The Achankovil Forest Division is named for a river, and the river is named for a temple. The Achankovil flows west from the high ridges of the Western Ghats in southern Kerala through Pathanamthitta and Alappuzha districts, and on its banks stands the ancient Achankovil shrine to Sastha, a deity honoured by pilgrims on their way to Sabarimala. The valley it cuts is one of the main passes between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the Achankovil gap, which allowed traders, armies and spices to cross the range for centuries.
So when you are standing here, the Achankovil forests are on the other side of the ridge, to the west and south-west, in a very different, wetter world. There the woodland is tall evergreen and moist deciduous, with strangler figs, tree ferns and enormous bamboo clumps, and the fauna includes elephants, Nilgiri langur and the Malabar giant squirrel. In the monsoon every stream is a torrent.
The riding here is a story of two slopes. On the Tamil side the roads are drier and straighter, with hairpins crossing the face of the escarpment, and the vegetation turns suddenly from thorn scrub to forest at the crest. On the Kerala side the roads wind between plantations of rubber, pepper and cardamom, and every bend has a tea stall or temple. Surfaces are better than you might expect, and traffic is calm outside the pilgrim season, though buses and trucks require respect on the narrow bends.
Services are in the towns. Gudalur and Cumbum on the Tamil side have fuel and food, and on the Kerala side Kumily and Pathanamthitta are the places to look for pumps. A hot cup of tea from a roadside stall is a ritual here, often with a banana fritter, and the forest rest houses can sometimes be booked through the Forest Department. If you plan to enter the forest tracks, check access first, and carry rain gear at all times, because storms arrive suddenly.