Impromptu meet at Corbert’s Gap

Brutally hard swing through the terrain over the last few days but heady and highly informative. We saw it all first hand in each microgeography with Sura giving me a running commentary as we drove through. Phenomenal sense of the area on his part and boy did I learn a lot. We would stop in the middle of the road and have impromptu meetings which was the way we always did things at the Green and it was nice to see us doing that again since I’d been away for a few years on other work. I figured out that cardamoms could be cultivated outside the protected areas if the terrain was right. Tough ask but we found a few pockets where it was possible and those were chalked up as possibilities for the future. An old campaigner in the form of Nava of Meemure gave us super insights into some of the ways in which those communities changed with changes in the way in which they were allowed to continue their livelihoods. Flagged up the pollution as well from tourists and locals as well as the huge waste of water from tapping directly into springs at the level of each family. We might need to work on that with these communities and hope they see sense. Much to be done here and the researchers are raring to go.