Climbing the Western Ghats

“We have to go up there?” I asked. The looming mountains would be fine to drive over in a car, but a rickshaw? “How bad could it be?”responded Joe gleefully from the front seat.

The Western Ghats is a mountain range that covers an area of 160,000 square kilometers in a stretch of 1,600 kilometers parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, traversing the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The entire range is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world. It is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India. It contains a very large proportion of the country's flora and fauna, many of which are endemic to this region.

According to UNESCO, the Western Ghats are older than the Himalayas. Geologic evidence indicates that they were formed during the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana some 150 million years ago. It’s amazing to think that the west coast of India was once attached to Madagascar.

They are spectacular, especially when you are crawling up the side of them at 40 kilometers per hour in an open air vehicle. It is the dry season here now so the landscape higher up is dry “veld” that reminds me of some places in South Africa, and the valleys are filled with sugar cane, tobacco, grapes and corn fields.

We’ve got one more day of climbing before we descend to the beach in Goa. Ghat should be a real treat. Did you see what I did there….Read more