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Mysore, up to Coorg, and down to Kerala
Entry 10 of 33 | show all | print this entry |
...in which our hero gets instructed in the art of making incense, learns that the produce alone is worth the trip, gets rained upon in a rain forest and rolls down the Ghats into wet, green Kerala.
MYSORE
An overnight train from Hospet to Bangalore, and a swift transfer to platform 3 got us on the train that dumped us in Mysore at noon. The views from behind the bars of the second-class sleeper seats were of flat countryside with pretty villages, extensive coconut and banana plantations and towns with well-built houses. Eva had travelled along but went ahead the same day to Kerala by gruelling nightbus.
Mysore is called a 'pleasant city' in the Rough Guide, I couldn't agree more. The British bulldozed the cramped old town in the 19th century, which has resulted in a grid-pattern town with broad boulevards and streets, and large clean parks, focussed on the huge palace in the centre of town. The daytime temperature of 32°C was the maximum (in winter it rarely goes below 15°), and humidity was low. Not many stray cows either. What's more, the locals leave you alone when you walk the streets, and the markets are spectacular. Just perfect for stolling around for a day or two.
Mysore's Devaraja market has a Victorian stone facade, and is crammed with stalls selling all the exotic produce from the surrounding countryside. Huge piles of fragrant stringed-together flowers which are used as puja offerings, for decorating buses and rickshaws, or to dangle from girls' hair. Stacks of bananas, mangos, papayas and vegetables. Piles of coloured powder for making tilaks, the Hindu forehead dots and stripes. Packets of incense sticks in many different varieties - an enthusiastic Christian Indian called Joseph showed me how oil is pressed from plants (sandalwood, lilies, jasmine, etc) to make the sticks. The market also had fresh seafish, trucked in every day from Mangalore, a 15 hour drive west. If you take the climate in account and base your diet on what is available year-round at the market, Mysore must be one of the healthiest places to live in India.
Mysore's main sight is the palace, still inhabited by a descendant of local royalty who now is in politics and has nine luxury cars in addition to his eight elephants. The palace, dating from the early 1900s, is the most opulent I've seen (maybe comparable in style to the ecclectic Peles Palace in Sinaia, Romania, that was built in the same period, and also was designed to impress). Cast-iron girders from Edinburgh, coloured glass panels from Belgium, murals of a procession in the 1930s, a painting of King Edward, elephant-top seats with electric lights, thrones made from tusks, a huge open-sided hall for watching parades from the shade... he had it all.
Again, there were not many foreigners in town (a few in the hotel and a French group in the palace were the only ones I saw) and the palace employees were interested in where I was from. I spoke to the elephant guard - his job was to make sure they keep quiet at night, and to call the mahout if there is a problem. He said it they could be dangerous animals - he showed me a gardener with metal spikes in his healing wrist that had been snapped by an inattentive elephant.
While we were talking, all eight palace elephants with mahouts on top came lumbering past on their afternoon stroll to a huge heap of plant materials - lunch. Earlier, I had seen one of the elephants at the 'rides' section of the palace, where tourists can get to sit on one. Two young girls had climbed the metal platform needed to board the elephant, but as it came walking towards them and trumpeted loudly a few times, they fled screaming, leaving their fathers to take their place. Indian children clearly get well-instructed about the power of elephants.
As the elephant rode off with the fathers, two little boys scampered up to the platform and (with their bare hands) collected the mound of shit that Jumbo had left behind, chucking it all in a jute bag and dragging it off to the gardeners shed. They wiped their hands on their trousers before continuing their play - another reason to use the life-saving Indian-hands-pressed-together-greeting instead of the handshake when dealing with scruffy children.
The next morning, after a very necessary 30Rs haircut, I hopped on the bus to see some of the surroundings, and to add a new kind of Hindu temple to my list of sightings. In Somnathpur, a village an hour east of Mysore, with a change of bus in the market town of Narasipur, lies one of the few Hoysala-style temples. It's not as immediately spectacular as those in Khajuraho, but the squat 800-year-old building was covered in fabulous small carvings. Inside, the roof was supported by huge, smoothly ribbed cylindrical stones that must have been carved using the turning technique (carved while spun horizontally). I'm glad I visited in the morning, as the stones were heating up quickly in the sun (and Hindu temples are always visited barefoot). The only other tourists were two Germans who were travelling around India on a battered old Enfield Bullet motorbike. Very cool, but with dangerous traffic, no good maps and hardly any signposting it's not easy getting around.
On the bus back to Narasipur I grabbed the chance to ride deck-class, and clambered onto the roof together with about 15 highly amused Indians (women, children and foreigners usually belong inside a bus). The sun was out, the trees weren't too low and the views of the farmland and plantations was great. The ticket-collector came out on the roof while we were moving to collect the 3Rs fee. The wildlife here is good - we passed a few lakes with lots of birdlife, including a flock of about 20 pelicans.
COORG
Just a 3-hour bus ride west of Mysore, high up in the Western Ghats, lies the Coorg/Kodragu region, made famous by Dervla Murphy's 1976 travel book 'On a shoestring to Coorg' (in which she travels with her 5-year old daughter and, being Irish, regularly gets drunk on her self-invented mix of coconut rum, honey and lime).
On the way to Madikeri/Mercara, the main town, the bus passed the gates of the Bylakuppa Tibetan settlement, the place where the Indian government provided land and aid to thousands of Tibetan refugees (including many monks) after the Chinese invasion in the 1960s. Now, half a dozen villages are home to a new generation of Tibetans who took their culture with them, but probably dearly miss their mountainous homeland. Just before reaching the Coorg, the road goes steeply up through heavily forested slopes, where I spotted signs saying 'Beware of wild elephants. Do not park your car here.'
Madikeri's centre is a dump. A noisy, busy square with constant honking of buses and rickshaws. But the back streets have elegant mosques, views of the hills, and have some of the nicest small houses I've seen so far in India. The green hills around were covered in mist as it had just rained - for the first time since my arrival in India two months ago I had felt rain. The Dutch could learn from this.
I'm in the Coorg for trekking, but due to the rain the local telephone lines had been down for days, so only at the last minute I managed to reach a travel/trekking agency that fitted me on a 2-day trek that would start the next day, as it turned out with two students from Amsterdam. It's a small planet. (The hotel owner told me that it's mostly north Europeans that come here for trekking, lots of Danes and Dutch.)
Our guide was Banzi, an enthusiastic 21-year-old Coorg who knew all about the plants and wildlife on the trip, and who was disappointed we didn't know many Dutch songs (leaving him to hum songs all the way). The trek started with a 30-minute bus ride through dense rainforest to the end of the road - a bridge after which the asphalt gave way to a steep path. The women on the bus all were clad in colourful saris and had fresh flowers in their hair, filling the bus with the smell of jasmine. The bus was also decorated - from the unused rear-view mirror hung a huge garland of large flowers I didn't recognise.
We hiked steeply up a hillside through a tea plantation and paused at a small farm (with a huge pig) at the top. It looked very tropical here - just like on TV. Huge trees reaching 30-40m high, vines snaking up and down everything, dense undergrowth, dripping water... and the sound of crickets, but not as you know it. These crickets were all embroiled in the final heat of the Black&Decker-Powertool-soundalike-contest, and let out a deafening screech.
Banzi used half a coconut shell (plenty of those around in these parts) to mix some soda powder with water, which was smeared on our shoes, an effective leech-prevention method. We hiked further up the hill and after an hour of forest came to the wind-blown meadows that characterise the tops of the Coorg mountains. A little higher we came to the top of the mountain ridge, and peered down the valley over waves of blueish, forest-covered hills and mountains streching in all directions. I'm sorry if I bore you with more Romania-related stuff, but it did really resemble the foothills of the Carpathians and the Apuseni mountains (but without the palmtrees then).
On the valley floor directly below us were only a few light green spots indicating rice paddys or fields - the rest was dense rain forest. Here we met another group of hikers, 15 curious Indians from Bangalore, that today were completing a 5-day hike organised by the same trekking company. They all never had seen so much forest in India, and were impressed.
After walking along the ridge with amazing views all around for another hour, we descended through forest to the plantations in the next valley. Here we saw the reason for the lush greenness of the whole area - coffee plants need to be shaded, and farmers leave most of the forest intact instead of chopping it down. Coffeelovers will be interested to know that two types of beans come from the Coorg: Robusta, which needs shade and is a large plant with broad leaves, and the Arabica, from a plant that can stand direct sunlight and is much smaller with smaller leaves. Robusta is mostly grown though.
As we descended through the forest and plantations, Banzi told us more about the plants here, and it seems that everything can be used for something. Large cactus-like plants were used to make threads. Silver-trees were planted to provide shade and used for firewood. Several types of palmtrees gave useful nuts such as areca (for in paan, something every Indian chews all day) and of course coconuts. Cardamom (a spice used in Indian masala tea and mostly exported to the Arab countries) grows as little peas near the roots of bamboo-like plants, all over the forest floor. Banana trees provide bananas of course, but the large leaves are used for wrapping hot/wet meals and agricultural products, and as umbrellas during rainy seasons (the banana plant is actually a sort of vegetable: it grows new from the roots every year, up to a height of 3-4 metres). Ginger is grown in open fields: the plant looks like reed. Pepper grows on a vine-like plant that is lead up nearly every tree in between the coffee plants. Mature mango trees each provide thousands of these delicious fruits.
The prize for weirdest fruit in the forest goes to jackfruit, which is twice the size of your head, spiky, green, and too heavy to grow on branches - so it grows on a short stem from the trunk of the tree. When ripe, it easily cracks open to reveal a sticky mess of thready yellow-white paste with about a hundred seeds that are covered in a slimy coating that vaguely tastes like banana. It tastes better than this description must sound. Elephants are crazy about ripe jackfruit, and in some parts of the Coorg villagers have to light fires on the forest roads at night during jackfruit season to stop wild elephants from walking through their gardens to get the fruit. I knew some Romanian farmers who were up all night to protect their crops from wild boar, but this is a problem of a completely different scale.
The plantations seem harmonious with their surroundings, and the landscape is very pretty and serene, with only spread-out farmsteads and occasional rice paddys on the valley floors inbetween the forest. Even the smaller farmhouses are large and well-kept, and the area seems a prosperous, nice place to live compared to many other parts of India.
We glimpsed a bit of globalisation in progress. Brace yourself for a bit of human geography now - or how you can 'read' a landscape. We passed a few farms where the farmers were clearing the forest and getting rid of the Robusta coffee plants. Coffee was only grown here after the British had introduced it as a cash-crop (to be sold abroad), and the main market for the Coorg is Europe (as South America takes care of the US and Canada). Banzi told us that in the last four years the price of coffee had dramatically dropped - to half the level it had been.
Harvesting coffee was still profitable, but not as lucrative as before, and planting other crops (in this case ginger) made better sense to some farmers (especially as coffee takes four years to grow to producing-age). Unfortunately, nearly all other crops require more sunlight and need the forest to be cleared away. The next day one of the trekking camp cooks, and part-time coffee farmer, told me the economics behind the price change: Indian coffee was facing competition from Vietnam, where the government recently has been promoting coffee production and has been subsidising the farmers. So here's an example where a government's action more than 3000km away leads an Indian farmer to chop down a patch of rainforest.
The night was spent at a tent camp in a quiet valley, where the participants of the Indian 5-day trek were awarded certificates, which we, Honoured Guests from Holland, were expected to hand out, after a speech about the dangers involved in climbing up Holland's highest mountain. The next day, we took the bus for an hour to reach the northern Coorg, where the mountains start to drop off towards the Arabian Sea. We climbed up a hill through leech-infested rainforest (the bastards only need a split-second to attach to your shoe and then slowly climb upwards in search of blood blood blood). This is wild-elephant country, with a herd of about 15 roaming the hills, but apart from a tree that had been used as a scratching pole and one footprint ( a large circular hole in the mud) we didn't see a sign of them.
It was a cloudy day, so the sweating could be kept to a minimum. At the top, an amazing view of forests all around, Madikeri in the south and the beginning of the slow descent of the Western Ghats down towards the sea - far away behind the mist. On the way back to Madikeri, we visited a nearby Hindu temple with delicate wooden carvings, when suddenly the heavens opened, pouring down warm rain on us (I'm now typing 4 days later and it still hasn't stopped).
Banzi invited us to his home, 10km north of Madikeri, and we accepted the invitation and met his father Dali, mother Asha and brother Mandela (born on the day that Nelson M. was freed from prison, in 1990). They live in a small house built by themselves 20 years ago, with two large rooms and two small bedrooms. Surrounding the house are their 15ha of coffee and banana plantations, a small lake with two ducks, a shed with two cows. No electricity or running water. Jungle life. We were treated to an excellent Coorg meal, and a great breakfast of rice pancakes and curry the next morning.
A jeep brought us to the busstation, from where I travelled an hour south through more enchanting Coorg landscapes, and changed to the bus that would take me back to sea-level. Just a few minutes into the rainy journey, the road dipped down and started a steep 75km descent through dense protected forest, to Kerala. I'm glad I was heading down, the uphill trip in this rustbucket bus would have been painfully slow and noisy.
The mountains levelled a little out before the Karnataka/Kerala state border (where there really was a gate across the road, and tax officers to stop cheap Karnataka alcohol spilling into Kerala). Two things were immediately noticable. The change of alphabet (from Karnataka's squiggly but orderly Kannada spaghetti font to Kerala's Malayalam: something much more curly, with lots of roller-coaster loops), and the dominating presence of communist propaganda along the streets (red flags! hammer-and-sickle busstops! Che Guevara posters!).
The elections are in a few days, and Kerala is the only state in the world that has democratically elected a communist government (who made a mess of things of course), and they're still a very popular bunch, for unknown reasons. Children are named Lenin and Stalin in this part of the world. From the bus I saw a long line of men in skirts walking under umbrellas, which turned out to be the tail of the first real communist procession I've seen. Hurray for Karl and Vladimir.
Unfortunately, communists are crap at uniting the weather, and the heavy rain had turned into a full-blown downpour when I had to get off the bus to transfer to the train station of spice-harbour-town Kannur/Cannanoor. I was soaked withing seconds, and seeing there was no easy way to go further south this evening, and keeping an eye on my soggy rucksack with the last dry/clean clothes, I bought a 'My India' brand umbrella, took a deep breath and booked into a room with a view of Kannur station's platform one - the wonderful 150Rs "Indian Rail Resting Room". It's the largest room I've slept in til now, but not the most quiet. Thankfully, not many trains pass Kannur at night.
THRISSUR
An uncomfortable 5-hour wooden-bench class trainride south early the next day brought me to Thrissur/Trichur in central Kerala, where it was also raining hard. With so much rain soaking you even with an umbrella, there's only so much you can do, so I used internet cafes, had the laundry done, and finished Murphy's Coorg book seated in an outlet of AFC (Asian Fried Chicken - not bad at all, though the waiters are idiots). This was the only place in town with enough light for reading and windows with a view of the street outside. All the locals were mostly standing in shops and under awnings, playing with their mungis (ankle-length skirts that can be tied up as a nappy), waiting hopelessly for the rain to stop.
Thrissur has no major sights except for the huge Keralan-style Hindu temple in the middle of a large green in the centre of town. I had just missed the biggest festival of the year, Puram (involving lots of elephants, drummers and dancing), so the city was cleaning up and void of foreigners. Keralans are a great bunch - many stop and smile and say hello to foreigers, or just come up to talk a bit. More so than in the north, but much more often with a sincere feeling of friendliness. They really seem delighted that a foreigner came to their town. (Or maybe it's a Communist plot and they're being paid by the tourist office to do so).
Next up: the former Dutch trading town of Kochi.
Mood: humidly happy, reading lots of good books
Weather: pissing down with rain non-stop, but comfortably warm at 28°C.
Reading: God of small things, Arundhati Roy (set in Kerala)
Sign of the Day: "I treat, HE heals" (on the wall of a doctor's clinic, Coorg)
Latest Comments (2)
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Thrissur (reply)
Sep 27, 2008 15:42 EST by menokki
'waiter's are idiots'? We dont need over critical tourists like you. Dont come back
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Your Comments About Thrissur People (reply)
Jan 20, 2008 16:37 EST by sudee4u
Hi Jeroen,
No body here at Trichur pays for people to get delighted at Foregners and Kerala is not a communist state at all.We are very happy that you visited Trichur and people here have got great respect for guests.Trichu is not all about Pooram.There are lot of other things to see in Trichur.
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