A waterfall below a power station is not a natural waterfall

Most waterfall advice is really rainfall advice: go after the monsoon, avoid the dry months, check the forecast. That advice is only half useful here, because the Muthirapuzha at this point is not behaving like a rain-fed river. It is being managed.

Upstream, a weir completed in 1944 takes the river out of its bed and sends it through a conducting system to the Pallivasal power house. Downstream of that power house — which is where you are standing — the water comes back, through six Pelton wheels. So the level over these rocks is set partly by the catchment and partly by the generating schedule.

What that means in practice

It can rise without rain. If the station picks up load, more water comes down, on a clear afternoon, with nothing in the sky to warn you. This is the single most important safety point on the page and it is why nothing — bags, shoes, phones, children — should be left on a rock in the middle of the channel.

It can be low in a wet week and running in a dry one. The correlation between what the weather did yesterday and what the river is doing today is weaker here than at a rain-fed falls like Attukad or Lakkam.

And it can be close to bare. In a dry March or April the slabs can be largely exposed, which is what the review reading "No water. Not good to visit in summer season" is reporting, and it is a fair warning rather than a grumble.

When to go

September to early January, with October and November the best of it. The north-east monsoon is still feeding the catchment, the lane down is in usable condition, and there is water over the rock without the river being dangerous.

Avoid March and April if the waterfall itself is the point. Avoid June to August unless you are content to look at it from the bridge — there is plenty of water then, and both the steep unnamed lane and the riverbed are genuinely hazardous rather than merely wet.

One thing this site has that almost nothing else on the Munnar circuit does: there is no dawn advantage. At 796 m, nearly seven hundred metres below Munnar town, the gorge is in shadow early and late and comfortable in the middle of the day. You can arrive at noon, which on this plateau is unusual advice.

And the rock

The falls here are broad shelving slabs of gneiss rather than a vertical drop, and when there is water on them there is usually algae under it. Wet, they are as slick as ice. The injuries at sites of this kind are slips rather than falls from a height, and the bridge across the middle of the river is both the best view and the only safe standing.