Planning · when to go
Best time to visit Munnar, month by month
Late September – November, and January. After the monsoon the hills are at their greenest and the air clears — late September to November is the window before the crowds. January, after the New Year rush, brings the driest air, the longest views and cold nights on the estates; Eravikulam then shuts on 1 February for two months. June to August is mist, waterfalls and closed roads; 20 December to 5 January is simply full. Our pick: October — the rain easing, the estates washed, Eravikulam open and the Top Station view still there at nine.
The season, honestly
Munnar is a hill station in the old sense: a subtropical highland where the town sits at sixteen hundred metres and the upper estates run three to five hundred metres higher and two to four degrees colder. The south-west monsoon arrives in June and does most of its 2,470 millimetres by September; October brings the north-east showers; November to February is dry, clear and cold at night, with frost possible at Vattavada in January. Eravikulam closes from 1 February to 1 April for the tahr's calving.
October to March
Oct: 23° / 15° — north-east showers; good light
Nov: 23° / 14° — mist mornings, clear noons
Dec: 24° / 12° — cold nights; Christmas crowds from the 20th
Jan: 25° / 11° — driest; clear dawns; frost on the upper estates
Feb: 26° / 12° — dry, golden grass; Eravikulam closed from the 1st
Mar: 27° / 14° — haze; Eravikulam closed until about 1 April
April to September
Apr: 26° / 15° — pre-monsoon showers; tahr calves after reopening
May: 24° / 16° — warm; afternoon storms
Jun: 21° / 17° — south-west monsoon; Attukad in spate
Jul: 21° / 16° — heaviest rain; landslip closures possible
Aug: 21° / 16° — wet; kurinji month in a bloom year
Sep: 22° / 16° — clearing; the greenest hills
If you can only come in the heat
Start at opening, be back indoors by eleven, and go out again an hour before sunset. Eravikulam — the Rajamala road at 8am in May is emptier and better than at noon in December — the city's rhythm is the desert's, and it rewards anyone who keeps it.
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