Sura, Ludo and Arjuna at the Ratna Ella falls

Just returned from a reccy into the terrain where COLIBRI will take place. Ratna Ella to be precise. Beautiful area but we did find a bunch of people farming paddy deep in the KCF. Ludovic found the straight up trek from the village to the main access road to the falls themselves a song. Sura and I, old as we are, found the climb which Ludo described as “baby climb” to be anything but. There were many positives we saw at the village where it seems as if the people had taken their environs seriously and were managing the tourism without damaging the environment with one of them even recycling used alcohol bottles left behind by toursts who had been instructed to simply leave them behind with the caps intact to be collected by the recyclers. Wonderful work and we saw that there was almost no garbage along the trail to the falls. Super lunch at the diner at the foot of the climb that was improved as part of a previous GEF intervention that Sura oversaw. We cobbled together a small video of the journey and you can find it here.