Scavenging, and this happens

Romit’s friends were closing down their gym and had a bunch of stuff that they were trying get rid of. And in keeping with our attempts to reuse anything we can, we took a break from picking pepper and offered to help clear things up. So, Neeti treated us to lunch at Mangalore Pearl, in exchange for a few hours lifting 6kg 18"x18" rubber tiles off the gym floor and piling them up in a corner for later storage. We cleared maybe 1500 sq ft, which means, we lifted and carried 650 tiles or so… 3900 kgs! Not bad, and we picked up 2 benches, a wooden box, a shoe rack, a metal rack of shelves, 3 rolls of artificial turf, a large mirror and 43 of those heavy bloody rubber tiles. Thank you, Neeti!

So, all this stuff, we pile onto Manik’s Isuzu that I had borrowed for this purpose, add an old wooden sofa on top and set off back to pin code 571201. Of course, a cop’s eyes light up when he sees a private vehicle carrying “goods” and he waves us down. “RC thorsi (show me the vehicle registration)”, he says, through his covid-19 prevention mask. I scramble for my phone where Manik had shared a photo of his RC card with me. Before I can locate the photo, we hear a mumble, “Corona… hogi, hogi (corona… go, go)”, and the cop’s gone! We stare at each other for a minute wondering what happened before the realization hits us… this is a “Chinese virus” and I must be a carrier! Muahahaha… I am a walking talking nightmare!

Anyhow, the rest of the drive up, I couldn’t help notice that the usually curious eyes in my direction were more wary than usual. Shrug, I guess.

The coffee was picked, now pepper

Back in the district of Coorg, the same one in the Western Ghats that played host to two weeks of coffee picking in January, the pin code of Avandur remains the same. And here I was again, with a month in hand this time, to watch the coffee bloom and to pick some ripening pepper off the vines.

Romit had already started the sprinkling using our brave and lonely sprinkler to encourage the coffee plants to flower; the plants were responding brilliantly. When I arrived, along with Gari, the area around the house smelled like someone had generously sprayed coffee flower perfume everywhere to welcome us. And the soundtrack to our walk up the slope was the buzz of the bees going about their business.

But before we could get to the business of picking the pepper, a few coffee trees remained to be picked, on the highest and steepest part of the plantation. Not much… but we don’t have so much coffee that we can ignore even these few trees. So, up we went, and pretty soon, as thankful as I was to have opposable thumbs, I was questioning evolution on how it was decided that we wouldn’t be needing prehensile tails any more. The need of a prehensile tail actually struck me while hanging desperately onto a branch; I looked down and realised that I was a little too close to being back down at the house post haste without too much skin left on my butt! I survived.

The limited horizontal space we have meant that we had to borrow space from Uncle Poonacha to dry some of our coffee, which in turn meant twice daily treks to his home to turn the coffee over. On one such visit, he mentioned that the water supply to his sprinkler had diminished and it needed to be checked. Romit is nothing if not chivalrous, and so off we set, up a little stream, past some startled jungle fowl, to the place where Uncle had laid the pipe. On the way back, we noticed that Uncle’s enormous chikoo tree was heavily laden with juicy looking fruit. When he said that we could take as much as we wanted, we joyfully bagged a bagful. Fixing a sprinkler for chikoos… I like! Another time, I scored a nice ripe papaya as well!

Selling our dried coffee berries was a new experience for me, and whether we got the best deal or not, I was quite thrilled to be given cash for the work that we’d done (mostly Romit). Maybe next year, I should be thrilled when we get the best deal, and not just any deal.

Oh yes, this was supposed to be about pepper! Yeah, we did that too… Romit put on a superman cloak (his father’s old lungi) clambered up a bamboo pole with me holding on with all my still developing might and picked the pepper high up in the trees. That was until we figured that we should 1. get some better equipment, and 2. perhaps leave it to the pros (now that we know what it takes!). And so we went back to watering our fruit garden of lychees, avocados, jackfruit, chikoos, custard apples, rambutans, dragon fruit, pineapples, mangosteens, persimmons… it takes forever! But patience, we’ll get there.

A couple of weeks picking coffee

Somewhere in the Coorg district in the Western Ghats of India, there’s a little building that indicates the turn off to the coffee plantation that Romit and I bought. The Avandur Post Office, pin code 571201, slightly bigger than a phone booth, serves the village that we are now part of.

Just after Christmas last year, I got a ride up to Coorg from Bangalore with some friends coming to help us out as we prepped to host our first bunch of escapees from the city. The guests were going to spend New Year’s Eve with us picking coffee and building walls with mud, straw and lime. You can never tell with the city types!

Anyhow, with three days to go before they arrived, there was still a campsite to prepare, a hot water boiler to install, benches to be created from old construction scaffolding and tyres, firewood to be cut and dried, supplies to be bought (how much do we cook for 20 people? :-/).

The boiler turned out to be the most frustrating. The leak from the outlet meant that we had to wait hours for the sealant to dry before checking again if it was fixed. It finally stopped leaking around 10pm on the 30th. We picked up our guinea pigs at 5am the next morning from the post office beyond which their large van could not come.

Romit’s uncle, Rahul, was in charge of cooking and we quickly learned that cooking by a wood fire in the blazing noon sun can make an enthusiastic cook resign from the job at short notice! That said, the food that he managed to conjure up went down extremely well after a morning of coffee picking and playing in the mud. The breakfast upuma turned out to be enough for everyone twice over. Romit and I ended up eating huge portions of that for the rest of the day. Barefoot Experiment, with the emphasis on Experiment!

The intrepid adventurers bathed in the waterfall a short walk away, basked in a bonfire, barbecued some chicken (the veggies didn’t barbecue as well), sang some songs, flavoured their drinks with freshly picked oranges, and packed into tents to bring in the new decade. I think some of them enjoyed our company and the birds and the trees, and I hope they come back again.

Incredibly, my first week back in Coorg was over. The arabica was ripe and needed picking before the birds ate all the berries. Some robusta was ripe and needed picking too. The persimmon and longan seeds needed planting, the extra peas needed either eating or planting, the sedimentation tank needed waterproofing and a cover, the orange trees were laden, the cow dung needed to be taken up in preparation to be used as fertilizer.

With Romit feeling a little under the weather and taking a trip to Bangalore, it was up to me to host Dillu and a couple of his friends when they made it up for the first weekend of 2020. Anvesha helped me with painting the sedimentation tank cover. The fire in the fireplace that evening was accompanied by singing every song that we could remember and pork fry from Bettigeri.

I had promised them no sign of other human life, so when Prachi woke to the sound of what sounded like a baby screeching and no sign of the rest of us, she was unsurprisingly a little perturbed. Well, we all learned that the call of a Malabar Grey Hornbill can be mistaken for a baby lost in the woods!

Romit brought back reinforcements in the form of Harshit and the coffee picking picked up pace. “Ants on my hands make me clap, ants in my shirt make me jiggle, ants in my pants make me dance, ants on my neighbours make me laugh!” Ant bites are quite the inspiration!

My last weekend in Coorg this trip was rapidly on me, and I had Urvashi, Vivek and Prabu come visit. Gari was back as well, to see how Evey, the pup she and Romit had rescued and brought up and to try and get our two adopted strays (Yerudu, the two coloured mom, and Muru, the 3 coloured daughter) spayed so that we wouldn’t end up littered with litters. 

Vivek told us how he had picked coffee in Chikmagalur as a college student because he ran out of money for booze — 50 rupees a sack! He told us about his adventures stealing mangoes as a schoolboy in Mysore. He cooked a fantastic chicken curry for all of us. Vivek, Urvashi and Gari combined to make pakoras over the bonfire to go with the Old Monk and oranges. So good!

And then it was time to go back to the world of concrete and internet connectivity.

I’m back soon… anyone game for a little adventure? Maybe the peas I planted will be ready to be plucked and eaten.

A torch, a camera and an umbrella

School Thota, Coorg.

Picture this. It's a dark rainy night in the monsoon in Coorg. Outside a 160 year old bungalow in the middle of a huge coffee estate, there's a curious shape on the lawn. It's part umbrella and part drenched human backside, lit by the glow of a torch, and the occasional flash.

Well, that's me... kneeling on the lawn, juggling a torch, a camera and an umbrella, trying to take a photograph of a nocturnal frog in the rain. The frog turned out to be rhacophorus lateralis, an endangered nest building frog, endemic to the Western Ghats.

For the two days I spent at School Thota, I was pampered by Mrs. Saraswathi Aiyappa with the best of Coorgi cuisine. Pandi curry, of course, with kadumbuttu and papputtu. Kai puli (bitter orange) squash, chutney, and the fresh, and extremely sour, fruit. Bamboo shoot curry with akki roti. I explored the estate in the rain, grinned maniacally at the few cars I happened to see, watched sunbirds fight each other for the best hibiscus blooms and vernal hanging parrots messily eat guavas from the tree.

Oh yes, thank you Amara! What wouldn't I give to be seven again!

More photos...

Loose Ends

Time seems to be flashing by at an ever increasing pace. There are so many threads that started along the way, some of them becoming thick ropes, strong bonds that you can count on. And there are others that end as wisps almost as soon as they started, lost forever.

And then there are those that haven't quite disappeared, those that you imagine would be there when you reach for them. Do I dare reach out and test them?

Or do I prefer loose ends?

The N Family

Coorg.

Last year's visit to the Synthesis Homestay made me a new friend, Namratha. Her parents, Naresh and Namita, took such excellent care of us that when she said she was going home for the holidays, I offered to drive her home. And in the process, I invited myself to their estate again.

Since it was the monsoon, I expected it to be raining heavily and constantly for the entire weekend, so I planned to sit in the patio with cups of tea getting my fill of dripping green. As it turned out, the rains stayed away, mostly, and I ended up with a bunch of highlights: Blue bearded bee-eater, what a blue! Pork for every meal. Shield tail snake, Uropeltidae, while walking at night. Crested Serpent Eagle sitting close enough to identify without binoculars. Buff-striped keelback at my feet. Namratha as a guide to the estate.

And then when I got back to town, I learned that Shield-tailed snakes are only found in the Western Ghats! And what I've spent my life calling hammerhead leeches are really terrestrial planaria, or flatworms! There's still so much to learn.

Oh, and the Ns are seriously wonderful hosts!

More photos...

Same, Same, but Different

Vietnam.

Same coffee, but whitened with condensed milk, sometimes iced. Thoroughly enjoyable either way.

Same spring rolls, but wrapped in rice paper.

Same stalactites and stalagmites, but so much bigger than I've ever seen, in caves named 'Amazing' and 'Surprise'. The surprise was the source of humankind.

Same Latin script, but not a single recognizable word. Well, recognizable if pronounced, but what would 'Bich Lap' or 'Phuoc Long' mean?

Same pieces of paper, but spent in millions of dongs. A significant amount of time went into wondering if we were actually paying a reasonable amount of something we were buying - I mean, is it reasonable for dinner to cost millions?

Same sounds of war (probably), but now made by tourists shooting AK-47s and M-16s.

Same tunnels, but no longer used by rebels, just by well-fed visitors.

Same taxis, but some of them have meters that run at five times the speed. I think we were taking for a ride in just one of those.

Same ancient Hindu temples, but pockmarked with bullet holes. The ruins at My Son are relics of a Cham civilization that thrived for many hundreds of years.

Same communism, but you wouldn't know it, apart from the blocking of facebook.

Same international apparel brands, but available at two different prices - the brand price, and the locally made price. The quality is still excellent though.

Same songs, but covered in an undecipherable accent.

Same secret war strategy room, but now a family shrine to the man who ran 'Pho Binh' right under the American noses through the war. The chairs on which the leaders of the Viet Cong planned their attacks on the Americans are still there.

Same En Chiang though. No matter that they thought I was Vietnamee.

Lots of photos...