Here's the post-Bangalore breakdown, with a handy timeline for those of you keeping score:
SAT 3 NOV-TUE 6 NOV: Mysore
We took the afternoon train from Bangles to Mysore, a beautiful route through acres and acres of canefields in full flower, their pink-white tassles rolling in the afternoon breeze. Mysore is a hub for the production of sandalwood and incense, and the Devaraja Market in the town center is a speed-metal concert for the senses. Every other stall features piles of multicolored tikka powder and every other hawker is looking to rub his collection of essential oils on your wrist and forearm. Floral aromas of every olfactory shade perfume the air with such intensity that passing bumblebees explode in midair, unable to process the embarrassment of riches. D left the market after our first trip with ten different scents cloaking her arms, nine of which were so vivid and cloying that she spent twenty minutes at the sink afterward trying to smell like people again. Satisfactorily scrubbed, we ambled toward the Maharaja's Palace for their Sunday night lightshow (pictured). For one hour each week the Palace is illuminated by enough lightbulbs to explain blackouts in Bangladesh. The good folks in charge waive the entrance fee for that one hour, during which a carnival atmosphere and thousands of people descend upon the grounds. Smiles still on our faces and the syrupy scents from the vendors outside the gate firing our appetites, we headed to the nearest sweets shop to sample a half-dozen variations on the four food groups: ghee, gram flour, rosewater and jaggery.**TUE 6 NOV-WED 7 NOV: Ooty
We'd been flirting with the Western Ghats, the mountain range just inland from the Arabian Sea, for our entire southward crawl from Mumbai. This far south they comprise the Nilgiri (or "Blue Mountain") range, and are dotted with hill stations established by the British Raj. Tea bushes and This White Guy flourish in the cool climate, but the drive (pictured) to Ooty (the universally-preferred alternative to Udaghamandalam) is so much nicer than the reality of the town itself. D said it best, remarking with her characteristic wit that "This place would be cute about twenty years ago, when it was cute." Indeed. Today Ooty is a dusty, smoggy, traffic-choked sprawl that's not even in the same fucking zip code as Cute. In a nutshell, for those who like it nutty: the town's lake, called (I shit you not) Reflections Lake, is a popular pedalboating destination for flocks of Indian tourists. It's also the collection point for like half the town's raw sewage. Cheery, nah? We stayed the night and rolled out on the first bus forWED 7 NOV-WED 14 NOV: Kodaikanal
After the psychout that was Ooty, we were a little apprehensive on the eight-hour-plus ride to Kodai. As if to allay our fears, the switchbacked road into the mountains, which we ascended in our DVD Coach (playing the original Spiderman in subtitled English), kept climbing and twisting to offer us a better view of the sunset burning over the lakes stretched below the foothills that receded ever further behind us the evening's mist. We pulled into town after dark, tucking into a quick bite before bed and hopeful dreams of a mountain paradise.Any possibility of disappointment disappeared with the sunrise. Our first daylight glimpse of Kodai revealed a beautiful town tentacled over and between a handful of peaks and valleys around 7000 feet. Gone were the rickshaws of Ooty and their sickening fumes, replaced by the kind of clean, thin, mountain air that induces euphoria rather than chemical lightheadedness. We walked the town, from the Tibetan restaurants and Western-style health-food store on the market road to the long promenade around the town's sewage-free lake to the southern route out of town that seemed perpetually ringed by clouds that stretched out beneath the sun like Shiva's down comforter. Sitting on the balcony of our room and looking out over those milky clouds, we knew that we'd be staying in Kodai for a while.
And good thing, too. We met a handful of people who reinforced our initial impression of the place, people who smiled with an unforced honesty that seemed to radiate from the town's very core, oozing into the groundwater and onto the faces of those lucky enough to call it home. Among them were I, the proprietor of Manna Bake Restaurant, who serves a world-famous apple crumble with custard accompanied by his warm alto and the Indian Christian music playing on the cassette deck. You can read two decades of his guests' handwritten hosannas in the volumes he places before you while you wait for your meal, which he prepares in the open kitchen of his own home, at his four-burner stove, ten paces from your seat at one of two communal tables in his main room. Then there was M (above right, with D), our guide on a grueling trek through the misty mountains (above left). He would stop occasionally to crumble a handful of leaves plucked from a trailside plant before offering them to us to smell and identify, or to point out the place where, only a few months ago, he and a couple of his Canadian charges encountered a ten-foot long king cobra that was none too happy with the uninvited company. All of 4'11" and 80 pounds, he led us for eight hours over rock and mud and along cliff faces dropping off into abyssal cloudcover beneath our feet, wearing his beaten blue flip-flops and a broad smile, never once breaking stride or sweat. As we passed a small, gaudy temple late in the afternoon, he summed up the entirety of Indian spirituality with one remarkably succinct utterance in his broken English:"See temple? Many temples in India. Many temples, many stories." Then, finishing his thought, pointing at a cast-off chunk of cement beside our path, "You see, looks like stone on ground, but even stone on ground has story in India."
WED 14 NOV-THU 15 NOV: Madurai
M's words still ringing in my ears (and not only for the altitude), we rolled out of Kodai to the temple town of Madurai. Our hotel in the old quarter overlooked the several gopurams marking the massive Meenakshmi temple complex. It was a dizzying view from the roof of the joint (pictured), where we went after nightfall to watch someone a few blocks away set off the remainder of his Diwali fireworks. But the heat and press of the city, naked under the sun that scorches Tamil Nadu's plains even in winter, proved too much for us after idyllic Kodai. So on toTHU 15 NOV-SAT 17 NOV: Trichy
We had heard conflicting reports about Tiruchirappali. The English couple we met along the trail with M recommended it as a fun stop with lots to do, but A in Chennai emailed us that "Trichy is boring." Had A added "crowded around the holidays," we would have known to head straight for the big city. We got off the bus from Madurai and tried to score rooms in at least a dozen hotels and guest houses around the bus stand, exhausting our guidebooks' suggestions and those of every desk clerk insisting that there would be available doubles in the joint next door. We finally threw ourselves at the mercy of Fate,
in the form of a rickshaw driver who asked several helpful passersby where there might be a room to be had. We wound up at the front door of the only joint in the area we didn't check about thirty seconds (and thirty rupees) after getting in the rickshaw around the corner. We took the last room in the place, a super-luxe AC room on the top floor with a distant view of the town's puzzlingly famous Rock Fort (pictured), a long climb up a small mountain to two tiny temples. The room was by far the nicest we've stayed in, but with a price tag to match. A single night exceeded our daily budget by almost 50%, but the comfort after so long in questionable digs convinced us to stay two nights in Trichy for no reason other than to enjoy our room.There followed an overnight bus to Chennai late Saturday, meeting up with A for lunch after a nap Sunday morning, and here we are, typing through a rainy Monday and ready to move on again tomorrow. No wonder I'm dreaming the caviar dreams of the Jet Set. We'll surely stop to smell the jasmine at some point along the road, but the moment-to-moment thrill of seeing new places, faces, and landscapes is too appealing to relent just yet. And just south of here, in the former French colony of Pondicherry, there's a croissant au chocolat that's screaming my name in at least three different languages.
*: I've been in India long enough to absorb some of the local standards of modesty, as I rolled out of bed in this dream already wearing pants.
**: For the uninitiated, that's clarified butter, pulverized chickpea, floral distillate, and raw cane sugar.
