You can be standing on the highest ground in Kasaragod district about an hour after you get out of the car, having paid fifty rupees for it, and in the Western Ghats that combination is rarer than it sounds. No permit, no guide, no minimum party and nothing to book. What buys it is a made road that climbs a very long way up a hill, and a Forest Department gate at the end of it that asks nothing of a visitor except cash and an early start.
The story of Ranipuram trek
The drive is the first surprise. Guidebooks and travel pages describe the last stretch as a rough nine-kilometre jeep track that a low car should not attempt, and advise hiring a jeep at Panathady. The map says otherwise, and it says so unambiguously: the Panathadi–Ranipuram road is a made two-lane road with a tarred surface, classified as a major district road, and it is tarred every metre of the way to the counter. It climbs roughly six hundred metres in about ten kilometres, from plantation country at the bottom to grassland at the top, and it takes an ordinary car about eleven minutes. What slows people down is the bends and the cloud, not the surface.
The building at the top of it is small and has a board outside, and the board is worth reading before you buy anything, because it is the plainest statement of what this place is. Fifty rupees for an adult. Twenty for a child. A hundred and fifty for a foreigner. Fifty for a camera. Entry between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon, and — in the department’s own slightly formal English — visitors are returned before half past five from the forest. Two times doing two jobs: three o’clock is the last moment anyone goes in, and half past five is when the hill is empty.
The number that says most about Ranipuram is one you will never see printed at the gate. The department’s booking system allows this centre to issue up to nine hundred and ninety-eight tickets in a day. Set that against the walks it runs elsewhere in the north — ten a day at Aralam, sixty at Vagamon, with a minimum party size at both — and it becomes clear that Ranipuram is not being rationed at all. There is no minimum number, so a couple can do it; there is no booking to make, because online booking for this programme is switched off; and there is effectively no ceiling to bump into. You drive up, you pay in cash at the window, and you walk.
The walk itself is short and the state is honest about it. Kerala Tourism calls it two kilometres and about an hour, and calls it a soft trek — a phrase that is easy to read as marketing and is in fact accurate. Stone steps are laid into the track in places. The gradient is steady. An hour of it brings you out of the trees and onto rolling grass, and that is where the hill changes character entirely.
What you are walking through is the thing that makes Ranipuram genuinely unusual rather than merely pleasant. The open ground is grass — much of it lemongrass, which is why people say the air up here smells of it — and set into every fold and hollow of that grass is a rounded island of dark evergreen forest, packed tight, dripping and several degrees colder than the air a stride outside it. Those are sholas: stunted wet woods that survive in the sheltered creases of high south Indian hills, where the cold air pools and fire cannot easily run. Kerala Tourism records this as the only place in Kasaragod district where they are found. The boundary between the two is abrupt enough to step across, and stepping across it is the best thing this walk offers.
At the end of the grass there is a bare rock, and it has a name of its own. Locally the top is Mani, and the hill under it Manimala, which is why photographs of it are filed under both. It is the thing you can pick out from far down the valley, and it is where the walk stops. There is more than one way up, too: two paths climb through the evergreen forest rather than one, with the rock-cut steps appearing on both at intervals. On a clear morning the Panathady reserve drops away from it in every direction and the Karnataka border runs somewhere out in the green; most days there is cloud sitting below you rather than above. The rock is unrailed and it is slippery in the late afternoon, which is the department’s own stated reason for wanting people up here in the morning. Names have been scratched into it. They are not old and nobody is going to remove them.
The animals are not the attraction and it would be dishonest to sell them as one. This is reserved forest in the Panathady reserve and elephants, leopards, deer, wild boar, jungle cats and Malabar giant squirrels all use it; Kerala Tourism’s own page says elephant herds are commonly seen. King cobra, cobra, krait and Russell’s viper are all recorded on the hill. That is the reason for keeping to the track, going early, and treating a morning here as a walk through somebody else’s house.
And then there are the leeches, which deserve their paragraph because they are what people actually remember. From roughly June into November they are constant, and the state says so itself, in the same breath as the advice: carry good boots and carry salt. They come up the outside of a shoe and go in at the ankle, and the descent is when you find out. It is not a reason to stay away. It is a reason not to arrive in sandals believing you are going to a hill station.
That last word is worth pausing on, because every single source about this place uses it. Ranipuram is the “Ooty of Kerala” — Kerala Tourism says so, the district says so, and so does every travel page that has copied them. It is a useful phrase for selling a hill and a misleading one for planning a day. Ooty is a town: eighty-eight thousand people, a lake, a botanical garden, a mountain railway, hotels, and an altitude of two thousand two hundred and forty metres, which is more than twice the height of the summit here. Ranipuram has a ticket window, a toilet, a bench and a footpath. The nickname is telling you that it is cool and green and high by the standards of its own district, which is true. It is not telling you there is a hill station at the top, because there is not, and a visitor who arrives expecting one will have driven three hours for a disappointment rather than for the thing this place is actually good at.
What it is good at is birds, and there is a hard number for once. In February 2021 the Forest Department ran its first direct bird survey of Ranipuram and recorded ninety-eight species — the first proper study of the place, which is itself the point: the team leading it said plainly that not much work had been done here. The state’s own list names the paradise flycatcher, the green barbet, the trogon, wood pigeon, peacock, the Malabar grey hornbill, the white-bellied treepie and the great Indian hornbill. Two hornbills on one hill is the part a birdwatcher notices; the white-bellied treepie is a Western Ghats endemic and this is comfortably inside its range.
One bird is worth coming for on its own account. The golden-headed cisticola is a grassland warbler of high open country, and Ranipuram is one of a very small number of places in Kerala where it can be seen at all — which is a direct consequence of the thing this hill has and the rest of the district does not, namely open montane grass at a thousand metres. Black eagle, crested serpent eagle and little spider hunter are all ordinary here too. The place to stand is the edge between the grass and the shola, because the birds move between the two and the boundary lets you see into both at once.
The reptiles get the same treatment and deserve the same attention, for the opposite reason. Kerala Tourism names the king cobra, the green whip snake and monitor lizards as things found here, and the department’s wider list for the hill adds the spectacled cobra, the common krait and Russell’s viper. That is three of India’s big four on one small hill. None of it is a reason to stay off the track; all of it is a reason to stay on it, and to look before putting a hand on a rock on the way up to the top.
The hill is not always open, and the reason changes with the season. Through the driest months, roughly April to June, the grass on these tops cures to tinder and the department closes the walk at short notice for fire risk — which is exactly when the weather looks best from the coast. In the monsoon it is the rock and the track that close it. The result is a hill that is most reliably open in the months either side of the rains, and a number worth ringing before a three-hour drive in any month at all.
One last practical thing about the ticket, which nothing else records. The department’s system holds a twenty-day advance window for this programme, the sort of thing that would normally mean you could book three weeks out. You cannot, because online booking for it is switched off, so the window has nothing to open onto. The programme is listed under the plain name “Entry & Trekking”, and that is the whole of it: you are buying entry, and the trekking is what you do with it. There is no guided version to upgrade to and no package to choose between.
