Vythiri and Lakkidi are less two settlements than the two ends of one working road. Lakkidi sits on the lip of the Thamarassery churam, the nine-hairpin ghat that carries National Highway 766 up from the Kozhikode plain onto the Wayanad plateau; Vythiri, about five kilometres further in, is the taluk town that services it — the revenue office, the buses, the taxis, the resorts spread through the tea and the shola. Almost everything that reaches Wayanad from the coast — vegetables, cement, tourists, ambulances — comes through this gap, and almost everything that constrains Wayanad’s economy is visible from it: a single vulnerable carriageway, a rainfall regime among the heaviest in India, slopes that fail, and a tunnel being driven through the mountain a few valleys south to try to end the dependence.
The churam is short and it is the whole point. From Adivaram, the village whose name simply means “foot of the hill”, the highway climbs through nine numbered hairpin bends to Lakkidi at the top. The Malayalam Wikipedia article on the pass gives the climb as about twelve kilometres; several Kerala tourism descriptions, and our own Lakkidi page, put it nearer fourteen. Nobody publishes a surveyed figure and the two numbers are close enough that the difference is probably where you start counting. What is not in dispute is the gradient, the retaining walls stacked in courses below the outer bends, and the fact that this is the main road link between Kerala’s third city and a district of some 846,000 people.
That single dependency is the reason the churam behaves less like a scenic road than like a utility. When it closes — for a landslip, a jackknifed lorry on bend four, a felled tree after a night of rain — Wayanad does not have a quick second option. Traffic diverts north to the Periya and Palchuram ghats towards Kannur, or right around by Nilambur and Gudalur, and every one of those detours costs hours. Kerala’s district administrations also impose blanket closures of hill roads and ecotourism sites during red-alert rainfall, and in a place where the monsoon runs hard from June into August those closures are a normal part of the calendar rather than an emergency.
The second constraint sits outside Kerala altogether. NH 766 runs 272 kilometres from Kozhikode to Kollegal, of which 117 kilometres are in Kerala and 155 in Karnataka, and about 19.7 kilometres of the Karnataka stretch passes through Bandipur. Karnataka bans all vehicles through that section between 9 pm and 6 am, and two-wheelers from 6 pm to 6 am, to reduce roadkill. The signed alternative for night traffic is a 352-kilometre detour by Mananthavady, Gonikoppal and Hunsur. For anyone driving Kozhikode to Mysuru the practical effect is that the churam has a curfew at its far end, and Lakkidi fills up with parked lorries waiting for six in the morning.
Lakkidi itself is a strip rather than a town: a bend in the road, a school, a church, a run of tea and honey stalls, and a dense cluster of resorts that begins almost at the crest. Vythiri, the taluk headquarters five kilometres on, is where the ordinary business happens — the taluk office, banks, the bus stand, the vegetable market that restocks half the plateau. Vythiri grama panchayat covers 47.84 square kilometres and fourteen wards, Lakkidi among them, and recorded 14,459 people at the 2001 census with 86.7 per cent literacy. It is a small place carrying a large amount of the district’s traffic.
The tourism economy that now dominates both settlements arrived quickly and reshaped the land. District figures put Wayanad’s visitor numbers at 1.51 million in 2022, with arrivals across the district up about 72 per cent between 2003 and 2023. Studies cited after the 2024 disaster found that roughly 62 per cent of the district’s green cover disappeared between 1950 and 2018 while the area under tea rose by something near 1,800 per cent. Resorts, homestays and adventure parks have taken the next layer, and around Lakkidi they occupy exactly the steep, high-rainfall slopes that hydrologists would rather nobody built on.
That tension is not hypothetical here. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel chaired by Madhav Gadgil classified all three Wayanad taluks — Vythiri, Sulthan Bathery and Mananthavady — as Ecologically Sensitive Zone I, with restrictions on construction and quarrying. The recommendation was never implemented. On 30 July 2024 the slopes above Mundakkai and Chooralmala, in Meppadi panchayat of this same Vythiri taluk, failed after 204.5 mm of rain in twenty-four hours followed by 372.6 mm in the next, and hundreds of people were killed. Those villages have their own page and their own dead; the honest thing to say from Vythiri is only that they are in the same taluk and on the same rain.
The long-argued answer to the churam has been a second alignment, and one is finally being built — not a bypass of the pass but a tunnel under a different ridge. The Anakkampoyil–Kalladi–Meppadi project on State Highway 83 is a twin-tube, four-lane road tunnel: 8.73 kilometres of alignment including the approach from Marippuzha to the Meenakshi bridge, of which 8.11 kilometres are tunnel. Sanctioned at ₹2,134.5 crore, it is being delivered for the Kerala government by the Konkan Railway Corporation as special purpose vehicle, with the civil contract won by Dilip Buildcon at about ₹1,341 crore. The foundation was laid on 31 August 2025 and rock excavation began in early 2026.
It has not been smooth. On 7 July 2026 monsoon rain triggered a mudslide at the Kalladi site, where excavated spoil and rock came down onto the works; reported death tolls ranged from three to six, construction was suspended, and the state ordered inquiries into spoil disposal and engineering practice. Completion dates published for the project vary between 2029 and 2030. If it opens it should cut the Anakkampoyil–Meppadi road distance from around 42 kilometres to under 20 and give freight a gentler gradient than nine hairpins. It will not, however, run through Vythiri or Lakkidi, and what a second door does to a town that has lived off being the only door is the open question here.
For a visitor, the practical shape of the place follows from all of this. Lakkidi is a stop, not a stay-put destination: pull in, look down the valley, and move on before the afternoon cloud closes the view. Vythiri is the better base if you want a bed, a chemist and a taxi in the same street. Drive the churam in the morning, in daylight, in low gear, and expect to be behind a bus for most of it. And treat every published opening time in this taluk as provisional, because rainfall, not the tourism department, sets the timetable.
Legend & myth
The mountain that carries this road carries a body of Adivasi tradition that is older than the road, and the honest way into it is through the Paniya, who make up the largest single tribal community in Wayanad — 92,787 people at the last full count, in a district where Scheduled Tribes are 18.86 per cent of the population, the highest proportion in Kerala.
The oldest written record of a Paniya origin tradition ties it directly to this pass. C. Gopalan Nair’s Wynad: Its Peoples and Traditions, published in 1911, reports that the Paniya said their original home was Ippimala, “a hill which no one in Wynad could localise and which is said to be somewhere near the Tamaracherry ghats”. In the tradition as he sets it down, the Paniya lived in the forest and the caves of that hill until landowners of the plateau trapped a number of them in nets — thandati — and, over six months, taught them the language of the plains and put them to work; those who had been taken then drew others down after them, and the community spread across Wayanad, Coorg and Mysore. Gopalan Nair adds that by his day the only surviving trace of Ippimala in ordinary speech was the exclamation “Ippi”, which a Paniyan uttered when frightened.
That last detail is where the source has to be read against itself. Gopalan Nair completes the sentence by saying the word came out when a Paniyan’s master thrashed him, and elsewhere in the same passage he calls the community savages and worse. The book is a colonial officer’s book and its contempt is on every page of the chapter. What it nonetheless preserves is a genuine tradition, recorded from Paniya speakers more than a century ago, in which a hill near the Thamarassery ghats is the lost homeland and the descent to the plateau is remembered as capture rather than migration. No later travel account we have seen carries it at all.
The same 1911 chapter records the community’s religious practice: the god Kuli and the goddess Kali, offerings made to them and to the ancestors on Ucharal day after the harvest, when the Paniya of a padi gathered to hear the words of the komaram, the oracle. That is a functioning ritual calendar attached to this landscape, not a legend about a road, and it is the part of Paniya tradition that outside writing has almost entirely ignored in favour of one story about a chain.
The one story everyone does tell is Karinthandan’s, and it belongs to the Chain Tree at Lakkidi, which has its own page on this site. We are not going to retell it here. What is worth setting down instead is its evidential status, because almost nothing published about it does. There is no contemporary document of any kind: the Malayalam Wikipedia entry, which places Karinthandan roughly between 1750 and 1799 and identifies him as Paniya, states plainly that no written record of his life exists and that the account survives only in tribal oral tradition. The versions also disagree with each other. In the most repeated telling a British engineer takes the route from him and kills him; in the version given in the Malayalam article on the churam itself, the road is opened when Tipu Sultan marches from Mysore into Malabar, with Karinthandan’s help, and the British betrayal comes later. In some tellings the spirit is bound by a mantravadi, a sorcerer; in others by a Muslim saint.
One documented fact sits awkwardly across all of these versions and is worth stating. Gopalan Nair records that in 1773 a Mysorean army marched through Wayanad and down to Calicut by the Tamarasseri ghat. Whatever route that army used, a practicable way over this shoulder of the Ghats was in military use before any British engineer is supposed to have gone looking for one. The legend can be read as a memory of who was never credited for the road rather than as a claim that the road was unknown; it is a story about theft of recognition, and on that reading its historical accuracy is beside the point.
The tradition is also no longer only oral. A statue of Karinthandan now stands beside the Chain Tree at Lakkidi, at roughly 11°31′07″N 76°01′15″E, and Malayalam press reported a memorial portrait of him as early as 2012. Leela Santhosh — born 18 December 1988 in Panamaram, a Paniya woman and the first Adivasi woman to direct in Malayalam cinema, educated at Kanavu, the alternative school founded by the writer K. J. Baby — announced a feature film called Karinthandan with Vinayakan in the lead. The Malayalam Wikipedia entry on her records that the project has stalled and remains unmade. That a Paniya director has been trying to put a Paniya story on screen, and has not been able to finish it, is itself part of how this legend is currently being held.
There is one more devotional use of the pass, and it is Christian rather than tribal. Malayalam sources describe the churam as the setting for a very large Way of the Cross procession, walked up the ghat road in Holy Week by the Catholic congregations of the Thamarassery side — an observance that belongs to the twentieth-century migration that settled these hills, not to anything older. We have not found an official diocesan figure for attendance and we do not repeat the round numbers that circulate; what is well attested is that it happens, on this road, every year.
More about Vythiri and Lakkidi
History
Wayanad’s recorded history reaches the churam early. Under the Kottayam rajas the plateau was reached by a set of forest ghats from the Malabar coast, and C. Gopalan Nair’s 1911 account records that in 1773 a Mysorean army passed through the country by the Tamarasseri ghat on its way to Calicut. Hyder Ali’s forces had been in Malabar since 1766; in 1786 Tipu Sultan extracted from Ravi Varma of Kottayam a deed relinquishing his rights over Wayanad. The pass mattered because whoever held it held the plateau’s access to the sea.
The road as an engineered thing belongs to the colonial period that followed, and to coffee. Gopalan Nair describes British officers of a detachment planting coffee experimentally on a Wayanad hill, and a partner of Parry & Co. passing through around 1820 on his way to estates in Mysore — the beginning of the plantation economy that made a cart road up the ghats worth paying for. Tea, pepper and cardamom followed, and the road up the churam has been widened, re-aligned and re-walled repeatedly since, but the line of the nine bends is essentially the line first cut into the mountainside.
The administrative geography is more recent than most visitors assume. Wayanad was a taluk of the old Malabar district; on 1 January 1957 Malabar was divided into Kannur, Kozhikode and Palakkad and Wayanad taluk was split into North and South Wayanad, with South Wayanad moving to Kozhikode district on 15 March 1957. Wayanad became Kerala’s twelfth district on 1 November 1980, and it was at that point that South Wayanad was divided to create the taluks of Vythiri and Sulthan Bathery. Vythiri taluk today comprises eighteen villages, including Lakkidi, Vythiri, Chundale and Meppadi.
Vythiri also acquired an institution that has nothing to do with tourism. The Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University was created by Ordinance No. 29 of 2010, dated 12 June 2010, and constituted in December that year with its headquarters at Pookode, between Vythiri and Lakkidi. The College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences and the College of Dairy Science and Technology both sit on that campus, which makes this small ghat-head settlement the administrative centre of veterinary education for the whole state.
The other twentieth-century arrival was people. Vythiri town holds St Joseph’s church, described as the first Catholic church in Wayanad, along with St Mary’s Orthodox church, a Mariamman temple and the Vythiri Juma Masjid within a few hundred metres of each other — a compressed record of the mid-century migration of Syrian Christian farmers from Travancore, of Tamil plantation labour, and of the older Mappila trade up the ghats. The mix is visible in the shopfronts before it is visible in any history book.
Why visit
It is the front door: the nine-hairpin climb of the Thamarassery churam is the most dramatic way anyone arrives in Wayanad, and Lakkidi is where it ends.
Vythiri is the most practical base on this side of the district — taluk office, buses, taxis, a chemist and a bank in one short street, with Kalpetta about ten kilometres on.
The cloud is not a nuisance here but the local weather: this stretch is among the wettest inhabited ground in India and the mist genuinely does close and reopen the valley within minutes.
Everything on the plateau’s western side is close — Pookode Lake, the Chain Tree, En Ooru and the Uravu bamboo village at Thrikkaipetta are all short drives from Vythiri.
It is a good place to understand what is happening to the Western Ghats, between the resort belt on the slopes and the tunnel being driven through the mountain a few valleys south.
Tea, honey, pepper and cardamom are sold at the ghat-top stalls by people who grow them a few kilometres away, which is not true of most roadside stalls in Kerala.
