OOty

March 10, 2008

OK, so maybe I was a little hard on the state of Tamil Nadu. You know when you listen to someone else's opinions about a place or a people, and you walk into that situation already jaded, and the slightest thing can set you off into thinking that the person's biased opinion was correct? Well, that happened. Someone told me that Tamil Nadu was ugly and the people unfriendly, and when we got to Coimbatore it was so bustling compared to the beach of Varkala, and the first two people we talked to didn't speak any English. Then I wrote the last email about Kerala being so much more peaceful and Tamil Nadu uneducated and blah blah. And you know when you put something out into the universe and something comes right back to you (this has been happening to me quite a bit, perhaps it always does and I'm just seeing it more), well immediately after I was on the computer everyone was very friendly to us and very welcoming. Perhaps I shouldn't jump to conclusions, huh. In fact, I quite like it here. Yers, Kerala is more lush and the people more friendly, and when you smile at people here not everyone smiles back (you think I would be used to that living in N.E.), but people seem to be friendly on the inside and still go out of their way to accommodate us. For instance, we were staying at the Yoga center and it was Tonya's birthday, and we had met an older Indian chap that morning in Yoga class, and later that night he stopped by with a birthday cake! Super sweet (and not just the cake!).

And now we are in the hill station of OOty. OOty OOty. This place was "discovered" by this English dude sometime last century who built a whole bunch of tea plantations and basically displaced the huge tribal community here, and instead made a little England in the mountains and thereby turned the hills into "snooty Ooty". And here we are, adding fuel to the tourist fire. But it's really nice, another bustling city set in the hills but just outside of the traffic is very quiet, which is where our hotel is, overlooking a lake. And hopefully tomorrow we are taking a forest trek into the hills and visiting a remaining Todod tribe. But half the fun was getting here. We took a miniature train up the mountains, which is a small train, 4 carts, being pushed by a steam locomotive, passed tea plantations and waterfalls and beautiful flowers and loads of waving children. But the best were the overly excited young men in the train, who were dancing and singing and clapping their hands the entire ride. I felt like a little kid again.

We will be making our way to Mangalore sometime this week, so we can take a really cheap flight to Calcutta next Monday. It's weird to be taking a plane to another part of India, but it is either that or take a 3 day train ride. We were going to go to a national park with elephants and tigers but we just found out that the park is closed because it is "fire season" (I told you it is dry here). So we will figure out something else to do until our mini flight.

Hope you are doing well