Three and a half months, nineteen guides and one gaur: the year the walk stopped

Ask a visitor what the dangerous animal at Kakkayam is and they will say elephant, or tiger. The forest here holds both, along with leopard and sloth bear, and the state’s own ecotourism page says the prospects of crossing the track of elephants are huge. But the animal that closed this place, twice, in the space of six weeks, was the gaur — the Indian bison — and one of the two incidents happened in the children’s park.

20 January 2024, about half past four

A wild gaur came into the tourism centre in the late afternoon and attacked Neethu Elias, thirty-two, and her four-year-old daughter Ann Maria, visitors from Edappally in Ernakulam. It happened in the children’s park area — not on a forest trail, not at a viewpoint, but in the part of the site specifically laid out for families with small children.

Neethu shielded her daughter and took the animal’s weight herself. She was left with three broken ribs and eight sutures to the head; the child was left with a facial scar. They were treated first at Koorachundu and then at a private hospital in Kozhikode.

Both operations at Kakkayam shut the same day — KSEB’s hydel tourism centre and the Forest Department’s eco-tourism programme, two separate authorities arriving at the same decision within hours. A forest team went in the following day to drive the animal off the hydel centre’s grounds.

5 March 2024

Boating had reopened on 1 March. Four days later a second gaur attack killed a local farmer, Palattiyil Abraham. He was not a tourist. That is the detail that gives the story its real shape: this is not an attraction with a wildlife risk bolted on for visitors, it is a working landscape where the people who live in it carry the same risk every day and carry it year round.

The death forced the eco-tourism reopening to be postponed again. The trekking programme did not restart until 11 May 2024 — three and a half months after the January closure. About two hundred people came on the first day back.

Nineteen guides

The number that makes this more than an incident report is nineteen. That is how many guides work the Kakkayam eco-tourism programme, and for three and a half months they had no work at all.

One of them, Salomi Thomas, put it to a reporter in the plainest possible terms: the closure affected our lives, as many of us depend solely on this job. There is no seasonal fallback built into the arrangement and no compensation mechanism reported. When the gate shuts, the wages stop.

This is worth understanding because of how the trek is organised. Kerala’s Forest Department states that visitor management and eco-restitution activities at the Peruvannamuzhi and Kakkayam ecotourism centres are carried out through the Vana Samrakshana Samithies — the village forest-protection committees drawn from the settlements around the reserve. That is the policy sentence. Nineteen households is what the policy sentence means on the ground.

It also explains something visitors sometimes read as officiousness. The guide walking with you is not a tour operator’s employee and not a park ranger. They are from a village committee whose bargain with the forest is that protecting it is what pays. The ₹40 on the ticket is the mechanism.

Two authorities, two decisions

The 2024 closure also exposed the split that governs everything at Kakkayam. KSEB, through its Kerala Hydel Tourism Centre, runs the reservoir and the boats. The Forest Department runs the trail and the sanctuary. They sell separate tickets at separate counters, and — as March showed — they close and reopen on separate judgements.

Boating came back on 1 March. The trek came back on 11 May. For ten weeks it was possible to buy a ticket at Kakkayam and get on the water while the walk everyone had come for remained shut. If you have ever wondered why no two published accounts of Kakkayam’s fees, hours or status agree with each other, this is why: there is no single authority here for them to agree about.

What it means for planning a visit

Three things, none of them alarmist. First, ring before you drive: this is a site with a demonstrated history of closing at short notice for reasons no seasonal calendar predicts, and a wildlife closure is not a monsoon closure. The Divisional Forest Office, Kozhikode is the authority for the trek.

Second, take the guiding seriously rather than treating it as a formality. Gaur are grazing animals that will stand their ground and are extremely fast over short distances; they are not aggressive by disposition and they do not need to be.

Third, keep the risk in proportion. Across everything documented at Kakkayam, the rock and the water at Urakkuzhi have injured and killed more people than the animals have. The gaur closed the site for three and a half months. The waterfall is the reason forest staff will not let you swim.