Into the hills

A quick route to hating Tamil Nadu is to frequently ride state buses.

To say they are badly designed is to state the obvious without context. More accurately, they are mysteriously badly designed. It is as if two demented engineers determined the most uncomfortable embellishments possible on a high-density public transport vehicle and included all of them on the drawing table:

 “Metal crossbars where the knees are?”

“Don’t stop there. How about making the seats small enough so the only way of avoiding the cross bars is sitting absolutely erect?”

“Wait, wait. Let’s do that, and add crossbars on the windows!”

“Right where the arm goes?”

“Exactly. And – and this is the kicker – we’ll throw in two more crossbars: one where the head could rest on the seatback in front of the passenger, and one beneath the seat so you can’t store a large bag underneath you!”

“Great! And they’ll be no luggage compartment underneath! Folks will just have to put their bags in the aisle!”

“Or on their laps!”

“We should really get a prize for this.”

In fact, a Tamil Nadu state bus is essentially nothing but crossbars, wheel wells and, occasionally, a seat. It is as if the skeleton of a bus were assembled with care, while the rest of the vehicle was carelessly, and sometimes incompletely, tacked on as an afterthought. In India, they have been my personal hell.

Train travel is generally a pleasant experience here, but because I mainly make short hops between towns, and because buses run so much more frequently, more often than not my movement has been tied to the tyranny of the bus stand. To get to where I am now – the hill stations of the great, green Nilgiri range – I had to take a series of long haul buses between Kanyakumari, the country’s southern tip, into the junction towns of Madurai and Coimbatore. Then up, slowly and painfully accompanied by the groan of gears and my own moans of discomfiture, into the cool spaces the British reserved for their summer escape from the dusty heat of the plains.

The lowland road, cutting through palms and plantations, radiated a lemon yellow heat. I felt it move like a sort of dusky sin wave through the clouds of red dirt kicked up by the traffic. Despite riding Indian buses for almost a month now, today my internal wires coiled and snapped, and I found myself writing in my notes, “Damn this heat. It takes an hour to travel 30 km.”

Too bloody true. State buses stop in every town, so the journey is a hideous stop start relay that stretches the limits of travel sadism.  Entering each town is a slow navigation through a web of cattle, villagers, autorickshaws, incessant honking. Then pull into the bus stand and people fight their way off and fight their way on and we stop and idle and the driver makes a little conversation and we’re off again, fighting a new path out of the town, challenging a new throng of sweating humanity to reach the open road which is only occupied by the bus for 15 minutes or so and then the next town, the next half hour of grinding to and from another fly blown bus stand.

Yes. Well. What can I say; it wasn’t an ideal journey. But eventually the topography of the route shifts, alters, and the bus began climbing into the night and the mountains at the same time, so the senses are jarred by both a slow drag upwards as opposed to a flat push forwards, accompanied by the loss of sight and perspective, now all dark outside, black and – increasingly – cold.

It is eerily silent. Night-bound mountains should be quiet, but not their roads. Why do Indian drivers honk their horns as a warning or announcement everywhere in the lowlands, where vehicles are usually in plain sight, but keep quiet here, where a truck could come careening around the corner of a blind turn at any minute? On one trip, to Mudamalai National Park , we crawl and climb through 36 out of 36 hairpin turns; at one point the mini-van we’re in runs out of juice and we lay stalled and helpless on the face of the mountain. Buses and cars whip around blind corners, and our tires never feel far from the edge of the road. A sign promises: Road Fatalities: 2006: 1; 2007: 0; 2008: 17. On the bright side, there were a lot less injuries this year. At one point I truly start to feel the sinking seepage of fear when I realize the Indian passengers – the same people who give their children small explosives to celebrate the holidays – are nervous.

Road tension carries its rewards. I can’t tell you how good the air felt when it first brisked me in Kodaikanal. There’s no heat and humidity like the tropical kind, especially the densely populated tropical kind, and there may be no relief like the first rush of cool you get at a hill station. This was the whole point of the institution, of course: colonial air conditioning.

They are also clean and, in some ways, calm, compared to the massive cities on the plains. I walk by a public toilet and write: “That must be the only public latrine in India that doesn’t radiate the odor of piss.” Indian tourists abound, but if the weather drops below 50F they bundle up as if Siberia has come upon them, and their energy seems sapped by the cold. To ward against it they buy silly earmuffs covered in fuzz, or drink, or both. Still, while the spaces around the hill stations are quiet and crawling with trekkers, in the towns themselves India’s volume remains cranked to (almost) full.

In Kodaikanal, in the Beatles-esque titled Strawberry Hills hotel, I end up banging on my neighbor’s door at 5am and telling them to, in so many words, shut up and turn their TVs down. Only the Chinese can compete with the Indians when it comes to making noise, which raises some pressing questions. First: what will happen when these nations take their due place as our lords and masters? It is as if a relentless tide of noise pollution – Bollywood squeal, Hong Kong dub, House music hell – is looming like an auditory tsunami on our horizon. And second: why are meditation, serenity and enlightenment associated with these most raucous, chaotic and loud of nations? How, I wondered, watching an elephant ford a stream under a slanting sunset, as a man belched loudly and with pride after draining some cheap whiskey from a paper cup, did Buddha become Buddha here?

Let’s be fair: America and anywhere else in the world doesn’t lack for loud cretins. But they manifest themselves in unexpected places here; say, on a wildlife game drive. Entry to the afore-mentioned Mudamalai National Park is restricted to official buses that ply a 45-minute loop through the only un-plastic polluted forest I’ve seen in India. At the ticket area for the park we are told: “Do not wear bright clothes. Be quiet in the bus to avoid scaring off animals.” But these signs must contend with the reality of so many Indian holiday-makers. Baby is taken along; why should a crying infant miss the chance to see a tiger? Dad wears his best pressed shirt and pants and shoes and, being not just dad but Dad, the patriarch of the Indian family, talks loudly and overbearingly and certainly doesn’t have time to listen to the requests for silence made by a hapless parks employee. Teenagers are loud as they are anywhere in the world, and the women – yes. If “dark clothes” means “your brightest sari, accentuated by your best bangles, earrings, nose studs and necklaces,” then they are adhering to dress code.

Most interesting/annoying is the fact the domestic tourists on the safari I embark on do not seem to have much interest in seeing wildlife. They board the bus, the driver tells them to be quiet, and they carry on chattering as if he has never spoken. We pass spotted deer; a baby cries, a few people lean over with cameras, dad talks loudly about something, mom fans herself. This is essentially the unbroken chain of our sightseeing. The national park isn’t there to be seen so much as it exists to serve as a new backdrop to wherever the package tour everyone is on leads to next. The Western tourists on the bus were seething with rage at this behavior (I was mad too, but I tried to convert the feeling, with varied success, into mild bemusement), an ill-defined sense of cultural confusion and post-colonial political correctness keeping their anger in check (who wants to be the white person who tells Indians how to behave in their country?).

With all of this said, I have enjoyed my time in the Tamil Nadu hills. The wild flowers bloom here in brilliant drops: lavender, gold. Between Ooty, Kodaikanal and the plains, I feel as if I am experiencing all my seasons; dusky autumn, bitter winter, spring by daylight, and the lowlands: a return to summer, a season I am still coming to terms with.

The colonial houses, or what remain of them, embellish the stations with a trace of 19^th-century romance. I walk by one, crumbling into a grove of pines and blue gums. More than the chill or the overgrown garden or the faded lintels above the door or the name Westbury Villa, it is the crows that make this Ooty garden villa seem like England. And the hill station natives have quirks; they seem more liable to push their eccentricities than the busy Indian of the lowlands. On a boulder overlooking one hairpin turn, I see a handsome young Indian man stretch out his legs and perch his chin in his hand like a Greek sculpture celebrating youth.

At night, flame flowers hide their faces from the cold, best warded off with a bowl of thugpa (hearty Tibetan noodle soup) sold in numerous Tibetan cafes or a slug of brandy, or whiskey. My old Pondicherry mate Francois has joined me here, and one night, surrounded by a United Nations crew, I was reminded of why I fell in love with backpacking in the first place: joking with an Israeli, a British couple, a German stoner, girls from France and the Netherlands, while the Belgian and the American go shot for shot with each other on cheap bottles of Bagpiper and Ekshaw.

Maybe farsight is brought on naturally by the perspective a mountain affords you. I ride an autorickshaw back to a bus junction after the sun sets. The dark blue night flashes by and the air feels like soft knives and smells of wood smoke, and the lights will o wisp the valley below, and I feel the old tug of the road.

Comments

[Vijay]

The hill stations are amazingly quirky by Indian standards! I agree they are some how endearing.