From the beauty of Ooty to God's Own (Communist) Country.

Having read through my previous posts, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that in the interests of brevity and, well, interest, I chose not to mention every fort, palace, mausoleum and temple we visited on our interminable school-trip-like tour of Rajasthan. There were very, very many more. Very, very, very many.


One of the things that had consistently amazed and delighted us about travelling through India thus far was the sheer numbers of people that manage to cram into public transport. Trains, buses, auto rickshaws – all look like their occupants are trying for a Guinness world record. People on the roof, hanging on the back, crammed into the driver’s foot well, spread-eagled across the side. We frequently watched in awe as ostensibly three-seated tuk-tuks left school gates with a class and a half of children on board. This ceased to be funny when we boarded our flight to Coimbatore. Obviously, the aviation-authorities-that-be frown upon passengers sitting on the roof and clinging to the tail of jet airliners, but Spice Jet more than made up for it by cramming people inside in alarming numbers. Over 200 of us in a Boeing 737. Which is a very small plane. After 4 hours of that, I have some sympathy with battery farmed chickens.

And to top it all off, about an hour into the flight, I started to feel somewhat unwell. I don’t know whether it was the (very good) food at the hotel or the (not so good) airline sandwich, but I left Delhi with a rapidly escalating case of Delhi-belly. And Rachel, still not over the previous bout of food poisoning also took a turn for the worse. By the time we got to Coimbatore, it was all we could do not to flood the taxi with pre-enjoyed food in assorted liquid forms. We got to the hotel and spent the rest of the day sleeping, groaning and evacuating various fluids in rotation. We did manage to get to a pharmacy where, armed with a list of brand names of antibiotics, we bought a couple of strips of pills the colour of raw liver. They did the trick and killed off whatever bacteria had come to call us home pretty quickly. We looked up the pills on the internet to find that they are banned in most western countries due to the potentially devastating possible side effects, including exploding ligaments and permanent damage to most, though not all internal organs. Needless to say, though we weren’t troubled by digestive indiscretion again, we spent the following days panicking over every (normal) twinge and ache.

It was a pity, because Coimbatore seemed like a nice place – a lot more prosperous and, well, real than most of the tourist places up north. Our hotel was right by the station, perfect for our planned 5.15am train to Ooty the following morning. The train to Ooty is, by all accounts, spectacular – a 1 metre gauge, rack railway occasionally pulled by steam engines. However, with diahorrea being such a recent friend, and having experienced the toilets on a first class train in Sri Lanka the previous November, we decided that eight hours of rail-bound fun just wasn’t for us and booked a taxi instead.

The taxi journey was quicker than the rail journey would have been, largely because the driver seemed to be suicidal. There are 36 hairpin bends between Coimbatore and Ooty, all of which we took at twice the speed limit on the wrong side of the road. By the time we actually reached Ooty, four or so hours later, we were too terrified to take much in. We had booked ourselves into the Holiday Inn as, after all the personal service of the Rajasthani hotels we fancied a couple of days of international anonymity. As is happened, it was a fantastic hotel, a couple of miles out of town and looking down over the valley.

The view from the hotel room, Ooty. The clouds were very low that day

The room was big and comfortable, the bar was welcoming and the food in the restaurant exceptional, though Rachel quickly discovered that she didn’t much care for the local specialities. On the first night, I almost passed out after walking the single flight of stairs up to our room. I know that I am unfit, but this seemed a little excessive. Once safely back in the room, I looked up Ooty on the internet. It turns out that we were about 2,500 metres above sea level. That’s close to twice the height of Ben Nevis. Higher than I have ever been in my life. Ooty is in the state of Tamil Nadu and was one of the three hill stations that the British lawmakers in the time of the Raj would escape to in order to avoid the brutal summers. The hotel had heating instead of air conditioning. All the local shops sold knitwear. It was still warmer than most Yorkshire summer afternoons though. Ooty is in the Nilgiri hills, famed for their tea plantations. Having already bought vast quantities of tea from Sri Lanka and Nepal, I proceeded to fill every available gap and cranny in my rucksack with small foil-wrapped packages of the precious local leaves. We spent two nights in Ooty, and though the town itself is tiny, could quite happily have stayed longer. The hotel was wonderful, though the service was occasionally a little over-attentive (I really started to worry that the barman was about to start topping my beer up as I held the glass to my mouth so insistent was he that I not run out).

Rachel in Kebab Corner in Ooty. A wonderful place!

Tea pickers, Ooty

But two days later it was time to move on to Kerala – self-styled as ‘God’s own country’. Everyone to whom we had spoken in India, and every Indian we knew in Dubai had told us that we had to visit Kerala. It is, by all (and I mean all) accounts, the best, prettiest and most welcoming part of the subcontinent. It is a narrow state, the strip of land right at the bottom on the left, sandwiched between coast and mountains. The night before we left Ooty, I read up about it. Kerala was the first place in the world to elect a communist government, and the communists are still (democratically) in control. It has 100% literacy and social services that compare with the best in the old and new worlds. It also has the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide in India (ignorance is bliss – the heightened understanding of the world afforded by reading well frequently leads to depression and drink problems. Discuss). Fine, I thought. A state full of literate, depressed, left-wing alcoholics. I should fit right in.



The journey (by taxi again, effete, old-world milksops that we are) from Ooty to Cochin was long. Really, really long. We had been told it would be seven hours. It was closer to ten hours. This was largely down to the driver, a very nice man who seemed absolutely terrified of everything else on the road. Driving in India is something of a state of cooperative chaos. You will frequently find yourself overtaking a car that is overtaking another car on a two-lane road with a bus overtaking a truck thundering towards you. Then at the moment when it seems inevitable that someone will shortly be picking your body-parts from nearby trees, everyone slides into tiny gaps the existence of which you had been hitherto unaware. And all this is done without any of the gesticulating machismo that accompanies the control of automotive transport everywhere else in the world. But our driver was too scared to even overtake oxen carts when there was nothing on the other side of the road all the way to the horizon. He also had to keep stopping for directions. Even when there were no other roads he could have taken. At one point, he stopped the car, got out, wandered around for 5 minutes looking for someone to ask (there were hundreds of people around – I wasn’t sure of his criteria for a director), eventually asked someone, came back, sat in the car, buckled his seatbelt, looked out of the windscreen for a moment, unbuckled his seatbelt and got out to go and find someone else to ask.



The only thing of note on the journey was our lunch stop. We found ourselves in a small, fly-blown roadside restaurant whose staff were delighted someone had turned up. The waitress brought a menu. We chose our food and the waitress went away. A few minutes later she returned – my choice was off, would I care to choose again? I did so and off she went. Then she came back. My new choice was also unavailable. I said I’d have the same as Rachel. A few minutes later she informed us that that was off too. We chose again. No luck. We asked what they did have. She indicated a section of the menu. ‘Everything here,’ she said. I picked a dish, almost at random from that section. A few minutes later, yes, you’ve guessed it, she came back to tell me they didn’t have that and she was sorry. It was eerily reminiscent of Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch. We gave up and bought chocolate from the supermarket across the road instead.



Our first impressions of Kerala were good – very green, very beautiful, acres of coconut palms, banana trees and rice paddies. The previous night’s research was visible in the fact that every tiny village had a public library and several bookshops, that the schools finished for the day at 4pm rather than the 1pm end we had seen everywhere else and that there were many, many state run off-licences (all with very long queues) and toddy-shops (toddy is the local moonshine brewed from coconuts). In fact, the only thing missing was a preponderance of shops selling nooses, garden hoses and razor blades.



So it was that at nine o’clock that night, a mere nine and three quarter hours after setting off, we arrived in Ernakulam, the mainland part of Cochin (the rest being spread out over several islands). We were tired, hungry, dirty and frustrated. We checked into the hotel to find that the room they gave us was not the one we had booked – we had booked (and prepaid for) a standard double. They gave us their best suite. We dined extravagantly, cheaply and very, very well at the hotel buffet and went to bed thinking that there might be something in this ‘God’s own country’ lark after all.