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.