Travel Blues

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I hate air travel. I know it is the most convenient form of transport, the fastest means to get anywhere. But, I feel it is a nightmare to be cooped up for hours on an armchair and it gets worse if your co-passenger is unsavory.

It is so much nicer to travel in a train where you can get up from the seat once in a while, stretch your legs, walk around… and if nothing else, there is always something outside the window to look at. Clouds or the dark night sky gets quite boring after a while on an aircraft.

I wish the whole of the civilized world was connected by an immense railway network… underground, over ground, under sea, long bridges, scenic routes, over deserts and plains and hill ranges. It would be quite a feat of engineering and a delight to travel the lines.

Last night on my flight back to Kuwait, I had a particularly nasty co-passenger. He was sloshed and kept drinking throughout the journey and he wouldn't shut up or let me sleep. He started of decently enough but soon his behaviour deteriorated into an annoying mess. I am normally not sociable while I am travelling, I do like to keep to myself and be in my own world of imagination… and not being left alone to do that was extremely irksome. I didn't want to create a scene on the late night flight and disturb the other sleeping passengers and even then I had to raise my voice and be outright rude to him (which is not exactly my style). When he didn't relent, I tried to change my seat or even get downgraded to economy class just to get away from the horrible fellow. Unfortunately, the flight was packed. Finally, I spent around 50 minutes of my 3 hour flight standing in the aisle space near the door with the steward and hostess to avoid the creep.

Well, glad to have gotten rid of him. When I narrated the incident to someone, he chided me for playing the victim, for talking about the incident in detail and so reliving the miserable moments and making him feel miserable in the process about something that is over and about which nothing could be done… about which HE could do nothing about.

Narrating the incident was not reliving it… it was therapeutic, a way to get it out of my system… a way of assurance that stuff happens and you do not let it simmer and boil within you but let it out and be cleansed. Obviously, that didn't go well for me. As usual, I decided to rant on my blog about it and purge it… and not be judged in the process. Thank you!

Dreams Of Wanderlust

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To travel far and wide, to see all sorts of places, to experience different cultures, to engage in a few adventures… the desires of this heart are many. Yet here I am confined to the four walls of my room, with a rare trip to the nearby mall to break the monotony of my routine life. To ease the chaffing of the invisible chains that bind me I turn to books. They have become my windows to the outside world, the sky in which my imagination takes wing… and they have been my means of transportation for the hundreds of journeys I have undertaken into this adventurous world.

I come from a family where travel is considered torture. The only traveling my parents take up are their trips to their hometown and back. They weren’t always like that… before their marriage both mom and papa have seen every place they could afford to go to. But after marriage, the trials and tribulations of setting up home in a new city probably put an end to their days of adventure and then unfortunately for me, the wanderlust flame died in them. For reasons best known to them and which I haven’t really tried to inveigle out, I have never been given permission for trips and picnics and the like when my school and college would plan any of it… except when they were these one day trips to nearby places which were repeated year after boring year, for example… the planetarium a hour’s drive in the city, the amusement park on the outskirts of the city and some done to death silly ‘gardens’ which were merely patches of planted green. But because I loved to pack my bag and sit in a bus with the wind in my hair, drowning out all the world around me… I used to enjoy even these little trips. The view outside the windows would generally be city clutter… but not when seen through my mind’s eye. Every patch of green on a traffic island were to me rolling meadows, groups of planted trees in some roadside colony were thick woods shrouded in mystery, puddles of rainwater, large and small were lakes dappled with sunlight or pools of unknown depths mirroring the sky, a gushing storm-drain by the roadside was the rush of a sparkling stream. I wove around me the world I wished to see in a tapestry of my imagination.

In fact, from a young age I developed the habit of tuning myself out from everything around me within whatever mode of transport I traveled in. I hated and still hate people trying to talk to me, offering me food or generally letting their presence known when I am lost to the world outside my window, while I travel. When I am traveling by the public transport bus, I eagerly wait for the conductor to charge me and then forget that it is a city bus… then it’s just me and my fantasies. Most of my bus travel is in Bombay, but the bus takes a wild route in my head… winding through the loud and colourful markets of Morocco shimmering with the desert heat, through the grey, drizzling streets of London (when I am in a double-decker), through Athens, Barcelona, Chennai, Damascus, the English countryside,… …Yangon, Zurich, etc.!

If there was a way, and if I could do this without hurting my folks, I would break free of these invisible chains (bonds of care and love they may be) and fly away… to backpack through the countryside, to listen to a hundred tongues, to hike a few hills, trek through woods and jungles, to eat whatever I can stomach. I want to get behind the wheel and take a long road trip through Europe and I want to trace a wary track through poisonous and intimidating Australia. I would love to live it up in the carnivals of Brazil or New Orleans. To sway on a camel’s back in a desert safari would be a great idea. Been my dream to dig up a few tombs in Ethiopia and Egypt, to gape awestruck at the wildlife in Africa, to explore the original God’s Own Country or as it is more recently known... Middle-Earth – New Zealand, to build a snowman in Canada or cuddle a husky in Alaska… and so much more.

Wondering when I would get to do all this… I know my time is running out. But my spirit of wanderlust is strong… and gaining as each year passes.

And then... I want to write about my travels... and read them again to experience them as now I experience the books that fuel my dreams.

More World Records

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In my previous post, I accounted how I have been lucky to be part of a team that entered the Guinness Book of World Records. Today’s post is about more world record-breaking feats… albeit I am not personally involved with them, but they are special to me for they are from my home away from home.

On 10th November 2012, Kuwait celebrated 50 years of the Kuwaiti constitution and what a celebration it was. Being away from Kuwait I missed experiencing the whole thing first hand… but, I have been eagerly following every news link and YouTube video related to the event.

Kuwait celebrated the milestone with a mind-blowing fireworks’ show that lasted over an hour… and the whole shebang cost a whopping KWD 4.1 million (~USD 15 million). The show was not merely an hour of fireworks… but included laser shows, 3D image projection, large kites, floating dragons and lanterns and all this spread over the coastal stretch of Gulf Road.

I was lucky that two of my friends, Matt and Cajie, both avid photographers and adventurists were in Kuwait and they have taken some amazing pictures and videos of the event. They braved the impossible traffic and took extra efforts to get the best possible vantage points to set up their gear and record the amazing show… which in its brilliance and extravagance broke some 7 world records. One of the new records created was the use of 77,282 firecrackers.

I included one each of the amazing photos these guys clicked… as a teaser to what you would find in their blog and flickr accounts. :)

Copyright - Mathew Jacob

Copyright - Cajetan Barretto

And the rest can be found here…

Mathew Jacob (His blog)

Cajetan Barretto (His Flickr Account)

Here are some of the other pics of the event I found online… Credits are on the pics.

A few videos of the event...

A Trip to Ooty - Part 2

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Evidently, there are quite a few people around who don’t seem to get anything to read… why else would they ask me to finish my Ooty trip series. Here’s another instalment about the trip for all those people out there who have the patience to sit through my posts.

And patience is a virtue I value… like a fish out of water values oxygen.

So, where was I? Ah… in the toy-train! The journey so far.

The train journey made up for the discomfort with the nice views around. Also, we were hanging our heads out of the windows to click pics (kids, please don’t do this… we are adults… adults are crazy and should not be let out of their asylums.) We were counting tunnels (they were numbered anyway! 16 of them) and oohing and aahing over every clump of trees and every trickle of water over the hillside. It wasn’t spectacularly beautiful, but for a desert-dweller like me whenever greens and blues dominate the landscape it is always a wonderful feeling. I spotted a few peacocks…some of which were sitting atop houses along the tracks. But, unfortunately I couldn’t click a snap of a single one… mainly because I was sitting in a seat that faced in the direction opposite to which the train travelled. By the time I saw a scene I wanted to click it would cross my field of clear view… and get obstructed by some tree/rock/bush.

At one point I heard my jiju shout and point excitedly at something… and when I looked it was our beloved bus racing ahead on a road that travelled parallel to the track at a distance. We knew it was our bus because it had ‘CeeCee’ written in huge letters on its flank. Aah… so our bus wasn’t abandoning us (or running away with our luggage!)

The first halt was at Kallar…

Halt One

Here I made a temporary friend… a stray dog who sat on the platform, facing my window, for as long as the train waited at the station. It looked at me as if I were some long lost friend… and I tried hard to remember if I had accidentally caused a canine transformation in any of my close friends. Not that I was aware of, but if I have… I am sorry and I still love you.

Someone I know?

After Kallar, the high-range rack-rail begins… which was indicated by a welcome board by the Nilgiri Mountain Railway.

And the adventure begins...

Rack and pinion arrangement of the rack-rail

The train being so tiny felt more like a private mode of transport than a public one. Also it made frequent stops other than at stations, especially if it was some picturesque view-point. We got off the train to click pics every time the train stopped to fill up its water-tanks. And the train’s driver had to hoot us back in when it had to leave. Wherever the train stopped there were monkeys… and not just the ones inside the train. They were quite bold from the constant exposure to us tourists. I had bought myself a cup of coffee at one of the stations and had drunk half of it and the rest had grown cold. I offered it to one little fella and he deftly accepted it with both hands and drank it all… bottoms up. And then he wanted more. Thankfully, some other passenger distracted him with a roti and he forgot about me and the coffee. Men, I tell you, doesn't matter which species… they are all just the same!  

Monkey Business

After more greenery, semi-dried streams, rock-cut tunnels and viaducts, we pulled out of the wild and in to a more inhabited area as we neared Coonoor. The views changed from woodlands and rocky terrain to tea-estates and clusters of houses.

A tunnel approacheth

Ghana jungle (as in thick forest... not a jungle in Ghana)

paani paani re... with kachra floating in it re

From Mettupalayam to Coonoor, we had passed 5 other stations… Kallar, Adderly, Hillgrove, Runneymede and Kateri, of which we had stopped at the first four. Adderly and Runnymede provided refreshments for the train and Hillgrove for the passengers. There is no stop at Kateri. 

The famous Coonoor tea

Finally, we reached Coonoor. The halt at Coonoor was longer. Here the steam engine that had pushed us until now was replaced by a diesel locomotive for better traction on the steeper climb from Coonoor to Udagamandalam (Ooty in short). It was fun to see the diesel engine travel on the same track as our compartments and then join us with a jolt. I even have a video. Er… I can’t upload it… it has me talking funny! And I don’t have a movie editor to replace my cackle with soothing music.

Once the diesel engine was ‘fitted’ we changed direction for a small distance to change tracks. Here the tracks again change to normal rail adhesion. The views from Coonoor to Ooty were mostly tea-estates, some pine groves, farms and orchards and clusters of multi-colored homes.

Rainbow Homes

Through a pine grove

Tea estates and farms closer to Ooty

After Coonoor, there are four more stations before we reach our destination… Wellington (not the island, but the cantonment town), Aruvankadu (famous for the Cordite factory), Ketti (famous for Needle Industries Pvt. India Ltd. of Pony Needles fame) and Lovedale (of the famous residential institution – The Lawrence School.)

Finally, at about 12:30 PM we reached Udagamandalam (official name). Quite a tongue twister… ain’t it? Ooty is also known as Ootacamund (who ever thought that was easier to say!) 

The lead compartment

Does look like a toy!

And... we are finally here!

We poured out of the train… all stiff-limbed, backs aching and bums numb.

After a few quick snaps of the train and the station’s name board we got out of the station and dialled our bus driver… before he could answer we spotted our bus parked in the first slot in the station’s parking lot. Still, we called the driver as the bus was locked. As we were about to get in to the bus… I spotted our guest house (Papa being a central govt. official, we had booked the government holiday home). The holiday home was across the road from the station… some 200 meters away. And I had already scanned the web and downloaded the pics and also tried to locate it on Google Maps… so I was pretty sure the blue and light-grey building across the street was indeed our Government Holiday Home.  There was no point taking the bus over so we first decided to walk over and check if there was parking at the guesthouse for a bus the size of ours.

The holiday home was no Taj, but it was neat and clean, airy, with large rooms and the best part was that it was peaceful, in spite of its proximity to the station.

We had booked two dormitories and two double-rooms. One of the dormitories was occupied and would be vacated only the next day at noon. We were a little worried as we were 18 in number, until we saw the dorm. The dorm was large with 8 beds arranged in twos in the four quadrants of the room. It had 2 balconies and 8 plug-points (this was very important to us… what with phones, laptops, cameras to charge and the kettle). Since the beds were paired they could easily sleep 3. The dorm had common bathrooms (separate ones for ladies and gents) but across the corridor, not attached to the dorm. The double-rooms (2 beds each) on the other hand, had attached bathrooms and a balcony each. All rooms were equipped with wardrobes / cloth racks, sofas and armchairs and dressers with mirrors. Since we were hardly planning to spend time in the rooms it was fine. We only needed the rooms to sleep in when we came back exhausted and to dress up in. And for us cousins, a place to play Uno, Monopoly and card games while the elders and the kids slept.

View of the station from the  dorm's balcony

Did I mention… the temperature (according to WeatherBug, Google Weather and AccuWeather) read 23°C and yet it was damn chilly even with the sun shining bright. I was of course, delighted. We got to our rooms and unpacked and decided to go out and have lunch. The plan for the first day or what was left of it was to visit the Rose Garden and Botanical Garden within Ooty town area. We had decided to skip the Ooty lake as it was done to death in all the movies and a by glimpse from the train, it appeared to be a green cesspool. Sis and I had planned two different routes for the next two days… one to Mudumalai sanctuary covering the touristy spots to that side and the other towards Kotagiri covering the major spots en-route.

How the rest of the trip unfolded is a post for another day… 

A Trip to Ooty - Part 1

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Have I waited too long for a blog post? Blame it on my being so utterly lazy. And this lethargy does things to your brain… like it throws in spanners amidst the cogs or cuts off the power supply to the thinking machinery.  Even now the bed seems to beckon ever so lovingly…

Arrrgh… ok… lemme kick-start the machinery again. And what better way than to try and remember a recent trip I had to Ooty. Yeah, it wasn’t that great and I don’t recall much.

Either all the movies are shot in an Ooty that’s totally different from the one I saw or something is wrong with my onscreen and off-screen perception of places.

Yes, it was green and misty and foggy and whatnot… but it was also too wet and too crowded for me to like the place. And mind you… we had gone when it was supposed to be off-season. I shudder to think of how the place would be during peak season when everyone would be Ootying.

To that existing crowd we added a good 18 more people. Oh yeah! When we travel, we travel khandaan in tow! In a Sutlej 30-seater coach. With luggage that most families pack for a month. For 3 days. 

Oh… did I mention, I had flown down to Kerala in June for a week… but thanks to this Ooty trip, I had to stay back there till August to avoid an extra to & fro trip from Bombay, without clothes… AND it made me MISS a trip to Bangkok! Mom & papa had a great Bangkok trip! *me sulking* *me mad*

Oh… by the way, when I said ‘without clothes’… I didn’t mean nekkid… I meant I had clothes only for a week and they were all “Dry Clean Only” which meant that I had to buy more stuff!^^ So, I was clothed… just not happy wearing clothes bought with money meant for books.  ^^Dry cleaning in Kerala takes donkey years!

Around two weeks prior to the trip my cousin sis and I were trying to work out an itinerary to fit in all possible touristy spots into a period of 3 days.  This resulted in the two of us doing a virtual tour of Ooty and its surroundings all the way to Mudumalai sanctuary to one side and Kotagiri to the other. Google Earth and Google Maps helped us a lot… but the weathermen did not.  To decide whether we needed to pack our winter-wear and how many warm clothes to pack, we tried to find a reliable weather forecast for Ooty. When the packing started, the weather was forecasted to be a sultry, humid average of 25°C with thunderstorms… which made us (sorry, Just me) wonder if I weren’t better off huddling under the blanket in the house in Kochi which was a cool 22-23°C. A week later the weather was forecasted to be a chilling 10°C – 14°C, so I panicked and rang up mom to ask her to get me my coat, but she was travelling to Bangkok before flying down to Kochi and so no coat for me. With 4 days to the trip, the weather was supposed to be a tolerable average of 23°C and I was glad I wouldn’t need to carry my coat.

We set out late one night in the last week of August, with the neighbors believing we were shifting for good, to Mettupalayam in the Sutlej.  The Bangkok trippers (my uncle & aunt from Kuwait and mom & papa) had all reached Kochi on the day of the Ooty trip with just 5 hours to repack. Bade-papa’s place was turned upside down with all of us packing and re-packing, and with badi-maa in the kitchen preparing food for all of us and to be carried to Ooty (Apparently, people in Ooty survive on pure, cool and clean air and nothing else) the house was quite a mess. The smallest bag I could find was my cabin suitcase and I threw in a pair of jeans and 3 tops for the three days we would be in Ooty, along with my bare essentials, a Gatsby cap and a woollen scarf (my only protection from the anticipated chill)… oh and a pair of sneakers which I had bought for the trip because the only other footwear I had was a pair of 4 inch wedges. I had hunted low and wide for a decent camera to take along but in the end settled for my trusty Galaxy S2… also, uncle was going to get his Canon Rebel T2i.

We were all packed and ready by half past ten in the night… even the two little ones. The living room was a sea of baggage, some of which included pillows and blankets. Don’t even think of asking me why! One corner was cordoned off for food items… snacks for the bus, idli and dry-chutney and bread-jam for breakfast, an electric kettle along with sugar, coffee and tea sachets… for all the people in the group who cannot start their day without a cup of tea / coffee and a few morsels in their tummy. And a newspaper… to aid a certain someone in certain early morning necessary deeds. A man has got to stimulate his brain for perfect motions!!

The Sutlej mini-coach with its awkward size (nothing mini about a 30 seater) could not manoeuvre itself through the steep and narrow lane to our house to pick us all up. It was expecting too much of us to think we’d have carried the luggage to the bus. So, jiju did a few shuttle-trips with his Swift to the bus and back for the luggage and the lazy ones among us. The rest of us walked to the bus which contrary to what you might have thought was parked a mere 200 meters away.

As expected from a luxury bus of its kind, the Sutlej was roomy and nice… and sparkling clean, smelled fresh and had all the usual stuff expected from these buses – fully reclinable seats, bone chilling AC, loud speaker system and the video-screen.  The bus has a 2 + 1 arrangement of seats... and I chose one of the single seats at the back which had the largest window uninterrupted by the window-partitions. The seats had this slight forward tilt and it resulted in me sliding off to the seat edge many a time… I was saved from falling off because I have relatively long legs (I’d like to think so). The shorter ones on other seats had their bums sliding completely off the seat… so much for extra legroom!

I was hoping to go to sleep as soon as I got in to the bus… evidently, that did not happen… I was wide awake the whole time. We had to make two en-route stops to pick up two (more) families of our relatives… in all we were 6 families plus or minus a few ‘kids’ being away on the account of not being in the country / no leave.  I started getting a bit drowsy after crossing the Kerala border in to Tamil Nadu.  By then it was early morning, and we had been in the bus for over 6 hours… we had to reach Mettupalayam station before 7:00 AM.

The meter-gauge, steam powered train (which I like to call the ‘Toy Train’) would take us to Ooty from Mettupalayam and it was scheduled to leave at 7:00 AM for a 5 hour journey to Ooty Station. We reached Mettupalayam at around 5:30 AM and then freshened up at the station, had nice filter-kaapi and breakfast at the railway canteen. Maybe because I was hungry… the wada-sambhar I had was yummy. I even got papa to buy me a pack of some fried savoury snack – fried corn tubes which could be worn on the fingers and also a few lollipops.

The train sans its engine was already waiting for us. We found our non-first-class seats in the middle compartment. The first one was the first class compartment which should have been booked as early as 6 months prior unlike us who booked it 3 weeks prior. Our tickets cost a mere 23 bucks per seat… I almost fell off laughing when I saw the ticket prices. BEST charges me more for a trip from Vashi to Chembur!! Someone told me that the first class tickets were 230 bucks per head… that too is quite measly. But then, the train was hardly what I had expected. It was worse than a state transport run ordinary bus… and the first class was a notch above, perhaps comparable to a BEST ordinary bus. The train's exterior was blue and yellow... bright and sunny! Here I was expecting polished wood interiors and the lingering memories of a vintage era… and what I got was the dirty sky-blue painted box of tin with grey Rexine seats. I am sure there were lingering memories of the earlier passengers but I did not check. I was glad we did not have to carry the mountain of luggage that we had brought from home in the train. Our nice and comfy bus was supposed to meet us at Ooty with our luggage.

For a moment I did think I would have been better off getting to Ooty in that bus… not to mention I would surely beat the train in speed. Of course, experiencing the toy-train was part of the Ooty deal and I wasn’t really gonna let go of that ‘opportunity’. 

Our compartment felt like it had sold of a few tickets more than it had seats and except for the seats which our group had booked, the others were quite crammed. We had the advantage of 4 kids (if that can be called an advantage) and then we also had two extra tickets because my brother and one of my cousins could not get leave for the trip. For all the leg room the bus provided, the train seats were stacked almost on top of each other. The seat in front of mine cut in to my knees. I silently thanked my stars for not making them seats reclinable.

The steam engine chugged along and joined the three compartments and finally it was time for us to leave the station… and unlike Bombay’s local trains, if you were to adjust your clock according to this train’s timing then you’d be eating only dessert at most of your dinner appointments.  

The skies were all clear and it was warm but not scorching hot and I still held out hope for fine weather at our destination. The journey was picturesque even if it was not comfortable. This post is getting to be longer than the train was! I will post about the train journey and the rest of the trip later…

Here are a few pics until then… 

At Mettupalayam Station... waiting for the engine

Excited passengers :)

The Engine - Swiss made

Estate Adventures - Part 2

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A good night’s sleep has revived me well enough to continue where I left off about the trip to jiju’s estate… not to mention it has filled my head with a few nightmares… the perfect ambience for the story that is about to unfold.

I’d mentioned a dilapidated two-storied house in the estate… well, you might have to check yesterday’s post for it. Now, for all external appearances, the house looks intact… a little weathered but fine otherwise. The quartet of explorers (my cousins and me… yeah… there was an additional one who joined us later) decided to take a look in and maybe do a li’l Blair Witch Project number on it. The sun was quite high up in the sky… just after mid-day. The tropical heat was not being very nice to us (especially to me… am not used to the humidity) and the uneven trek had pretty much tired us all out. When we finally reached it we saw that there might actually be a li’l truth in the stories my sis and jiju plied us with about the house being haunted. It did look the type. There was this huge pile of coconuts piled up in its verandah… a Shangri-La for big tarantula-esque spiders and scorpions and the occasional snake. And the place reeked of dried cow-dung… the reason was that there was a huge pile of it nearby baking in the sun… ready to be used as manure. The house had a 4 feet wide verandah all around it... and the eaves of the first floor roof were hanging so low that you had to bend to get up the steps to the verandah… and am not exactly ramp-model-tall.  The doorway had the old-fashioned 4 split-paneled door (4 panels that can be opened separately)… the panels hung on rusty hinges and were covered with cobwebs… but the door was open.

Bat Abode!

We entered the house and saw that there was a corridor that ran three-quarters around a central walled room… maybe the fourth quarter had a bathroom…we didn’t check! The central room was our focus… as we figured out the staircase to the upper floor would have to be inside it. The idea was to get to the top of it… hmmm… we did place a lot of trust in old workmanship. With the door open, the corridor was pretty well lit but it was quite a shock to enter the central room… it was pitch dark inside… even with its door open. We couldn’t see our hands held in front of us. This wasn’t turning out to be as cool as expected... and we all had smart-phones with us…which meant none of them had a torch light like a cheap Nokia would. Someone, not me… my phone didn’t have a flash, used the flash to light up the inside. The momentary flashes created bizarre images on the wall… moving shadows that seared our eyelids… making it difficult to re-adjust the eyesight in the dark. None of us wanted to keep the flash on for long ‘coz that would drain our smart-batteries and the return trip would take long… everyone, except me… my phone didn’t have a flash! Finally, we did manage to get some light… thanks to my smoking cousin (naah… not smoking hot… just that he smokes)… and his matchbox. The flames never did last long… the room seemed filled with very old air… it was reeking of guano. And then we saw why… the rafters seemed alive… and breathing… and writhing… with hundreds of bats (and may I say, unhappy bats… considering we had just stomped in on their beauty siesta). In the flickering flame we also found the staircase… narrow and crumbling… wood that looked rotten, but surprisingly strong… at least, the first rung was. Didn’t check the other rungs… the first rung got me quite close to an upset bat and I didn’t fancy it snapping at my nose or the tetanus shots and anti-rabies shots that would have to follow. The floor was littered with bat droppings and am sure would be over-run with rats at night... we could hear the rat squeaks already. We decided we should leave the place before we were subject to a two-pronged attack by the Rodentian & Chiropteran Orders! My cousin clicked a few rapid pictures in quite a haphazard manner… his contribution to our version of the Blair Witch Project… disturbing the inhabitants of the room quite a bit. He even claimed to have clicked a yakshi (a female ghost) … which when we later checked out in the open turned out to be just me!

With the bats agitated and seeking to fly out… we were even more motivated to make our own escape. We scrambled out of the room, tripping over coconuts and bumping our heads on the low roof… and managed to get out in the open air… back to the divine smell of cow-dung (as opposed to the not so divine smell of guano).

We were hungry and dead tired and the trek back to the overseer’s bungalow was a long one… this time we did follow jiju’s instructions and did not wander off the path. Back in the bungalow we had tall glasses of chilled lemonade and large helpings of steamed kappa (tapioca)… spiced with tempering (mustard, dry red chili & curry leaf tadka with grated coconut) for me and with fish curry for the rest of the gang. This was followed by a passion-fruit pudding made by the overseer’s wife.

Full tummies meant that we were all sleepy and that was not good considering a few of us had to take turns driving back home. So, we decided on another trek in the opposite direction of our earlier route. This one was not meant to take long… it was within the boundaries of the first plantation. We walked along the paths among the rubber trees and recorded videos of the workers ‘skirting’ the trees in blue tarpaulin… the trees looked funny with their blue skirts, like tall ballerinas in really short tutus!

We had directions from jiju to a well in the estate… he wouldn’t divulge much but just asked us to be careful. We sensed the well before we saw it… no… it wasn’t smelly or anything like that… just that a portion of the landscape looked as if it had caved in at a spot… like something had been pulled through a wormhole. We reached what I call the Andha Kua… a huge well (photographs do not do it justice)… deep almost fathomless… and dark. The well had no raised walls… it started at ground level and just plunged in to the bowels of the earth. There was a bucket tied to a rope that coiled almost a foot high… there was no pulley… the bucket had to be raised and lowered manually. I tried to do it and the bucket just slipped… clanked its way down to the water taking the coil of rope with it… someone had the sense to stop it from uncoiling completely. In my defense, I wasn’t expecting the bucket to be that heavy!

There were metal rungs embedded in the stone wall of the well, for people to climb down to the water level… which in spite of challenges and prodding I wasn’t foolish enough to accept. But, I wanted pics and from our vantage spot at the top, none were coming out nice… that is when a worker came up to us to warn us about not slipping in and it should suffice to say that he did slip in (figuratively, of course). We said we were trying to get pics and were planning to climb down the metal rungs… he gave us a glowering look, mumbled something (am sure they were some wonderful local expletives), took my cousin’s cell-phone, tightened his lungi and clambered down the rungs himself… and took this pic… not bad, I say!

Andha Kua!

He clambered up just as soon and slammed the phone back in my cousin’s palm and asked us to get our asses out of there. We thanked him profusely and decided not to linger and irk the poor guy more.

Soon, we were back in the bungalow… in time for tea and snacks… banana fritters and pani-kam chai! Yummy!

We left the place around 5:00 PM. We were in a hurry… actually, I was in a hurry… I wanted to catch that mango-waala bhaiyya at his tapri and pack some of it to take home. By the time we reached the spot he had left for the day… maybe some other day…

Estate Adventures - Part 1

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Once upon a time… in a land far, far away… I’d gone on a trip! This wasn’t a trip in an armchair… but one that physically transported me from one location to another.

The destination wasn’t some exotic land of mystique… but, just my jiju’s (brother-in-law) estate (in Thrissur, Kerala). There sure was mystery there… in the form of weird sounds & calls from among the rubber trees and the thick vegetation around the plantation and also in a crumbling, old two-storied house whose current inhabitants are bats, snakes, scorpions and spiders… all living in perfect harmony with each other and with nature ( a lesson to us humans). Ok… all that does sound exotic… in a rustic sense.

The drive to the estate was long and we started out from home in the wee hours of dawn, just before the sun rouged the sky. The drive required us to cross 2 districts… we started from home in the heart of Ernakulam city and wound through what seemed a trip in time rather than distance. The vibrant city gave away to bustling towns… and then a more laid-back, rusticity… not so much a village anymore and not yet the town. This was repeated in the next district as we crossed the heart of Thrissur ‘city’ which really is a glorified town… not as fast-paced and upbeat as Ernakulam city but with a less hurried, more mellow flow of life. Soon, we reached the outskirts of Thrissur district… and our destination, Chelakkara – a small town. From the town, we began the winding road on to the hills, with the mercury dropping 2-3 degrees along the incline. The huge, garish multistoried villas and bungalows which clustered in the more urban areas were more widely spaced along this stretch. Now, there were only one or two huge houses along the route which looked like they belonged in a Grimm’s fairy tale (specifically the gingerbread house of Hansel & Gretel fame)… or like huge wedding cakes that dotted the lush green hillscape (with white trellis-work & cherry-red, fuchsia or blue tiled roofs… the horror!). I am told it is a lot of ‘Gelf’ money that has gone in to the making of those nightmarish tributes to the Lord of Architectural Horrors! I wonder what goes through an owner’s head when he decides to paint the exteriors of his ‘magnificent’ villa in candy pink or fluorescent orange or chartreuse green or lemon yellow… or an eye-blinding combination of these. Oh well, I digress… the aesthetic tastes of modern house owners in Kerala is the subject of a long rant… some other time. Aah, so we leave these nightmares behind and move on…

The road had taken on a steep incline and our little cars (there were two – a Suzuki Swift & a Chevy Spark) were accompanied by massive trucks and trailers and those estate-boss Scorpios and Safaris. Being in Kerala, it goes without saying, that the road was narrow and there was no divider and the traffic hurtled down as well as trudged up without a bother. Parallel to our road ran a railway track… and there were occasional crossings… surprisingly, all were gated. There were tiny waterfalls along the way… the rains hadn’t yet started their fierce march through the state; some of these waterfalls formed sizeable streams over which the road bridged in small arches. After one such arch, we came across a roadside temple… a place where travelers stopped to bow their heads to the Vignahartha (Lord Ganesh) and throw a couple of coins in to the hundi. The temple had its shutters closed by the time we reached it… but the diyas (oil lamps) were still lit up and the general air of peace (when no one’s around) found in all places of worship prevailed. Right next to the little temple was a make-shift tapri (small shop on a cart)… a refreshment stall that sold everything from cigarettes to tea and snacks to nariyal pani (tender coconut). A particular jar caught my attention… it was filled with what to me looked like banana fritters (am absolutely crazy about these oily, calorie heavy critters)… but they were submerged in a liquid… there were other jars with stuff submerged in what I realized later, was brine. I asked the shopkeeper about the contents of the jar which attracted me the most… he told me that they were slices of partially ripened mangoes pickled in brine. I wanted to have a go at it and in my defense, he did mention mango and pickle in the same sentence. He told me that he had just put them in early morning and it had just been 4 hours… I really didn’t care… and helped myself to a slice. Like a magician he produced a pet cola bottle filled with some fiery, red masala and asked me if I would like the slice sprinkled. Ah… if that’s how you have it… sure… I went ahead and sprinkled quite a bit. Then, I bit in to the slice… the only thing I remember after that is that I was in heaven… life was as beautiful as it could get… everything seemed prettier, people around me were all nicer…so on and so forth. The masala was some magical trade secret or so he said… I still asked him to pack a bit for me. Between me and my two cousins we finished almost half of the jar.

*Wanted to put up the pic of the mangoes... but it has me in it...and am scary... Boooo!*

Soon we reached the estate… our tummies full of yummy street food, rural-style. After a round of lemonade (for me) and tea for the others at the overseer’s bungalow, we set out on an exploratory trek through the estate. My jiju had work to finish… some accounts to be checked and the labour to be paid off and stuff… so our trip was unguided and well, quite honestly, we just walked aimlessly around in the vicinity of the bungalow… a li’l worried about getting lost. Being the eldest of the trio (and with enough trust in technology… cell-phone coverage was good), I incited my cousins to venture a bit farther. We clambered through some dark and craggy paths… so thick with vegetation that it was difficult to walk without getting the twigs, leaves and the occasional spider web (with and without its owner) on the face. I managed to click the pic of a less wild path… considering I could not maneuver much in the others.

The Path Of Glory

We called up jiju and asked him directions to his new plantation… he rattled of some directions… we didn’t follow any! We found our own way walking over rocky outcrops and some open spaces that connected the pockets of thick vegetation. I was intrigued by a shrill call of a bird, the sound was familiar… a desert dweller like me could not recognize it instantly… the call was shrill, a little unnerving considering the surroundings, a bit banshee like. Then we caught a fleeting glimpse of the creature… a peafowl (couldn’t see enough to say if it was a cock or a hen). We tried to follow it but it disappeared in to thick vegetation which we could not penetrate… and also, ‘coz jiju had warned us that the peafowls usually loitered around snake-nests (or snake-mounds or whatever they are called). After the mini-adventure through the ‘Jungles of the Estate’ where we came across varied wildlife such as the fashionable millipede and some high flying kites to the elusive pea-fowl, we finally reached the other plantation. Rows of plantains, a beautiful stretch of lovely green fields and more rubber trees greeted our eyes. And a well, which we used to draw water from to drink… and then thought better of it!

The Fashionable Millipede

Ok… now, am tired… the adventure of the dilapidated house would be told some other day… along with the adventures of the andha kua (blind well)!