fragmentation,” says Thomas. That fragmentation has also pushed hungry big cats dangerously close to people. “Tigers used to travel large distances. If they come now, they are shot.”