Distant Home Signal

Ooty is cold enough in the morning for me to see my own breath; there is no heating in my cottage, and the stone floor numbs my toes when I pull back the thick blankets and walk from the bed-sitting room to the enormous bathroom. I pull on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, grab my fleece, and walk across the garden to the dining room for coffee. The TTDC ( Tamil Tourist Development Corporation ) Hotel is a huge, rambling, tatty complex of 1960s concrete and dark wood buildings set amidst an equally erratic spread of lawns, flowerbeds, and towering evergreens. The main building has had bits haphazardly added over the years, and at some point in the mid 1970s, somebody thought it would be a good idea to put some cottages in the middle of the garden. The place is a warren of passages, corridors, courtyards, and stairwells that you could get lost in for hours; it is gloomy, run-down, faded, and worn, with unexpected dead ends and echoing of footsteps. As I walk down a dimly lit corridor around the edge of an overgrown courtyard, a monkey suddenly leaps through one of the open windows and tears off ahead off me, hotly pursued by its playmate. I hear them chattering and screeching as they crash through some unseen part of the hotel, and see them again from the window of the dining hall.
I sit at a small table in the vast dining hall; it reminds me of a school canteen, with its institutional green walls, high flat ceiling and woodblock floor – there is even a suitably austere clock above the serving hatch to complete the picture. It could easily seat 200 people. Even at this hour, a big, old-fashioned television set in one corner is playing a Bollywood movie. There is an Indian couple several tables away in the middle of the room, but nobody else apart from me for the four waiters and the cashier to serve, each of them bundled up against the morning chill. I order a coffee. The waiter writes out a requisition, one part of which is handed to another waiter who takes it to a third waiter posted at the hot drinks vending machine; the second part is lodged with the cashier, who transfers the details into an A4 ledger before spiking it pending payment. After a full five minutes, a small paper cup of black coffee is relayed to my table by the team of waiters, a curl of steam rising into the cold air of the hangar-like dining room. I throw them into complete confusion by immediately ordering a second cup; there is a lot of discussion, but they eventually manage to bring it to my table just as I finish the first and light a Wills Classic. They look longingly at my cigarette. What the hell? I smile at them, and push the pack across the Formica tabletop. Service is a lot quicker after this.
The two monkeys are chasing each other around the gardens outside the dining hall. They shoot up drainpipes, swing from window ledges, and leap from balconies; but their favorite pastime is tumbling around inside a large satellite dish that is mounted on the flat roof of the laundry. It rocks alarmingly as the monkeys roll around inside it, pulling each others tails and twisting their ears. The television picture flickers and rolls, snow clouds of interference blowing across the screen; the waiters take it in turns to poke at the controls, scratching their heads and rechecking cable connections. Over the waiters’ shoulders, I watch the monkeys jump up and down in the dish, using it like a trampoline; the television goes haywire, the waiters are baffled. It is hilarious.
The TTDC front desk was apologetic that they had nothing available for me apart from a cottage; they sheepishly pointed to the Xeroxed tariff pinned to the dark-wood veneered wall and said it would be 600 Rupees. By the time I had looked at it and returned to the lobby, the price was down to 500. A whole family could live in my cottage – although bungalow would be a better description; it has a long, monkey proof veranda, which leads into the bed-sitting room; a large bathroom with a hot water geyser; and a dressing-cum-dining room. The furniture is an eclectic mix of dark wood, Formica, plastic and vinyl, all of it truly dreadful, but perfectly suited to the spirit of the TTDC. Two 1970s bucket seats in bright orange plastic and a hideous Alpine print in a cheap, gold coloured frame are my favorite pieces. It is such an unexpected, endlessly entertaining and eccentric place that I cannot help but love it. There is a knock at the front door. One waiter and two porters are waiting outside.
“You would like coffee,” the waiter asks, “breakfast?”
“You would like laundry,” one of the porters enquires, “washing?”
“You would like anything, good sir?” asks the other.
It is pleasantly warm as I walk down the hill to Commercial Road, past the strikingly colonial British secondary school, and find the Irani Coffee House. Inside, shafts of dusty sunlight poke through the gaps in the timber roof and fall across the old and scarred wooden tables; little silver pots of thick, strong coffee are served beneath verses of the Koran woven into silk wall hangings; the atmosphere is redolent of strong tobacco, incense, and Persian mystery. A white bearded old man in a skullcap welcomes and serves me with warmth and politeness; it does not matter that I am a English catholic, he an Iranian Muslim; and neither of us need to patronize the other to prove how tolerant and accepting we are. I wander through the maze of steep alleys and lanes of the Big Bazar, past shops full of cooking pots and sandalwood carvings, bags of tealeaf and bolts of cloth; past squalid yatri lodges and stinking mutton stalls, shops full of gold with shotgun toting guards outside and dingy little chai stalls. Further past the racecourse and the bus stand, I find Ooty’s railway station – the terminus of the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway – and buy a cardboard Edmondson ticket for the 12.15 departure for Coonor.
The train is waiting in the station’s only platform behind a metre gauge YDM diesel – almost identical to the ones stranded at Mysore Junction, except that ‘Powered By Bio-Diesel’ is painted on its cab side. Almost a scaled down version of the broad gauge WDM, the YDM works the upper part of the line, after which a steam engine takes over for the most steeply graded part of the route down to Mettupalayam, where its Rack-And-Pinion gearing is needed. I sit on a wooden bench-seat in the first coach and drop the window down on its leather strap; although the steam engines date from the line’s completion in 1908, I would guess that most of the coaches date from somewhere around the 1940s, along with a few others that are quite obviously much more modern. Built by Nilgiris tea planters and the colonial British, the railway’s 46 kilometre route appears in table 93 of Trains At A Glance, and nearly 100 years later, you can still get a train from Ooty and on to anywhere in India. There are few places left in the world where the national railway schedules century old steam locomotives in their timetables.
The tell-tale signs that the nation which gave the world railways built this line are everywhere; from the ground frames that control the points outside the station, to the old water tower at the end of the platform; from the station master’s Acme Thunderer whistle, to the block token signal machine in the porters’ office. And the semaphore signals that could have been plucked from the Great Central, or the erstwhile Great Eastern railway, and planted beside these tracks, high up in the mountains of Tamil Nadu. Different types of signals for different functions, like the one the train is approaching now, the growl of the YDM’s exhaust belying its size: a distant home signal, cleared for the run to the last section; perhaps a reminder for me, also, that I am approaching the end of my journey.
As I lean out of the window, I see the front wheels of the YDM suddenly jump and then crash back down onto the track; a second later something clatters off the underside of my coach and the drivers applies the brakes in full emergency. The crew walk down the train and pull a metal rail chair from between the carriage wheels; someone deliberately laid it across the tracks, and would have derailed the train had they chosen a curved, rather than straight section of the line. At Coonor, a steam engine waits under the home signal to take the train down Mettupalayam; the YDM drops onto the return service to Ooty, and after smoking a Wills Classic, I climb up behind the diesel for the slow, steep crawl back to the terminus.
I walk back to Charing Cross and go into The Blue Hills Hotel bar; they have no Kingfisher, so I order a Golden Eagle. The red and gold label reads De Luxe Premium Beer – Specially Bottled For Connoisseurs – Quite A Chiller! Quite a mouthful. I debate asking the barman if he has ever caught anyone posing as a Connoisseur to surreptitiously drink one of his bottles of Golden Eagle, but decide it is not worth explaining Mohan Breweries’ strange and slightly ambiguous assertion. I buy some chicken tikka and rice from the Hyderbadi Biryani House to take back to the crazy TTDC Hotel; the uncooked kebabs hang on skewers outside the shop, unrefrigerated since whatever time they were made, and are cooked in a pot of charcoal out on the street. The rice appears from somewhere in the back of the grimy kitchen-cum-dining room, and the whole lot is presented to me in a purple carrier bag that encourages me to Fly Emirates. I call down to the bar for a room service Kingfisher, and eat my dinner on the veranda while the monkeys do their best to wreck the picnic tables on the lawn below me. If the TTDC arranged an exchange program with the Hotel Akademia in Slovakia, it would herald a whole new era in adventure tourism – one that would remain Exclusively For The Connoisseur of such places, I hope.

Blue Mountain Ultra Deluxe

I wake in the opaque pre-dawn light and repack my bag for the bus out of Madikeri; the restaurant will not open for another forty minutes, so I ride the Yamaha back to the tourist office, push the keys under the door, and walk back to the Rajhandi through the empty streets. Mist rolls across Kennett Lane and slowly swirls around me, dampening my hair and brushing droplets of dew on my shirt, but somehow leaving the dust under my boots untouched. A few metres from the hotel car park, I disturb an enormous brown rat feeding on the waste from yesterday’s slaughter at The Best Mutton Stall; its nose twitches at the air, but it does not move off; its thick brown fur is beaded with mist; it is the size of a small cat. I order a pot of black coffee from room service, sit at my table, and watch the town slowly wake up outside my window.
In Delhi or Kolkata, I would see smudges of smoke tainting the sky above the bastees and slums, hear the constant growl and clatter of traffic, and the howls of stray dogs; I would smell cooking fires, rotting garbage, exhaust fumes, decay and human waste. In Madikeri I see the mist cloaked hills, hear birdsong and the distant call to prayer from the mosque down in the valley; I smell only the tang of evergreen sap and lighter notes of jacaranda and bougainvillea. High in the Coorg hills, surrounded by plantations where coffee bushes shade beneath trees strung with pepper vines, Madikeri seems as distant from the madness of urban India as it is possible to be; the chronic social problems that shock the senses in other cities – the slums and street dwellers, the pollution and the poverty – are unseen. It is as if it has placed itself, literally, above that.
I wave down the solitary auto-rickshaw that sometimes cruises Raja’s Seat Road looking for a fare and load my bag onto the small shelf above the engine at the back of the passenger compartment. Across the road, the little train waits silently in the station, the driver and conductor dozing on two platform benches; it will be a long day – the tour buses won’t arrive until six o’clock, and the Rajhandi’s bar will have first call.
There are two buses waiting to leave from the KSRTC bus stand for Mysore. I check the Deluxe service for any sign of video equipment, buy a 95 Rupee ticket, and stow my bag behind the driver’s seat. I buy a litre of water, smoke a Wills Classic, and take a farewell look at the town; further up the hill at the circle, a white uniformed traffic policeman stands with his hands on his hips and glares down at me with a decidedly non-plussed expression. I creep back to the bus and take my seat.
It takes five hours to reach the suburbs of Mysore. I step down into the burgeoning City Bus Stand and back into the noise and chaos I had escaped in for a short while. After the freshness of Madikeri, the heat and humidity is intense. I take an auto-rickshaw to the Mayura Hoysala and check in to my old room; they welcome me like an old friend and ask whether I would like a bottle of Kingfisher in the bar, or served to my room. I sit on the veranda with Trains At A Glance and work out a route to Udhagamandalam – or, as it’s more commonly known, Ooty – in the Ghats of Tamil Nadu. Although it lies only 130 kilometres from Mysore, there is no direct rail link, and I calculate a journey of 30 hours on three different trains via Bangalore and Combiatore Junction. I walk over to the station booking office and find that train 2677 - The Bangalore-Combiatore Intercity Express - for the following morning has only Wait Listed tickets; I change the date on my Reservation Requisition Form and push it back over the counter: Wait List or Reserved Against Cancellation.
“You take bus,” the booking clerk advises, “every day, nine o’clock, Ooty in six hours only”.
I thank him, take an auto-rickshaw back to the City Bus Stand, and within 10 minutes have a ticket for the morning’s Ultra-Deluxe coach to ‘The Queen Of The Hill Stations’.
It is getting dark as I walk back through Devaraja market to The Kwality Bar And Restaurant; the worst of the heat has backed off, but the evening air is like a hot breath on my face. I sit under an ancient, wobbling ceiling fan and hold a chilled bottle of Kingfisher against my neck, flicking perspiration from my finger tips.
“Please, you must help my friend.” A tall, well dressed Indian stands beside my table, his hands clasped in front of him. “Please speak to him, before it is too late.”
His friend is a middle-aged plantation owner from an area south of Coorg; I am told that since his wife left him, he has spent his time drinking and has lost interest in his coffee bushes, his estate, and his friends. A further concern is his cigarette smoking. I sip my Kingfisher, light a Wills Classic, and ask him exactly what sort of advice would he expect me to offer his friend. The irony is lost, however, and his friend summoned to my table. I point out that I am neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist, and that I smoke and drink on a near biblical scale; but it doesn’t matter, the tall Indian assures me: “You are English – he will listen to you.” His friend turns out to be quite content with his apparently decadent and destructive lifestyle; his staff is quite capable of running the estate, and he is relieved to be free of the conventions of a boring marriage. He has lived a full life, and is looking forward to the day when one of the big co-operatives will buy his plantation and allow him to retire and fully embrace the pleasures of McDowell’s and Navy Cut.
“If there is one thing you could say to him,” the tall Indian asks me, looking at his friend, “what would it be? What piece of advice?”
What indeed?
“Enjoy yourself,” I tell his friend, finishing my Kingfisher and standing to leave. The tall Indian looks at me with disappointment; I shrug apologetically: he is fighting a moral crusade to save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved, but he simply can’t see that.
I cover myself with Odomos mosquito repellant and sit on the veranda late into the night; as the traffic noise subsidies I can hear the Chug of a WDM idling in Mysore Junction station, waiting to back onto the 2am Bangalore Passenger train. Bats swoop and flit around the trees that line Jhansi Laxmi Bai Road; the shrill cry of a startled kite and the occasional bark of a stray dog penetrate the darkness, but otherwise it is eerily quiet.
I have less than two weeks left in India. It doesn’t seem possible.
In the morning I drink my usual tall glass of hot black coffee, shoulder my bag, check out of the Mayura Hoysala once more, and take an auto-rickshaw to the bus stand. I walk the line of buses that are parked nose-in to the main concourse until I find my Ultra-Deluxe, waiting with the engine running and only two other passengers on board. I buy a breakfast of potato chips, which I throw away after a few mouthfuls: thick, hard, and greasy, they are caked in a mixture of chilli powder and sugar, rendering them inedible to anything but the most hardened local palette. On the bus, I am pleased to note a gaping square hole in the laminated hardboard wall behind the driver’s seat where the video screen once faced the passengers. In fact the whole interior looks as if it has been burgled of most of its fittings; more holes appear in the ceiling with speaker cables poking out, and all the knobs have been removed from the seat reclining levers; there is nothing left of the seat back tables apart from empty screw holes to show where the hinges were, and the door to the pilfered first aid kit hangs open, swinging backwards and forwards with each bump in the road. My seat is stuck at an uncomfortable and random angle, neither upright nor reclined; what’s left of the handle won’t budge, so I spend the journey halfway between sitting and lying, like a hospital convalescent. The drive is hair-raising; there is no concession to traffic or road conditions; from the minute we leave Mysore, the driver keeps his foot to the floor and his hand on the horn. Sometimes we drive with the nearside wheels on the hard packed mud of the verge, kicking up stones and dust as we undertake a Tonga or an old Ambassador taxi; at other times, on the wrong side of the road, dodging and weaving through the oncoming trucks and rickshaws. After three nerve-wracking hours we pull off the road at an isolated truck stop for a break. Before any of the passengers can prise themselves from their broken seats, the driver and conductor are inside the shabby little bhavan and claiming their commission. While the owner serves the bus crew a meal of steamed iddli, dosai, and sambar, the passengers are ignored and left to study the stale contents of a dirty, glass fronted food cabinet balanced on a sagging wooden serving counter. I stand in the desolated car park and smoke a Wills Classic, looking through the doorway as my fellow passengers reluctantly select what they think they can stomach from the tired and old fried snacks on display; as the driver and conductor accept cups of hot chai from their host, a woman in a cobalt blue sari leads her young daughter back to the bus, disappointment and disgust written across her face. The little girl is clutching a cold, sickly brown bonda to her mouth and taking small bites; her mother is going hungry.
There is a rough, stinking, wooden lean-to behind the bhavan marked ‘Ladies.’
I ask where I will find the gents.
“Outside,” the owner says, with a dismissive flick of his hand. I feel like leaning across his filthy counter with its three yellowed plastic bottles of overpriced drinking water and punching his lights out. Outside means exactly that: anywhere outside. I choose the back wall outside the open kitchen door and add the smoking butt of my Wills Classic to the puddle.
We cross into Tamil Nadu at a military checkpoint outside the gates to Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary; the park is out of bounds to visitors, even though the bus drives right through the middle of it. Banditry linked to the trade in illegal sandalwood has made whole tracts of the Ghats no-go areas; roadside signs prohibit stopping unless absolutely necessary, and forbid leaving your vehicle in any event. Dense, scrubby bush rears up on either side of the thin ribbon of Tarmac; thick and seemingly impenetrable, a whole army of dacoits could hide unseen in this vast jungle. Other signs show pictures of elephants, monkeys, and even tigers, with ’30 KM MAX’ in large red letters; our driver carelessly throws the bus from one side of the narrow road to the other at twice this speed. Beyond the teak and sandalwood trees, the peaks of the Ghats soar above the foothills and lower valleys; somewhere in those mountains is Ooty, but that the road will reach such a height seems impossible to believe. The climb is torturous; each time we reach a pass or a saddle between these huge ridges, we face another wall of sloping rock rising still higher into the thinning blue air. Eventually, we clear the highest ridge and begin to drop into the mountain valleys where the colonial British rulers would retreat from the suffocating summer heat of the Tamil Plains. Forests of eucalyptus and sandalwood gather in the clefts and folds of the mountains, and plantations climb the steep valley walls, a carpet of emerald green dotted with the tiny, brightly coloured figures of tea pickers.
After seven hours, we reach Ooty’s bus stand. Following my introduction to Tamil Nadu in Chennai, my first impressions of the town do little to dispel my negative feelings about the state. Spanning a long, wide valley, Ooty seems to be a hotchpotch of scruffy shacks, red-brick colonial public buildings, ugly concrete boxes, and alpine ski chalets. A faded and overgrown racecourse occupies the oval of land between the bus stand and the Big Bazar; further west, the boating lake receives the town’s sewage and pervades the air with a faint, but unpleasant smell.
I find a pokey little bhavan on Lower bazaar, order a coffee and a cucumber sandwich, and study my map; I settle on the TTDC Tamil Nadu Hotel just off Commercial Road in Charing Cross, pay my bill, and catch an auto-rickshaw.
In the evening I sit in the wood paneled bar beneath reproduction prints of Victorian English gentlemen playing croquet and hunting with dogs, sipping Kingfisher, and thinking about The Hotel Akademia in the distant central European city of Kosice. If my stay there was like a post-Soviet version of Fawlty Towers, then my stay at the TTDC Hotel is promising to be the Bollywood remake.
And then there’s the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway.
I think I’m going to enjoy Ooty.

The Gladiator And The Gulag

In the morning, I order black coffee and sit at a table in the restaurant overlooking the garden. Madikeri is shrouded in early morning mist; ethereal fingers of vapour curl through the evergreens that climb the hillsides above town, and only the minarets of the Rajas’ tombs rise above the rolling cloud that fills the valley floor. The air is already hot by the time I finish my coffee and The Vijay Times and walk downstairs to the car park. The Yamaha refuses to start; it’s become used to being left on ‘reserve’ tank and doesn’t like that I turned the petrol tap to ‘off’ the previous evening. I spend 10 minutes kicking it over and shaking it around before the sediment in the bottom of the tank allows some fuel to reach the carburetor, and then gun the engine and ride down Kennet Lane into town. I pull over and walk through the private bus stand to buy Wills Classic and a bottle of water; a line of battered, bent and leaning old buses are reversed up to the kerb outside a row of bare concrete waiting rooms where women sit on rickety benches in near darkness. The men wait beyond the barred doors of these cells, spitting paan leaf onto the littered pavement, smoking beedis, and arguing fares with the touts who compete loudly and with wild gestures for passengers. There is no timetable, no booking office, nor any hint of where any of the buses might be going; it is even more intuitive than the KSRTC bus stand in Mysore.
As I ride the Yamaha across the traffic circle and past the auto-rickshaw stand I hear the shrill blast of a whistle; the white uniformed traffic policeman points at me and waves me down with his lachti stick. I pretend not to see him, drop the bike into second, and accelerate down a side street behind the Capitol Hotel; I have no helmet, and although everyone else in Madikeri flaunts this law, I have just saved myself a lot of hassle and a large fine. Consulting my map, I work out that I can circumnavigate the centre of town, and, when I need to, park out of sight behind the Canara Bank and walk the short distance to the main street.
The road to Abbi Falls is a strip of narrow, hilly Tarmac that winds its way through coffee estates and thick jungle; after six or seven kilometers it hugs the edge of a steep valley with views that disappear into the haze surrounding the distant peaks of the Western Ghats. Every so often a shared jeep or Ambassador taxi passes in the opposite direction, sending me fishtailing onto the dusty verge with an incessant beep-beep-beep of its horn; otherwise the road is hot, empty, and meandering as it snakes through the lush, green countryside peppered with hamlets and smallholdings. I pull over beneath the shade of a jacaranda and drop the Yamaha onto its side stand; as I reach for a Wills Classic movement catches my eye: a bright green viper – perhaps three feet in length – slides from beneath the bike and arcs towards my feet. I unashamedly run a good twenty metres down the road until I deem it safe to smoke a cigarette before going back to the Yamaha. I reach the waterfalls from a footpath that runs from the car park at the road’s end; a steep descent through a coffee plantation brings me to a wooden bridge beneath the trickle of water that spills over its lip, and a litter strewn picnic area patrolled by a bored looking park ranger. I cannot imagine a less inspiring scene; it has a fraction of the charm of even the most mundane stretch of the road from Madikeri. But I am at least satisfied that the Yamaha Gladiator is as much a match for the roads of Coorg as I am, and leave Abbi Falls for Kushar Nagar, some fifty kilometers to the east.
I follow Mysore Road out of town, dropping into the Cauvery River valley through a series of hairpin bends; the road is quiet, but the few buses and lorries I meet drive straight at me and overtake each other on blind bends, making it is far more dangerous than riding around town. I overtake whole families of Indians balanced on scooters and small motorbikes, and often slow to wind my way through herds of cows that cross or simply stand in the middle of the road. When a long stretch opens up, I push the Yamaha to its limits, streaking up behind other riders and then overtaking with a blast of the horn, tempting them to see if they can catch me. Two young men on Hondas take up the challenge but give up as the Gladiator’s speedometer creeps towards 90 kph on a sweeping bend; when I slow to take the road to the Durbar, they smile and rev their engines as they pass, waving and holding up their thumbs. After ten kilometers of crumbling Tarmac, dust, gravel, and compacted mud I reach a crossroads with a hand painted sign showing a badly drawn, smiling elephant; a narrow lane snakes through a few hamlets and a wide plain of paddy fields and eventually ends at The Durbar Hotel on the banks of the River Cauvery.
The elephant training camp is on an island in the centre of the river; I pay 5 Rupees to park the Yamaha under the hotel’s porch, and another five to take the ferry across to the camp. It is hot, still, and humid on the island; the thermometer at the deserted feeding centre sits at 36 degrees, and my forearms tingle with wind blasted sunburn from the ride.
Sweat trickles down my chest and darkens my shirt in large patches; clouds of mosquitoes gather around me. The trainers lead two small elephants into the water below a sign saying ‘Bathing Area’, screaming instructions at them and beating them with bamboo lachtis until they lie in the shallow water; they scrub at the leathery skin of the animals’ ears with soap and stones, and smash them repeatedly on the head if they attempt to resist the brutal treatment. Beyond the feeding area, another trainer is forcing a larger, older elephant to lift its front feet for the visitors; thick, heavy steel chains are wrapped around its legs, and the scrubby bush that covers the island resounds to the crack of the trainer’s stick hitting the elephant’s shins. Excited Indian families pose in front of these cruel, degrading, and ugly little scenes, and then turn their backs on the animals’ fate and compare photographs over their picnics. I feel sick and ashamed of myself for coming to this place. As I take the boat back to the Durbar Hotel and leave the hopeless elephants to their life of slavery in this rotten gulag, a park ranger smiles at me and asks: “You like our camp? You will come again?”
I ride the Yamaha twenty kilometers to the picnic area at Kushal Nagar Dam; the River Cauvery is a crucial element in the life of Karnataka, and, further east, Tamil Nadu. It irrigates the paddy fields and farms, and provides drinking water for millions; it is also the source of tension between the two states, and a political powder keg. The dam at Kushal Nagar is almost empty, but The Vijay Times is full of editorial comment and angry letters about the Cauvery Dispute – the division of the precious supply of water between the two states. Back in Mysore, demonstrations are paralyzing the city; at Mandya, protestors have blocked the railway line from Bangalore; in the countryside, impoverished farmers are committing suicide as their smallholdings literally dry up; across both states violence is rising as the water levels slowly drop. Central government in Delhi has finally awarded each state a share after more than a decade of wrangling, but nobody is satisfied: there simply isn’t enough flowing from the Western Ghats for everybody. There isn’t even enough in Kushal Nagar to attract the flocks of wading birds Karnataka State Tourism guaranteed.
I ride back to the Mysore Road and find the Pooja Bar And Restaurant; I order a Kingfisher and take a seat at a dirty wooden table with a cracked plastic ashtray advertising McDowell’s No1. The local men eye me curiously: a Western visitor in their dark, pokey, and flyblown local bar is probably unprecedented - and one that has arrived on a motorbike?
I take a circuitous route back to The Rajhandi Hotel, turning off the main road on the outskirts of Madikeri and riding in on Racecourse Road past Raja’s Seat. The state tourism leaflet I picked up in Mysore says that ‘not an inch of railway line has been laid in Coorg.’ But they are wrong: across the road from my hotel, just below Raja’s Seat, a narrow gauge railway trundles in a loop around a small amusement park. The tiny yellow engine pulls three open-sided carriages at snails pace in a small circle, and it looks like the kind of thing you’d find rusting away in a forgotten English seaside resort. But in Madikeri, this is the closest thing you will find to a white knuckle ride; the tour buses that ferry people to watch the sunset from Raja’s Seat also bring a stream of young people who get tanked up on Kingfisher Strong in the Rajhandi’s bar before riding the train. It is quite surreal. They hang from the sides of the open carriages and whoop as the little engine totters out of the station; as they reach the first bend in the tracks, they wave their arms in the air and close their eyes; there are blood curdling screams as the train plunges very slowly into the six foot long mock tunnel halfway round. Even after a skin full of Hayward’s 5000, it really couldn’t be much more frightening than nearly stubbing a toe, or anywhere near as exciting as watching a pair of snails mating.
I sit in the hotel bar with a Kingfisher as the riders return to finish off their evening with a few more Hayward’s before getting back on their buses. Keyed up to fever pitch, they gulp down whole bottles in one go, some of them trying to appear worldly by pretending to smoke Wills Navy Cut cigarettes, coughing and holding thier affected cigarettes at amueturish angles. I buy a bottle to take out, walk over the road, and climb over the gate into the darkened and empty amusement park. The station signs, signal posts and platform benches are identical to those in Bhubaneswar and Lucknow; the rails, although only two feet apart, are standard Indian Railways patterns; the ballast between the sleepers is the same grade as the South Western Railway’s mainline across the Deccan plateau. A small, almost real railway, running to nowhere and in the middle of nowhere. And no WDMs. I finish my Kingfisher, walk back to my room, and lie on the bed. A real white knuckle ride is sitting in the doorway of a Shatabdi Express as it rockets through a small town behind a WDP-4.
The nearest mainline is 130 kilometres away in Mysore; the bus from Madikeri leaves at 10 o’clock in the morning.
Tomorrow.