Ooty Last weekend we went on our first major outing - a colleague was playing in a golf tournament at Ootacamund (Ooty) and he invited us to join him. Ooty is an old British Hill Station - the British would retreat to the hills during the hot season, and then return to the plains when the weather cooled down. Ooty was the most famous of the hill stations in South India. At 7500 feet it remains cool throughout the year. The hill stations are now promoted as tourist destinations by the Indian Tourist Development Agencies. The western tourist books (such as the Lonely Planet guide) are notably unenthusiastic about Ooty.

Ooty is several hundred kilometers south of Bangalore in the Nilgiri hills. The driving time works out at about six and a half hours due to slow traffic and narrow mountain roads. Our journey was aided substantially by a national truckers strike which has all of the big trucks off the road. (Doctors and college teachers are also on strike for different reasons.) One of the big attractions of this trip was the chance to see the countryside. The first part of the journey, from Bangalore to Mysore was through very lush farmland, followed by more arid farmland south of Mysore. We then entered the forest (which is preserved as national parks), and the final stage of the journey was a very steep climb up to Ooty. I am under the impression that rural Karnataka is relatively well off. The land was filled with coconut groves, sugar cane, and rice fields. It was a very beautiful drive. We stopped for lunch and had raw coconut milk. The top of a green coconut is cut off with a machete, and this gives a couple of cups of very thin juice. It is supposed to contain many useful minerals, and is certainly a very safe source of water. South of Mysore the road became narrower, and the villages appeared less properous. There were several places where villagers had spread their millet out on the road for vehicles to drive over to thresh out the grain.

Highway driving is an adventure. Since the trucks were off the road, the only large vehicles on the road were buses. Buses will travel either very slow or very fast, and seem to be able to occupy about 75% of the width of the road, independent of the road's actual width. We passed a couple of carcasses of buses along the way which were wrapped around trees or turned over. Indian driving operates on a food chain principle - you get out of the way of things higher on the food chain, and things lower on the food chain get out of your way. (And vehicles in the same niche settle precedence by a game of chicken.) The rules for passing other vehicles could have been developed in Greece: as long as an oncoming vehicle is not visible then it is okay to pass - making blind corners and hills ideal places for passing, since you can't see anything. Since there are many very slow or stopped vehicles (broken trucks, ox carts) and other road hazards, frequent passing is necessary, even when driving at a moderate speed. It was very clear that our car, containing three adults and one child was grossly underloaded. Buses and taxis will be filled with people until they can't hold any more. There are also minibuses which are used for public transportation - these drive with their doors open since this increases their capacity substantially, about eight people can hold on and hang out of the side door.

Mudumali Wildlife Park

India has relatively large projects to preserve its last remaining forests, although the statistics relating to deforestation are predictably depressing. There are a number of large national parks which preserve both the remaining forest as well as wildlife. Although there is substantial pressure on the boundaries of the parks, they have succeeded in checking the deforestation (of the protected area), and have allowed some of the wildlife to recover. The forests in south have a moderate number of tigers, as well as free roaming elephants. Our journey took us directly through Bandipur and Mudimalli national parks. We stopped at Mudumalli to go on a "wilderness safari". There were a tremendous number of monkeys hanging out in front of the park station which seemed a favorable omen for the trip. The safari consisted of riding through the forest in a very noisy van, so that anything that wanted not to be seen had ample warning to get out of our way. In the first hour of driving we did not see that much, a blur in the distance that could have been a bison, several deer, and a bird. However, just seeing the forest was interesting - it was mostly a teak forest with trees about thirty feet high. The trees were sufficiently spread out that there were grasses and bushes as ground cover. We stopped at the place where "hundreds of elephants congregate during the dry season". Since it was the wet season, all we saw were four turtles and some monkeys that did not want to be photographed. Casey enjoyed bouncing around in the van. Although the safari was only scheduled for an hour, the driver decided to continue, and we came across several bison (large cow-like creatures with horizontal horns, not the American bison), and a large herd of elephants. The elephants were spectacular to watch in their own environment even though we did not get very close. I am very glad we stopped for the safari, although it did add two hours on to Casey's travel time.

(We had previously visited another National Park, Bannergatta N.P., just outside of Bangalore. This was an interesting trip, since it was a chance to drive through the outskirts of Bangalore, and some country side. The safari section of the park consisted of driving through a scrub forest, and then entering an enclosed area, which had a few caged tigers, and then an area with uncaged lions and tigers. It probably is not that bad a place to be a lion or a tiger, since meals are provided, and they do have a few acres to roam around in before encountering the fence. We saw one sleeping tiger, and two sleeping lions. The other section of the park is a small, slightly run down zoo, with a children's play area. There were many monkey's running around outside of the cages (and one poor monkey inside a cage). Some of the cages contained rather mundane animals, such as pigeons while others were empty. )

After we left the ranger station at Mudumalli, we continued on towards Ooty. The herd of elephants we had seen in the forest had wandered out to the highway, so we saw them again. After leaving the National Park, we began the climb up to Ooty - this was a narrow, curving road that had many sharp curves, and had busses heading both up and down. To combat road accidents, a collection of safety signs were provided, two of my favorites were "Always keep to the left, particularly on curves", and "Time is precious, life is more precious". [The National Park also had safety signs, but combined them with fire prevention signs. Two of their signs read "Keep left, prevent fires" and "Use horn, prevent fires".] The signs were placed so that anyone paying any attention to the road could not read them at all. It was a substantial relief when we made it to the top, since it was completely dark and had been a very difficult drive.

The Ooty Club

Our friend comes from an influencial family, and had arranged for us to stay at the Ooty Club. He had warned us that it was stuffy. The Ooty club is an old, british club. The club's claim to fame is the invention of Snooker. The public rooms of the club are wood panelled, decorated with the heads of animals from endangered (and formerly endangered) species. A pair of tiger heads stare down at patrons of the bar. However, we did not spend much time in public areas, since Club rule number 12 forbade children from any areas of the club other than the parents' room and the children's dining room. (India is extremely tolerant of children (which is fortunate, since if they weren't we would have been deported long ago), this is the first place where children have been distinctly unwelcome.) We ate our meals in the children's dining room, which is reserved for families and for men not wearing jackets and ties. Club rule 7 requires men to wear jackets and ties in the dining room. Three men arrived in the children's room to eat while we were there, since they did not have proper attire. The food was quintessential English institutional cooking. Our dinner was breaded fish pellets, potato chips, and an unidentifiable gray sludge. My theory is that they are still using foodstuff stocked up in 1947 when the british left, but it is possible that they have a contract with the British school or prison system. Since the same food is served in the main dining room and children's dining room the coat and tie rule seemed pretty absurd.

On Saturday, our friend was playing in a golf tournament, so we were on our own. We chose to spend the morning at the botanical gardens (which was a pretty easy choice, since there wasn't much else to do.) The gardens were very nice, carefully manicured gardens, with plants from all over the world. There was a lot of interesting topiary work (including signs made from hedges), and a map of India done with plants. However, the real highlight of the gardens was Casey. Soon after we entered a group of people came up to us, and asked us if they could take a picture of Casey, so he posed with a group of Indian tourists. Then another group came up and asked for a picture, then another group, and so on. Nancy's comment was that we should be charging for these photos. Pretty soon the situation was out of control, with Casey being passed from group to group, and a steady click of cameras. Casey is generally good natured about being picked up by strangers (and often objects at being passed back to his parents.) However, he got decidely grumpy about all of this, and had a very serious pout in most of the pictures. People tried all sorts of methods to cheer him up (like squeezing his cheeks to force a smile), but he managed to resist most efforts. Eventually, we managed to get to another part of the garden, where Casey found a pair of old cannons to climb on. He spent a full hour climbing on the cannons, and trying to get them to work (I think he thought they were water cannons). He told anyone that approached just to go away, which deterred most of the photographs. After we left the gardens, we went to find a place to eat, and after a little bit of indecision ended up in a budget restaurant. Again, Casey was the center of attention (although no cameras). The waiters and bus boys took turns carrying him around, and various customers gave him food off of their plates. All in all it was an incredibly strange scene. In the evening we drove to the top of the highest peak in the Nilgiris which provided excellent views of the area, and one more photo session with a tour group. We ate dinner at a not too great Chinese restaurant, where Casey began the meal by going around and collecting all of the salt and pepper shakers in the restaurant (including demanding them from patrons).

On the drive home, we took the steep road down from Ooty (which had 36 hairpin curves, each of them numbered). The steep road had the advantage that buses were not allowed on it, so it was probably an easier drive. Driving through the forest we saw several herds of elephants and quite a few monkeys. The one stop we made was in a town called Channapatna which specializes in making wooden toys. I found the selection to be rather disappointing, but we purchased a couple things out of a sense of obligation. Sunday was the first day of the Ganesha festival. (Ganesh is one of the Hindu gods, he is commonly represented with an elephant head and a pudgy belly. He is the god of luck and is generally very popular.) A major portion of the festival is to have processions which carry around brightly painted idols of Ganesh, which end by dunking the idol in water. When we were leaving the store, two separate processions were passing, one in each direction along the road. The procession on the near side consisted of an ox cart containing the idol, five or six men playing metal drums, and about twenty or thirty other men and boys. They were dressed in fairly traditional dress, and had quite a bit of paint on their faces. When they started to play the drums, Casey started to jump up and down doing a dance. This again completely upstaged everything else, and the entire crowd was around him. It took very little encouragement from them to get Casey to join the procession. He was a little scared when the men beating on drums came up to him and started playing just in front of him, but was generally very excited by the goings on. We eventually retrieved him from the procession and drove the rest of the way back to Bangalore.