Monsoon is not a washout
The word does a lot of damage. People picture a fortnight indoors and book July out of the calendar without asking anybody.
What it actually is, across most of the country: intermittent rain rather than constant rain, heavy for an hour and then gone, with the landscape at its greenest for the only time in the year. Forts you have seen a hundred times in dusty ochre come back in deep green. The light is extraordinary and the crowds are somewhere else.
The honest costs, because there are some. Some hill roads close. Most wildlife parks close. Humidity in the plains is real and it is tiring. And a monsoon journey has to be built to absorb a lost afternoon rather than pretend none will happen.
In Kerala it is not a compromise at all — it is the Ayurvedic season, and the one the treatments are designed around.
