Having reached my threshold of Southern Indian cities, I headed off to the mountain where I stayed first in Kodaikanal and then in Munnar. I really wasn't sure what to expect when I got to Kodaikanal. The bus arrives in the center of town in the middle of a tourist district complete with a lake and Indian couples paddle boating on it. I thought it was going to be more of what I was trying to escape in the city. However my cheap hostel was a km away from the lake. I walked. The tourist center started to fade and was replaced by countryside. It was dark so that's all I could tell. I checked in, got some dinner back in town and went to bed. The next morning found that the hostel itself was on the edge of a cliff with amazing views of the mountains and plains below. I took a lot of pictures. After hanging out just looking at the view for a while I rented a bike and when on a ride to the nearby village of Vakkanal. It was supposed to be a nice alternative to the tourist center. It was lovely ride and Vakkanal was a small place but it was an Israeli backpacker stronghold. I think Israelis out numbered locals. I did have some really good middle eastern food at one of the restaurants. I ran into a group of French I'd met earlier at the hostel. The woman with the best English told me she had once done a 2.5 year around the world trip. Her suggestion was to have a project to come back to when you are done. Otherwise, coming back is the hardest part. Hopefully, if grants come through I will have a project.
Back at the hostel that afternoon, I noticed someone drawing so asked him how it was going, pointing to the drawing. He just shrugged and we started talking. He had first been in India 20 years ago to plant trees in Auroville. He feel in love with Kodaikonal and stayed in the same room he was in now for a month. His wife came out and joined us. They were an English couple in their 50s from Sussex. In talking about India and me complaining about the barkers in the cities I was escaping, he offered that he thought more greed had come to India and that was creating a new caste; He knew brahmin teachers who had become rickshaw drivers because they could make more money. Sounds familiar. Before leaving for dinner I mentioned to the couple, Dave and Tracy, that I was going to stay another day. He said "careful, that's how it starts." At dinner I ran into the into the group of French from the hostel and Varkkanal again - it can be a very small tourist world sometimes.
I ran into Dave and Tracy again in the morning. They had moved rooms because of overbooking. We chatted again for a long time over coffee (they had a kitchen in the new room) They were nurses. He had just quite his job but she had taken a 3 month leave of absence for this trip. We talked a lot about healthcare. They told me that the Health Service in Britain is slowly being dismantled in favor of private insurance. We also talked about different travels. They were a fun couple. After I did very little but look at the view until about noon when the mist rolled in and blocked everything. I did get some internet banking and reading done. Mostly I just tried to relax and figure out the next few days. I went to a Tibetan restaurant Dave had recommended and and had momos for the first time - yummy.
The next day it was off to another hill town called Munnar that was surrounded by tea plantations. It was a really long 9 hour bus ride with one transfer. We basically came down one mountain and then went back up another. As we got closer to the town, the tea began blanketing the mountains in beautiful striped pattern of deep green. Trees grew dispersed throughout the fields. I thought they had something to do with the ecology of the tea but no they were just silver oak grown for wood. By the time I made it to town in was dark and had a hell of a time trying to find the hotel that had a room but wouldn't reserve it for me - nobody I called had rooms in my price range. It was here I started to realized that every little thing tourists do costs money. To go for a two or three hour walk in the tea with a guide would cost half of my daily budget. I asked the hotel manager to recommend a cheap guide. He was very much a happy, love, yoga, mediation local who still admitted that yes foreigners have dollar signs on their foreheads. He said I could just go walking out past the hospital and I'd be surrounded by tea. So that's what I did. I just walked up the trails and through the tea trees for a couple of hours before I was busted. I came upon a bunch of woman carrying baskets of tea leaves on there heads down the trails and their supervisor was in front. He looked at me and said "No tourist area!" I just asked if I could go back the way I came and he seemed ok with that. I don't think he wanted to deal with the whole problem. So I head off kind of in the same direction but took a turn to get to the tea museum. I was kind of a minimal museum - they had some stuff left over from the last hundred years so they put it in a building. The phone exchange was kind of cool but the typewriters not so much. They processing demo was interesting to watch as tea was aged, chopped, sifted and dried. The guide lecture was not so much about how tea is made but about how tea does all kinds of great wonderful things like lowers blood sugar and stress and has vitamins blah blah blah. The white tourists were mostly annoyed but the Indian tourists loved it. I think I learned a bit about Indian story telling and rhetoric and why we in the west find it so hard to get anything out of. I was staying in town, which was a nice little place. I got my pants mended at a tailor and bought some bath soap. For dinner I went to a place recommended by my guide book (don't buy lonely planet anymore, it's now aimed at Brits on Holiday not the individual backpacking traveller it used to be for). The place was fine but to get there I had to go to the other side of the river which was like the other side of the tracks. Here a new town was being built with gleaming white, new hotels complete with glass and marble lobbies. They are all filled with Indian tourists. I didn't like it at all. When I left the next day for Allepey, I saw lots more of these resorts out in the tea fields. The guy next to me was an engineering student at the local college. He said the resorts starting to show up about 5 years ago and they keep coming. He was a nice kid I enjoyed talking to. This is why I take public transit and do things on the cheap. Otherwise you totally miss talking to the people who live there.
