22 May 2015
Postcard from Orange County (the other one)
July 2012
At least our clothes and bodies are free of leeches.
It's not a great day, drizzly, grey and dank, due to a
cyclone over southern India. Nearby there are floods, high winds and a number
of people have died. But here, like elsewhere in the world, the talk is more of
Sandy than of India. The same driver, who sleeps in the car in the car park
while we are in the various resorts, has driven us west from Mysore to the
province of Karnataka, the land of the Kodavas, a people famous for being
warriors, coffee drinkers and spice growers (mostly pepper and cardamom).
We may think of India in terms of tea, but the British
started cultivating coffee here about 100 years ago, with the Rustica varietal
thriving in the cool, relatively dry (so we're told!) sub-tropical climate. The
locals are very proud of their coffee, and thrust us a cup each on our arrival.
It's foul. It turns out this is because of the milk, which they boil before
serving it. Served black, or with steamed milk, the coffee is excellent.
We're at 1,000m altitude and the rolling forested hills
are noisy with birdsong, croaking frogs, crickets and many unknown noises. At
the fringe of the forests are plantations: fruit trees including jackfruits the
size of giant marrows, avocados, star fruit, limes, papayas, oranges, and of
course lots of coffee bushes. As the coffee does not like too much direct
sunlight, for shade silver oaks are planted, up which the pepper vines are
cultivated. We're shown small chillies and warned not to touch them, as they
are so hot (their name atom-bomb chilli, used to make Tabasco, is a big hint!).
We sign up to a guided tour of the forest, slightly
alarmed at being equipped with leech resistant socks and instructions to use
salt rather than fire to remove any that make it past and onto our skin. Fellow
tourists are all Indian, even if one couple has come rather a long way, from
the San Francisco Bay Area. English is the common language, and they all use
the old city names such as, "I'm from Bombay". We're told in the same
breath that Mumbai has the population of Australia and that, by not going there
this trip, we've "not missed much". Ouch.
On the edge of the coffee plantation, we follow our
guide's instructions to switch off mobile phones, stop talking and tread
quietly, as we venture into the forest. We see a squirrel the size of a badger with
a bright red tail leaping around tree branches, lots of flowers that would cost
you a fortune in a London garden centre, ants and termites, and a mimosa that
closes its leaves when you touch it. Many of the plants apparently have
medicinal properties, both for humans and for animals (elephants, for example,
eat the mimosa when they have a stomach ache).
We find a large pile of elephant poo, then another,
fresher pile followed by a third, still steaming. One of the group stands on a
bamboo branch, breaking it. The noise makes the guide extremely anxious, as
elephants have acute hearing and regularly attack humans to protect their
babies. Then in the near distance we hear a great noise of trampled
undergrowth: it's a female elephant with her young. She's not happy, showing it
with a great snort. The guide tells us "this is very danger" and we
beat a hasty retreat from the forest, but are invited to come again tomorrow.
We'll have to see about that.
At least our clothes and bodies are free of leeches.
# posted by DavidF @ 16:28 
