Travel · Viewpoints · 9 min read

Clouds, Cliffs and a Thief's Cave: The Viewpoints and Waterfalls of Munnar's Gap Road

Fifteen kilometres from Munnar, the highway threads a notch in the mountains and the world falls away. A stop-by-stop guide to the Gap Road's viewpoints, its waterfalls and the cave of Malayil Kallan, the 'mountain thief' who, legend says, robbed the rich and fed the poor.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

There is a moment on the drive from Munnar towards Bodimettu that every traveller remembers. The road has been climbing gently through the tea of Devikulam, past neat rows of bushes and the still waters of the lake below the town. Then it swings round a shoulder of rock, the hillside on your right simply vanishes, and you are looking down hundreds of metres of air into a vast green bowl of tea gardens, forest and water, with ridge after ridge fading blue towards Tamil Nadu. On your left, a wall of bare granite climbs straight up into the cloud. This is the Gap Road, and in the space of a few kilometres it packs in more spectacle than many hill stations offer in a week.

Our article The Gap Road: Kerala's Most Dramatic Drive tells the story of the road itself and its troubled widening. This one is a traveller's companion: the viewpoints, waterfalls and legends you will meet along the way, and how to see them at their best.

The road to the gap

The journey begins in Munnar town and climbs south-east to Devikulam, the old administrative centre of the High Range, where the small Sita Devi lake lies among the tea. (Read the history of Devikulam.) Beyond it the road runs along the flank of the Lockhart estate, one of the oldest plantations in the High Range. Opened in 1879, it grew cinchona and coffee before tea, and its factory, built in 1936, still runs today. On your right, the bare, grassy dome of Chokramudi rises above the estate; trekkers start their climb near the gap, and in a Neelakurinji year its slopes turn blue.

Then the land opens. The ridge that divides the cool Devikulam plateau from the lower valleys to the east is broken here by a natural notch, and the road squeezes through it. This is the "gap" that gives the road its name. It was always narrow: before the widening, two vehicles could barely pass, and drivers learned to stop and wait for one another at the bends.

Lockhart Gap: the classic view

The most famous stop is the Lockhart Gap viewpoint, where the road reaches the notch itself. Look east and the mountains part like a pair of curtains. Through the cleft, the land drops in great green steps towards the valleys of Bison Valley and Chinnakanal. On a clear morning you can trace the shine of rivers and the white specks of distant villages; on most afternoons you can watch clouds pour through the gap like water through a sluice, swallowing the view in minutes and then, just as quickly, letting it go.

Photographers come here for two moments of the day. Soon after sunrise, the valleys below are often filled with a level sea of cloud, with only the ridgetops standing out like islands. In the late afternoon, the low sun slants through the gap and lights up the tea on the slopes. Wind is a constant: the gap acts as a funnel, so hold on to hats, and to drones.

The cave of Malayil Kallan

A little beyond the viewpoint, on the left of the road, a flight of steps leads up to a dark, triangular cleft between two enormous boulders. This is the Malayil Kallan Guha, the cave of the "thief of the mountain", also called simply the Rock Cave.

It is not a grand cavern. Geologically it is a fracture cave: a crack where two great blocks of granite lean against each other, about 4.5 m high and barely a metre wide at the floor, so narrow that only one person can squeeze in at a time. There are no lights, so bring a torch if you want to look inside. Its fame comes from the story.

The legend of the mountain thief

According to local tradition, recorded by the Munnar historian M. J. Babu and repeated by older residents, the cave was the hideout of a man named Thankayyan, who came to Munnar from Tamil Nadu in the years before Independence and found work on the Pallivasal tea estate. Arrested by the Devikulam police for robbing a neighbour, he escaped and took refuge in this cleft in the rocks above the old cart road. From here, the story goes, he preyed on travellers crossing the gap, and gave his loot of cash and jewellery to the poor in the villages of Tamil Nadu, a Robin Hood of the High Range. People began to call him simply Malayil Kallan, the thief of the mountain.

How his story ended, nobody agrees. Some say the police finally shot him; others that he was killed by a woman in Tamil Nadu. Another local belief holds that a secret passage once ran from the cave all the way to the temple at Devikulam, though no such tunnel has ever been found. There is no documentary record of Thankayyan himself, and the tale may well have grown in the telling. Curiously, a robber named Thankayya is also said to have hidden in the Kalladanthy caves at Bison Valley, the valley you look down on from Lockhart Gap. Whether the two legends grew from one man, or one story wandered between two caves, is a question nobody can now answer. (Read about the Kalladanthy caves.)

The cave also has a claim to film fame. According to M. J. Babu, it appears in Malaikallan (1954), the Tamil hit starring M. G. Ramachandran, in which the hero is himself a noble outlaw who robs the rich to help the poor. When the highway was widened, the National Highways Authority took care to protect the cave, and today it is one of the most popular stops on the road, with a small tea stall across the way.

Shooting Point and the serpentine bends

Beyond the gap, the new highway descends towards Chinnakanal in a series of broad, sweeping curves, cut into the cliff and edged with stone walls. Several wide lay-bys have become informal viewpoints. One, known locally as Shooting Point, is a favourite of photographers and film crews: Munnar's hills have served as backdrops for scores of Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi films, and the dramatic curves of the Gap Road are among the most filmed. From the bends you look back at the road coiling across the face of the mountain, with the tea estates of Suryanelli and the route to Kolukkumalai spread out below.

Periyakanal: the Power House waterfall

As the road drops towards Chinnakanal, a long white ribbon of water appears on the hillside: the Periyakanal waterfall, better known as the Power House waterfall. The water slides and tumbles over broad sheets of rock beside the road, splitting and rejoining as it falls. After the monsoon it is a roaring torrent; by late summer it can shrink to a thin trickle, or vanish altogether, so it is at its finest from June to December. (Read about the waterfalls of Idukki.)

Anayirangal and the elephant country

From the lower bends, the eye is drawn to a gleam of blue in the green bowl below: the Anayirangal reservoir, whose name means "where the elephants come down". Formed by a dam on the Panniyar river, it lies among tea estates and forest that wild elephants have always used as a corridor. This is the old range of the famous rice-raiding tusker Arikkomban, and elephants are still seen around Chinnakanal, especially at dusk. (Read about people and wildlife in Munnar.)

Weather: clouds, wind and rain

The Gap Road sits on the boundary between two climates. Moist air from the west meets the drier air of the eastern slopes here, which is why clouds so often boil up through the gap, why the wind can be fierce, and why the view can change completely in five minutes. Mornings from October to March are usually the clearest. In the monsoon, from June to September, the road is wrapped in mist and the waterfalls are at their fullest, but the steep, freshly cut slopes are prone to landslides, and the Idukki district administration sometimes closes the Gap Road, especially at night, when heavy rain is forecast.

Tips for the Gap Road

• Stop only at the wide lay-bys, never on bends. Traffic, including buses and trucks to Bodinayakanur, moves fast on the new road.
• Go early for the sea of clouds, or in the late afternoon for warm light on the tea.
• Carry a jacket: the wind through the gap is cold even on sunny days.
• Check road advisories during the monsoon, and do not travel the Gap Road at night in heavy rain.
• Do not feed the monkeys at the viewpoints, and take your litter with you.
• If you fly a drone, mind the strong gusts in the gap, and respect local rules and people's privacy.

(Read also the story of the Gap Road, Chokramudi, Devikulam, Pothamedu viewpoint and our Munnar sightseeing guide.)