The Western GhatsAfter the Rains.
The most beautiful weeks in these hills arrive after the rain has finished showing off.
By late September the monsoon has spent itself. What is left is a landscape running at full capacity — every stream still moving, every slope still green, and the sky suddenly, generously clear.
The Light
The air is washed clean of dust, so the ridgelines stack into the distance in five or six visible layers. Sunrise takes almost an hour to finish. It is the season the hills are photographed in, and rarely visited in.
“The hills are loudest in July and most beautiful in October.”
Small things
Frogs, fungi, wildflowers with two-week lives. The Western Ghats hold species found nowhere else on earth, and most of them are the size of your thumbnail.
Then October turns the grass at the tips, the green begins its slow retreat, and the whole thing starts again eight months later.