Our very last day in Madurai, we booked a tour through the state tourism board to Kodaikanal, a former british hill town retreat that's now a lovely place to go to cool off. wow, is it lovely... it's about 6,000 feet up, satisfying granite hills and cliffs covered with luxurious growth, with some enormous waterfalls.
But that was not the highlight of our trip. The highlight was the trip itself, beginning with the bus. when they picked us up at our hotel, we went out and there was a big shiny giant tour bus. wow, we thought. Then our guide turned... left. behold, our bus. A vintage deluxe schoolbus type bus with the original velvetee plush seats covered by ripped plastic, an ornate ceiling decor of velvet curliques, and rococco silver columns separating us from our driver, on both sides. and our dashboard, featuring a small ganesh statue with ribbons of incense smoke going upwards, and a giant plastic pterodactyl, and a squirrels' tail. really fun.
Anyway our other misconeption was that this trip might not be fully booked since we had barely seen 2 other europeans, at a distance, in this big city. Wrong! it was full of tourists - from all over India. It was full and initially we thought no one would interact with us - people kind of looked away. but there was the most darling year old baby next to us who was pure delight and she was kinda interesting for us to see because she'd just had her little head shaved, something done both as an offering, in some families, and to encouraqge the hair to become thicker darker and stronger, as we learned was this family's choice. she LOVED her daddy.
anyway, we managed in this ancient feeling bus to have a great, safe trip, all the way 2 hours of town in the flat landscape with gorgeous hillls rising directly out of the flats, as if the landscape had poured flatness on top of a mountain range, and then up an hour of very dramatic climbing, leaving behind the palm groves and scrub and up into pine forests, ferns and familiar english style flowers (all imported from India I'm sure). Like profuse lantana. Not that the country before the hills had been ugly, far from it... it was full of small towns with brilliant jam packed markets, and little stucco houses painted peach and turquoise and blue, on their fronts, and on each side, a bright yellow orange with lots of advertising in black letters. Accepting an advertisement means you get paid AND your house gets painted! next time we have to repaint one of our houses maybe I can find someone who wants to make the side of it a billboard.
One of the best things that happend on this trip was lots and lots of coffee. after on the road for 2 hours we stopped at our first 'ten minute stop'. well.. the bus conductor spoke limited Hindi, which our felllow passengers said they barely understood, and none of them spoke the local Tamil. And we spoke NOTHING. so the conductor would talk at length and everyone left the bus. The first time this happened we did not realize that nearly everyone around us were educated english speaking tourists from the big cities, and we could have asked them... I think because the bus was such a strange spectacle and cost so little - the WHOLE day including 12 hours trip, 3 free meals, was only 295 rupees, or $4.50. So we got out at this stop, a little restuarant with outdoor coffee stand and soem bathrooms, bewildered, because 3 or 4 other tour buses were there and I worried ours would drive off if we did something wrong.
Luckily nothing like that happened and soon we were maknig friends with our fellow passengers. We went up to this town which was quite peculiar: it's majorly Christian, with also about 1000 tibetans. So on the granite cuts on the side of the road, as we went up, were written, in english, FREE TIBET, LOVE TIBET and TRY JESUS. no graffiti just encouraging phrases. and when we got to the town it was full of christian colleges, episcopal churches and Tibetans selling cheap shawls. It was actually lots of fun. a chaotic little town with the usual trash and deteriorating sidewalks, a little lake with swan boats, and a walk to a vista called 'Green Valley overlook' which involved wlking past a gamut of about 30 little stalls selling tourist geegaws, ending at an overlook carefully fenced in with chainlink fencing so you would not jump off, and -- fog. utter, complete, white out at the end of the road. so we just had to walk back through the salesfolks, down to the sunny valley. it was pretty wild.
Slowly we got to know our fellow travelers and their kids, it was so fun. they were all there on weekensd from Delhi or Bangalore and one family had been in Atlanta for 4 years. And they all, like us, had trains and buses to catch that night. SO.... when the aged bus got down the 6,000 foot hill, and onto the flats, and a loud BANG was heard, and the gearbox broke, we had lots of companytrying to figure out just what on earth to do. And it ended up being fine... we limped back to Madurai at 20mph on the side of the roads and the freeway, and made our train. which is the next story.
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