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.