What to expect
Highlights
- Trek route around Siruvani trek
- Western Ghats landscapes and viewpoints
- Guided operator and permit planning
The story
A forest-department safari and walk that starts at a check post gate, runs ten kilometres of closed rainforest road to the dam that drinks for Coimbatore, and ends an hour uphill on grassland at the state border.
The story of Siruvani trek
This is not a trail you can simply turn up and walk. The Siruvani forest is a closed reserve, and the whole trip begins at the Inchikunnu check post on the Siruvani Main Road, where the Forest Department decides whether you go in. Beyond that barrier private vehicles need permission, and the programme run by Mannarkkad Eco-tourism is the ordinary way to get it: you pay at the gate, take a guide, and drive your own vehicle onward under escort.
The drive is the first half of the day and it is not filler. It is about ten kilometres of forest road — we measure the gate to the dam at 9.7 km, matching Kerala Tourism's "around 10 km" — through some of the least-disturbed wet evergreen forest in this part of Kerala. The road climbs from lowland plantation country into canopy that closes overhead, and the reservoir surfaces at roughly 800 m, held in a bowl of hills that run up past 2,000 m behind it.
At the dam the border does something odd and very visible: there are two gateway structures at the site, one built in Kerala's temple-roof idiom and one in a Tamil style, because the water behind the wall belongs to a bargain between two states. Above the reservoir the eastern skyline is Muthikulam hill, with a waterfall coming off it that people mostly see from a distance rather than reach.
On the reservoir bank stands the Pattiyar bungalow, a British forest bungalow that Kerala Tourism describes as more than 150 years old, with the Muthikulam falls visible from its veranda. Pattiyar is also one of the six base camps the 2007 bird survey worked from, which tells you what kind of building it is — a working forest rest house in deep country, not a hotel.
The walk itself comes last. From the dam the guided party goes on foot for about an hour up to Keralamedu, high grassland on the Kerala–Tamil Nadu line. The vegetation changes as you climb: wet evergreen forest below, then, above roughly 1,700 m on the Muthikulam and Karimala ridges, rolling grassland with stunted evergreen shola tucked into the folds. From the top the ground falls away east into Tamil Nadu and, on a clear day, you are looking down at the Coimbatore plain.
The gate shuts early. The programme runs 09:00 to 15:00, and it is called off outright when the weather or the forest says so — this is elephant country with a working rain figure of 2,000–4,500 mm a year. Phone the Mannarkkad Divisional Forest Office before you drive out; that call is the difference between a day in the rainforest and a locked barrier.
Legend & myth
The name Muthikulam is explained locally as muthi plus kulam — the old woman's pond. In the telling repeated around Karimala, Shiva dug a square pond in the hill for his consort to bathe in, she bathed there, and the pond became the source of the Siruvani waters. It is offered as local tradition rather than as history, and no one points to a date.
There is a second and much louder claim, and it needs to be handled carefully: that Siruvani water is the second tastiest or second sweetest in the world. It is repeated everywhere, including by Tamil Nadu's own tourism accounts, and it is always second — the first place is variously given and never sourced. We could find no ranking body, no UNESCO finding, no study behind it. What is real is the mineral balance people are describing: the water leaves this catchment unusually soft and clean-tasting, which is exactly why Coimbatore built a pipeline to it. Enjoy the boast; do not repeat it as a fact.
Read the full history of Siruvani trek 555 more words
History
The dam at the end of the forest road is Kerala's ground and Tamil Nadu's water. An agreement was executed in August 1973 between the two state governments for drinking-water supply to Coimbatore town and its neighbouring areas; the Siruvani dam sits in Attappadi taluk of Palakkad district, was built by the Kerala Public Works Department, and was paid for with funds provided by the Tamil Nadu government. It was completed in 1984 and stands 57 m high and 224 m long. The two gateways at the site are the polite architectural form of that arrangement.
The forest around it is a recognised site of international biodiversity importance — the Muthikulam–Siruvani Reserve Forest, listed both as an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area and as an Alliance for Zero Extinction site, and confirmed as a Key Biodiversity Area at its last assessment in 2016. Its size is given differently by the two databases: the KBA factsheet says 284.78 sq km (28,477.75 ha) spanning 300–2,060 m, while the BirdLife IBA entry gives 24,700 ha. We print both rather than pick.
What makes these hills matter is where they sit. The Palghat Gap is a roughly 40 km wide lowland break in the Western Ghats, and the high-altitude life of the Nilgiris is cut off by it. Siruvani–Muthikulam is one of the few compact high plateaus north of the Gap that still holds some of those endemic species, which is why a genetic bottleneck in the Nilgiri populations is not the whole story of the southern Ghats.
The birds were properly counted only recently. Over four days in February 2007 about 35 birdwatchers worked 36 transects from six base camps — Muthikulam, Karimala, Kuravampady, Singampara, Koodam and Pattiyar — and published the result the following year as Praveen J. and P. O. Nameer, "Bird diversity of Siruvani and Muthikulam Hills, Western Ghats, Kerala" (Indian Birds 3(6): 210–217). They logged 158 species, 14 of them endemic to the Western Ghats and nine on the Red Data list. Before that survey, as the paper says plainly, very little had been collated about the birds of these hills at all.
The headline find was the Nilgiri Laughingthrush, an endangered bird that had never been recorded outside the Nilgiri Plateau: 18 sightings totalling 33 individuals from Muthikulam across to the Elival ridge, mostly above about 1,600 m, with the team suggesting this may be the largest population of the species in Kerala. The same survey recorded the vulnerable Nilgiri Wood-Pigeon at nine encounters, the vulnerable White-bellied Shortwing in shrubby undergrowth at Muthikulam, and a single Broad-tailed Grassbird near the marshy ground by Siruvani dam. The forest also holds Vateria macrocarpa, a critically endangered evergreen tree endemic to this region.
None of that is on a signboard at the gate. It is the reason the gate is there.
Why visit
Ten kilometres of closed-road rainforest that you cannot drive on any other day.
The dam with two gateways — one Kerala, one Tamil — that explains a fifty-year water bargain.
An hour's climb to Keralamedu grassland on the state border, looking down on Coimbatore.
Grassland-and-shola habitat above 1,700 m holding Western Ghats endemics found nowhere north of here.
The 150-year-old Pattiyar forest bungalow on the reservoir bank, below the Muthikulam falls.
Butterflies and birds in quantity — 158 species were logged here in four days.
