Nilgiri Journals Part 3 – Coonoor Days

The rest of my days in Coonoor were spent relaxing in the upper storey verandah of YWCA Wyoming and drinking a lot of tea. A colonial building over 150 years old, now converted into a guest house, it’s probably as good a deal as one could get in the hills. My room, which would have cost an arm and a leg in more business-minded hands, cost only 414 Rs. It was the perfect place to linger without the pressure of making the days count and the fear of losing my bank balance. My regular visitors were the house sparrows and red-whiskered bulbuls that chattered endlessly in the green surrounds. One day, a herd of gaur (wild bulls) made their way into the pastures of the property compound. Another day, V showed me bear’s paws marked on the building wall. It was a wild and remarkably peaceful setting, in perfect contrast to the cacophonic mess of Lower Coonoor Town.

A Gaur grazing in the compound

Marks of a bear’s paws (if V is to be believed)

By the end of my 3 weeks in the YWCA, I had come to know everyone who lived and worked there. V, who worked at the reception, was a Coonoor boy and would march me off to his favourite eateries in the town. His suggestions were unfailingly good. So, thanks to him, I got to taste the masala varkeys and biscuits at Crown Bakery (the oldest bakery in the Nilgiris, possibly even in Tamil Nadu, still run by the same family from 1880), veg rolls at the New Bangalore Bakery on Mount Road and the twisted varkeys and Nendrampazham (Plantain) chips at the New Indian Bakery near the bus stand. He also made me go to Hotel Ramachandra on Mount Road, which became my favourite restaurant in all of Nilgiris, to gorge on their biryanis and parottas that were served with spicy curry and watery raita and wash it down with splendid coffee from Tamizhagam. I made a trip all the way to a small bakery in the Barracks area called Needs only because V told me it was the best black forest cake he had ever tasted and he wasn’t far off the mark on that one either.

The dirt track to my home in Coonoor!

G, the cook at YWCA, had worked at the Fernhills Palace with the Mysore Maharaja and had a knack for making one crave for even basic dishes like chappati and dal that were cooked simply yet tastefully (and with a lot of pride!). His meals were always delicious and healthy and made sure I never got sick when I was there. S, one of the security guards, had served in three wars for the Indian Army, got hurt multiple times and yet was having to work post-retirement to earn a living for himself and his family because the pension he received was a pittance. V’s principal obsession was tracking prophecies and conspiracy theories and his many weird, surreal youtube video recommendations kept me entertained days on end. Thanks to V, G and S’s appetites for long conversations, my days at Coonoor were never lonely and when I left, it was with a feeling of sadness and a promise to return some day.

The Wyoming building

The evenings were invariably spent in a couple of cafes in the Bedford area. My personal favourite was Dew Drops, a cafe which served supremely well-brewed tea and succulent snacks like cheese sandwiches, veg cutlets and uh, stuffed capsicum. This was a new place but seemed to have already developed a loyal customer-base. It was a convenient stop-over for my trips to the Bakers Junction where I shopped for locally-made jams, bread, honey and Acres Wild cheese.

Sim’s Park

Apart from gastronomic excursions and the jaunty ones I wrote about in the previous post, my only trip out in Coonoor was the one I made on the first day, to the beautifully wild Sim’s Park. After getting exhausted wandering its many labyrinthine tracks for hours, I settled down for a meal at La Belle Vie, known for its French cuisine. It’s housed in an old colonial bungalow nestled amidst tea plantations on a cliff-side that commands a stupendous view of the valley below. These were early days, so I still wasn’t jaded looking at tea plants everywhere. I wish I had just looked at the view and left though because the food was an inedible, expensive and oily mess. I know nothing about French cuisine but I’m pretty certain they don’t dunk their veggies in 3 inches of oil. When I narrated my Belle Vie ordeal to V, he told me of an old French couple who had gone there after hearing rave reviews. The exchange went something like this –

“Did you like the food?”

“It was okay.”

“So was the food really French?”

“A little bit, yes. The names were French, the food very Indian.”

I felt vindicated.

The best thing about the restaurant is the architecture…

…and the views from it

My favourite place in Coonoor though wasn’t Sim’s Park or Dolphin’s Nose or Lamb’s Rock or the Tea Museums. The place I loved the most was the terrace of the Ayyappa temple that served as a short-cut for the steep yet peaceful hike from Lower Coonoor to the YWCA. It was an ideal location to break the journey which worked both as a rest-stop and as a place which gave unobstructed bird’s eye views of the Lower Coonoor town below.

Sitting on the steps on the terrace, I could spy on a hundred roof-tops, get a perspective on the urban mayhem down below, listen to the chaotic symphony of honking cars, hooting trains, the hammering and drilling of construction work and the chirping of countless red-whiskered bulbuls and oriental white-eyes and watch the clouds decapitate the hills in the distance as they find a way through the valleys enveloping entire villages in opaque mist in the process, and all of this in good privacy. Barring the few who used the stairs of the temple to cut across to the town, I had the whole place to myself. I never took my phone or my camera with me when I went there and it was a blessed relief to be disconnected, if only for a short time, from the trigger impulses of checking and clicking and being busy.

Nilgiri Journals Part 2 – Being an account of two days spent around Coonoor

The view from Lady Canning’s Seat

Of the 5 weeks I’ve spent in the Nilgiris so far, 3 have been in Coonoor. Thanks to ennui, laziness and the peaceful confines of the YWCA Wyoming, only two days out of the 21 were spent traveling around the town and they too happened only because of coincidentally timely visits by a few friends.

One of them was a drive around Wellington with A and P (you know who you are if you’re reading this), through the military area and the golf course, to a little puddle with paddle boats they called the “Wellington Lake” and then to a nice property they had stayed at called Tea Nest which had big rooms, friendly staff and delivered gorgeous views, sprawling tea estates, massive hills in the distance, good tea and a story about a bear that likes to pay a visit every now and then.

The cloudy drive to Dolphin’s Nose

The other was a trip with D to Dolphin’s Nose, Lamb’s Rock and Lady Canning’s Seat two days before I left the town for good. We could see nothing but walls of clouds around us when we were on our way and I began to think it was a terrible idea to do the trip in that weather. But thankfully, once we reached Dolphin’s Nose, some of the mist had cleared and while the views were still somewhat hazy, one could see all the way down to Mettupalayam and Coimbatore in the plains below. M, our rickshaw driver, insisted that there was a map of India imprinted in the landscape somewhere. I squinted hard but couldn’t see anything so cartographically precise but when he started getting agitated and directing my eyes to every hazy outline decipherable below, everything I saw started resembling a map of India in one way or the other. I pretended to see whatever he wanted me to see to get rid of him momentarily and break out of bizarre illusions.

“They haven’t evolved much, have they?”, says the monkey watching humans litter

While we were standing there admiring the view and ignoring resident primates and trigger-happy tourists, M started telling us about a traumatic incident he witnessed a few years back. He had come here with some gullible tourists and was showing them the landscaped map of India. A young couple were sitting on a rock behind the view-point having what he felt was a leisurely chat. Suddenly, the boy (of the couple) walked down calmly and jumped into the valley below. I asked him if this is what passed for “suicide point” in this area and he laughed and said that the suicide point was on the other side of the hill where even more gruesome events were known to happen. I discovered that vertiginous suicides were one of M’s pet obsessions when he tried to convince me that Lamb’s Rock was so named because a certain Mr. Lamb jumped from his eponymous rock, which is utter nonsense as I learned from a little google research later.

Stopping jilted lovers jumping over

Our next stop was Lady Canning’s Seat and I could already sense a fidgety impatience in M when he started playing loud Tamil songs and telling us that there was nothing to “see” there. But we wanted to tick all the boxes, so up we climbed the desolately mossy steps to a “seat” that was scratched and scribbled with notes of people who must have wanted to record their memories in stone. D wondered why it was called “Lady Canning’s Seat” to which I cunningly replied that it must have been because a Lady Canning sat there. We had the whole place to ourselves and the clouds were doing a ballet in the air waltzing over the villages and estates below creating a dreamscape that stays in your head long after but is impossible to photograph (with my limited skills anyway)

Our reptilian friends at Lamb’s Rock

We then merrily hopped towards Lamb’s Rock, where M issued a stern warning to us to make it quick because we were going regularly over the “time limit”. But Lamb’s Rock proved to be the place we lingered the most, not because of the views, which were just a slight variation of the views you get from Dolphin’s Nose, but because I started developing a sudden interest in herpetology. Down on the rocky cliff were many multi-coloured reptiles basking in the sun safe in the knowledge that no human being would be stupid enough to venture where they were. After spending an inordinately long time watching and taking pictures of the many lizards on the rocks (some extremely well-camouflaged), we remembered M’s grumblings and hustled back.

More herpetology

M’s rickshaw started rebelling against him as it sputtered and stuttered to a halt. He rather somberly shut the music down and started focusing on solving the problem at hand while we were solemnly contemplating walking the 8 kms back. D had foreseen this much earlier but we hadn’t done anything about it. Would our inaction bite us in the ass? Fortunately for us, M solved the problem soon enough and we romped home.

Nilgiri Journals Part 1 – Getting there

The beginnings

There is a 3 year old kid emptying his bladder in the seat next to mine. His brother is busy jumping from one cabin over to the next, screaming every time he does a hop. Their mother seated diagonally opposite is juggling between taking pictures of her son’s adventurousness on her smartphone, scolding her younger ‘un for soiling his neighbour’s pants and exchanging itinerary notes very loudly with another family. Her bored-looking husband, sitting glumly and despondently opposite to me, has just finished eating a packet of jam roll and drinking a cup of tea he was conned into buying at the chaotic stall at the station by enterprising vendors who told him nothing was available in the jungles beyond where the train was going. He vengefully dumps his plastic wrapper and foam cup outside the window so they could join millions of their cousins littered among the green slopes of the valley we were slumbering through.

In the adjacent cabin, another big family from Chandigarh has a septuagenarian patriarch boasting about the devious means he used to convince the ticket collector to give him a first class ticket for a second class price so he could join his noisy family in the same coach, a remarkable feat where he saved a princely sum of 100 rupees. A group of young college boys and girls have taken over another cabin and their atonal cacophonic screams and wails could have killed many an endangered species in the forests outside.

This wasn’t an ordinary train. This was the more than 100-year old UNESCO-certified world heritage mountain railway from Mettupalayam to Ooty which offered an opportunity to travel by the old romantic way of getting to a destination, behind a chugging steam engine on a narrow-gauge track. It’s a trip every guide-book tells you to do when you visit South India. When I successfully booked the only seat available on the train a month ago, I felt triumphant and for days dreamed of the quiet valleys of the Nilgiri foothills, of the dense forests with hundreds of endemic bird-calls and of the hooting steam engine that would transport me to a different place and time. The imagination, as always, trumped reality.

Frenetic picture-taking at Hillgrove

Was it worth enduring all that mayhem to take a supremely hyped up and romanticized mode of travel to reach my destination? In a way, yes. For one, the ticket cost 25 Rupees. And as the train wound up through the forested valleys of the Nilgiri foothills, I whipped out my Sansa Clip Plus mp3 player, started listening to Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, drowned out the ambient noise, began ignoring my cantankerous neighbours and started enjoying the journey. The names of the stations, Hillgrove, Runnymede, Adderley, belonged to another, more oppressive (now faux romantic) time and so did the pace of travel as the train jogged along for 3 hours to traverse the 17 kms to Coonoor. We would get down at every station, drink some tea, dutifully brandish our DSLRs to take pictures and get back in. Some of the scenery was spectacular and different in perspective from the ones you would get from the road that you could see winding down below. There were bridges so high you felt as if you hovered in the air. As the jungles got thicker, the air got cooler and clear streams flowed hundreds of meters below. Thanks to the altitude, there was a nip in the air and every now and then, an expansive landscape would open up where one could see miles and miles into the plains, making me (almost) forgive the kid who peed on my pants.

The view from Adderley

So yes, I’m glad I took the train. Will I do it again? I’m not so sure. Maybe once in a lifetime is more than enough.