Seetharkundu is not a trek — and the real one starts on the plain

Seetharkundu is the best-known thing on the Nelliyampathy plateau and it is routinely described as a trek. From the top it is nothing of the kind. You drive out five kilometres from the settlement on an estate road, park, and walk for about two minutes.

What you get for the two minutes

The plateau simply ends. A thousand metres below, the Palakkad plain runs flat and hazy to the horizon with the Kollengode paddy country laid out at the bottom of the drop. Below the lip and to one side there is a waterfall that runs hard in and after the rains and shrinks to a stain on the rock by February. On a clear winter morning you can read the plain: fields, tanks, roofs, the hills across the gap.

The macaques

The car park is part of the experience whether you want it to be or not. Bonnet macaques work it with complete confidence — sitting on car roofs, taking biscuits out of hands, going through an open window if you leave one. They are habituated because people have fed them. Shut the vehicle and keep food out of sight.

There are two viewpoints, not one

Two are mapped along this stretch of escarpment a few hundred metres apart. The one everybody means is the one the road and the car park serve. The second is further along and reached on foot by a narrow path through the scrub; it gives a slightly different angle down the same face and it is almost always empty.

The trek that is a trek

Before the ghat road existed, people reached this edge by climbing it from Kollengode on the plain directly below. That climb still exists and Kerala Tourism calls it exhilarating; the hilltops on that side run eight to fifteen kilometres from the plain and the ascent is continuous. It is a completely different undertaking from the walking on the plateau, and it is the only version of Seetharkundu that deserves the word.