A Walk in the Hills

A Tea Plantation
Originally uploaded by qiubuo.

We are attempting to leave town every other weekend, and we are even more eager now that the summer heat has settled over Bangalore (South India really has three seasons - winter, summer, and monsoon). We couldn't get away last weekend because I was shooting the opening of a tailoring center for deaf women on Sunday, so we planned to take the train Sunday night, but we were worried about crowds. Instead we got on the waiting list for Monday night and easily found berths on the train to Coimbatore. We had hoped to take the Blue Mountain Railway up to Ooty - a "toy train" that takes about 3 and a half hours to go 45 kilometers up the Nigiri Mountains. However, that train only leaves once a day at 7 am, so instead we took a local bus from Coimbatore to Ooty, which also took about 3 and a half hours.

We stayed at a small guesthouse that is popular with foreigners, particularly Brits, and has excellent cookies. Among the other guests were a charming teenage couple from Switzerland and two British medical students. The first day we rented a boat and rowed on Ooty Lake for two hours, then took an exorbitantly priced rickshaw to a bakery called Hot Breads - the rave review in the Lonely Planet suggests that there are plenty of British writers on their staff, because the bread was not exactly stellar. We visited the beautiful Botanical Gardens, popular among families and young couples, which boasts a Japanese garden that consists of oddly formed pagodas and skulls made of pebbles, and a Italian garden which looks like an Indian garden with red vases on pedestals. Then we ate dinner at a rather uninspiring Vegetarian western restaurant that whips up Greek salads with no olives or cheese; Gilles was sorely disappointed.

On Wednesday we signed up for a trek led by a local guide that has quite a good business going. He told us that his business is even better since the tsunami. He took us up the hills, through a tea plantation and a Toda village - the Toda people are an indigenous tribe from the Nilgiris. I am not really sure what indigenous means in India, but they are not of the same ethnic group as the Tamil majority. At any rate Indian people seem to enjoy classifying people even more than we Americans do!

Gilles tries to make a new friend
Originally uploaded by qiubuo.

The hike was beautiful and we only got a little sunburned. Anyway we seemed better off than the five English people we were with. As usual, the guide told us the names of all the plants in slightly comprehensible English and then completely incomprehensible French. Our favorite was the translation of "forget-me-not" into "ne m'oublie pas," perhaps a joke perpetrated by the Swiss couple that had gone on the walk the day before.

The guide carried candy in his bag, and all the children in all the villages knew it. He only gave candy to the "good children," which meant docile little girls who didn't ask for candy - ultimately that meant little girls under the age of 3. He seemed to have a particular aversion to little boys.

On Thursday we took a walk and got soaked by the rain, then decided to take the Blue Mountain railway down the hill, but the ticket office wouldn't sell us seats in advance. This was a shame since the railway station was where we had chosen to hide from the rain, so we were stuck there for twenty minutes anyway. Instead we were told to line up half an hour before the train along with everyone else. The ticket window opened around twenty-five minutes before the train, and we bought our tickets and waited on the platform. When the train arrived, we experienced the most chaotic mob scene we have seen yet in India. The passengers basically stormed the train from all directions, elbowing everyone out of their way, including the people descending from the train, which did not help matters. Some parents thrust their children through the windows to reserve seats for when they actually got on.

A group of young men tried a standard trick, throwing handkerchiefs in through the windows, but as we had just fought our way onto the actual train we weren't about to oblige. Besides, they had not even aimed at the seats properly, so there was no real achievement on their part; they had just tossed their handkerchiefs to a man inside the train and he dropped them on our seats right before we sat down. So we sat down anyway, and the men started yelling at us "kerchief! kerchief!" Gilles responded, "Je ne comprends pas," to which they just said "pas?" and "kerchief" again. Really the French was unnecessary, as they didn't speak English either. They were pretty annoyed, but I thought it was rather ungentlemanly of them to be going after a lady's seat, so I didn't feel very guilty. I'm not sure if they managed to retrieve the actual handkerchiefs.

We did finally make it down the mountain. The view was lovely from the train, but I'm not sure it was worth the trouble. We arrived in Mettapulayam, waited an hour for the train to Coimbatore, then discovered we were still on the waiting list for Bangalore. Having gotten on our other waiting list trains in the past, we thought we would give it a shot anyway. We waited on the platform with a drunken Tamilian insurance salesman who told us that American people have sex too early and that France is probably around 400 or 500 years old, not nearly as old as the temple in Madurai, built 2,500 years ago. He scolded us for not taking care of our parents by buying life insurance for ourselves, and we tried to explain the idea of "pension" to him, but that would involve explaining a lot of other concepts that many Indians have not discovered yet, although their civilization is clearly so much older. (Maybe it's because they suffered under Imperialism for so long, but I feel like Indians take national pride to a whole new level. I just read an editorial in an Indian newspaper claiming that "Indian brain is the best in the world." It's a good thing they're vegetarian.) Anyway I took particular offense when he told us that he had married his daughter off at the proper age of 19 to a boy he chose himself, and then of course when he asked me the age at which I first had sex! Luckily, soon after that he forgot how to speak English and the rest of the lecture was in Tamil.

The train only stopped at the station for five minutes, which gave us enough time to watch a conductor study our ticket for one minute and tell us we had "no chance," run to another car where the conductor wouldn't listen to us at all for one minute, run to a third car where we were told that class was full and we should try another car, search fruitlessly for another conductor for one minute, and then be yelled at in barely comprehensible English by a conductor who told us that since the train was leaving, how could we expect him to help us? (I don't mind that the English is different here and sometimes broken, seeing as I don't speak any Indian languages so who am I to talk, but it bothers me that certain people, usually men, are just so proud of their ungrammatical, impolite and occasionally incomprehensible way of speaking. I was told the other day that "my English is very good for an American" by a shopowner who would clearly have trouble writing an essay on Shakespeare - or Hemingway, for that matter. On the other hand, I have met many women who speak excellent English and yet apologize frequently for their lack of skill.)

Anyway, we were a bit deflated by the idea of spending the night in Coimbatore, 450 km from Bangalore, but our chances of making it out looked dim. We went to the information booth and asked about buses to Bangalore, and a very nice young man told us that there was another train that night. He actually took us to the refund counter and filled out the forms for us, and the refund processing agent obligingly sold us tickets to Bangalore so that we didn't have to go to the next window. We only had a few minutes to spare, so we ran to the train, which was all but empty. All we had to do was upgrade our tickets to AC class, and we had a nice compartment all to ourselves. The train did not actually pass through Bangalore, but 15 kilometers from the city station, so we had breakfast in a small suburban town and took a passenger train into the city. Gilles put on his sunglasses and was much admired by the young men near us. We arrived home safe and sound at 9 this morning. Now it's back to work!

p.s. My government clearance is finally coming through this week! So I'll be an official Fulbrighter when we come back after Gary's wedding.