Pothundy: the dam at the bottom of the Nelliyampathy hill

Pothundy is the last flat, ordinary-looking place before the Nelliyampathy road starts turning back on itself, and almost everybody sees it in the mirror. It is worth stopping at, and it is worth stopping at on the way down rather than on the way up.

The mortar

The core wall of the old dam is described as having been packed with a mixture of jaggery and quicklime rather than cement — a lime-and-sugar mortar of a kind used in Indian masonry long before Portland cement arrived. It is the single most repeated fact about the place and it is a genuinely interesting one, as long as it is understood as a description of the nineteenth-century core rather than of everything standing there today.

How old, honestly

You will see Pothundy called one of the oldest dams in India. The claim is old, widely repeated, and hedged even by the records that carry it. What is solid is narrower and still worth the stop: a nineteenth-century masonry dam, later folded into a medium irrigation project that was completed in 1971 and which is what the reservoir is operated for now. The modern figures usually given are about 32.6 metres high and 1,680 metres long, across the Meenichiladipuzha and the Padipuzha.

What there is to do

Gardens by the dam, boating on the reservoir, and the view back up at the wall of hills you are about to drive into. In the dry months the water is drawn well down and a wide band of bare shore shows round the edge. Early morning is when the mist sits on it. Charges for the garden and the boats are set locally, so carry cash.

And from above

The other half of Pothundy is seen from the plateau road further up, where the whole sheet of water appears below in the trees. That long look down is one of the set pieces of the drive, and it is worth a second stop. Between the dam and the settlement there are twenty kilometres of near-continuous curve; published hairpin counts for it run from ten to twenty-three, which tells you mainly that people count them differently. The plateau is at the top of it.