A Great Big South Indian Adventure 7

What? Pronounced in a slack teenage style, like 'whaaaa', my catchphrase on The Adventure, borrowed from number one equal son Hamish.

Maybe the Bullet Boys wanted to make a statement about my morning ebullience when my bike started easily. Maybe they wanted to leave me behind. Or just have a laugh, but it had enough of an effect on Will that we had to delay setting off while he attended to urgent business. Cue standard lavatorial humour.

From Coimbatore we battled out of the city on the road to Kadaikanal. There was more open traffic and the bike was working well, so we had a few spells of leapfrog, letting people through to drop back, followed by a rush up to the front again. The open roads meant we were fairly close together as a group.

The morning stop was just after the turn-off for Kodaikanal. We had excellent chai and kept going back for more grub, which was delicious. Most of us had learned to concentrate on the food presented to us in torn up newspaper at the roadside and not do a Health & Safety inspection of the premises. Will not only committed that sin but took a video of the cooking area. You just know that the nighttime cleaning staff were rodents and scavenging insects.

But the cooking utensils were well maintained and the fire killed most remaining germs. Besides whatever residues were incorporated into the recipe certainly enhanced the flavour.
Sometimes the most surprising parts of a trip are the parts that are not there, Sherlock's dog that didn't bark.
We were all filled with the new sights, sounds, smells and tastes. So we had not noticed that none of us were sick with dysentery or Delhi belly, which in hindsight is a very big surprise. Perhaps the pro-biotics the boys had been taking, or the fresh food from our part of Italy, had set us up. Maybe hygiene was just getting better in India. Whichever way it was a very good result.

 We were in a jovial mood and there were a few photos of the fascinating people and articles that had congregated there, including one of the very, very few beggars we encountered and the local version of 'man with a van'.

The ride up to Kodaicanal was simply magnificent. Sweeping uphill, hairpins with wider roads than normal and few potholes. We all had a stunning time and the Bullet Boys stopped some of the way up to take photos and drain the adrenaline. I had started dragging the pegs and having done it once managed a couple of dozen times before we stopped.

We took a long break, admiring the view, grabbing a smoke, or two and letting the bike engines cool along with our own overheated moods. Having stopped for about 20 minutes we carried on up the hill to find the main group had stopped for photos, which is where this comes from:

... and when I get the hang of it maybe Chris' Jurassic Park video will give a better feeling of the place. Big and open and prehistoric.
Michael was in fine form and led the Bullet Boys up the hill. I thought he was riding like a mad man and taking risks, but he obviously had a much better view round the corners than I did and there were no clise shaves so it was probably just good bike riding!
At to the top and found Fritha and Sarah had stopped for a 'budgie' so we guessed it was a good refuelling stop. It wasn't.
It was a great refuelling stop. The budgies were delicious, so we stayed and ate and chatted more about the great ride up. Steve arrived, as did Lovely in the jeep and the baggage train, which was a van with Dharmendar, our mechanic, extra spare parts and all our baggage.

We invited the boys for lunch, stuffed ourselves with food and Will generously offered to settle the bill. Lunch for 9 people eating as much food as they sensibly could, with lots of chai and Will had to cough up 370 rupees or €5. He left a tip!
We were well behind the others, but we didn't really care. It was a Bullet Boy bonding day. 
We eventually met up with the group just ahead of a hill station of yore, Kodaikanal. It was misty and threatening rain so I didn't notice anything about the town except that the approach to the hotel was convoluted and way, way up the hill. Hotel Le Poshe. I mean seriously. It really was called Le Poshe and was newly fitted out in a very modern style. The staff were really friendly and looked a lot more Asian than Indian. But nothing quite worked.

In the bathrooms the short taps didn't reach far enough over the large rectangular, highly modern sinks, so washing your hands meant soaking the top behind the sink. The light switches were halfway into the room, making returning to the room in the dark interesting. The hotel guide mentioned table tennis and Chris wanted revenge, so we went to reception and 20 minutes later we had the bats, a ball and one of the junior staff, dispatched with us to find the table. We negotiated the labyrinth of the conference suite few floors below, using our phones as torches to find well hidden light switches. After an extensive search we found the table well disguised among dozens of conference chairs, deep in a storeroom. We gave up.

Alex found us and swept us up for a quick whisky in his room, where we found a smoke filled cabal of jollity. A few fingers later we were listening to the tobacco tones and violent wit of Doug Stanhope (PG 30).

Somewhere on the edge of sobriety we made it out for a buffet supper, where we met Will and Michael who were extolling the magnificence of their massages in a glowing, languid, trance-like state. The morrow was a rest day, so supper was followed by everyone going out into the cold night air to smoke, drink whisky and talk rubbish.
Since the pollution was setting off my recurring cough I decided to ostentatiously enjoy a large Cuban with slugs from Will's Bottle of Jack. Somehow I found my bed in the dark without waking Steve.

It was an early start the next morning, the gap in the window allowed us to enjoy the full force of the cool night air followed by the pre-dawn muezzin, whose insistent call for prayer I could not respectfully answer in a way he would expect from the faithful. But there was an answer, probably invoking one saviour, or another. A too-brief silence was followed by some version of Radio Islam which, although probably pleasant in the original, was heavily overdubbed by a nameless distortion technician.

Being a rest day there was no rush for breakfast and the marsala omelettes partially made up for the mullah's intonations.

The girls were off for a shopping walk and the boys assembled for a ride out to not see a lake. Alex kindly gave up his rest day to suit our biking urge. My biking urge was tempered by the occassional missed gears but not so bad, just enough to put me on edge.

The road to the lake we wanted to see was blocked by some military looking people so we tried another route and came across a market. As we arrived there was a momentary view of a craggy karst, like the limestone lumps of Phi Phi Island. Spectacular, it quickly hid its modesty in the drifting mist. 
That was obviously why the market was there. Alex explained that India is developing so rapidly and the new middle class were starting to tour around the country, so features like this became tourist attractions. And in the free-for-all of Indian business life that meant lines of stalls selling, as Ian put it, tat.
So we loaded up on that, with a brief pause for chai before launching into the absolute necessities of sunglasses for Will and I at 50 rupees each. Tony went on a tat rampage arriving soon after with a 300 rupee sweatshirt with a real(ish) Puma logo and a 200 rupee Che Guevara t-shirt, That really set the competitive juices flowing so Michael got a couple of Guevaras and Will grabbed some powder that smells like Real Sandalwood! 
We resisted the air rifles and jewelry, but Chris bagged a wooden model of an Enfield Bullet. Some of these probably made it all the way home.

Duty done we wandered around a bit on the bikes, coming across a golf course, which I did not have the time or energy to play.
Further up the hill we found the road we rode in on, so doubled back until Alex found Fairy Falls. We stopped and took lots of photos, there seemed little else to do, but the chance for taking the mickey did not pass by. Since my bike was not behaving and we got back early enough I opted out of pizza and instead got the great Balinese massage recommended by Will and Michael. Unused to pampering I was tolerated by a very good masseur from Mizoram near Myanmar, beyond the Chicken Neck, in the Lost World. 
Hence the Asian look we had seen in Masinaguni and in the staff yesterday. Lots of oil and deep tissue manipulation later I was sent to a steam room with zero visibility, lethally slippery, with oil and water on the floor and a convenient stone bench for cracking the head against when falling. Hoping that my low blood pressure would not recur and send me to a head banging faint I settled in for a lengthy steam. It was not fun and about 20 minutes later, having lost at least 2 litres in poison filled sweat and suffering bad thoughts of being locked in I gave up, only to find the masseur waiting patiently outside with the fourth fresh towel of the event.

Surrounded by a comforting glow I drifted back to the room and steadily lost all peaceful thoughts while trying to update the blog. The inability to scroll in a text box on the iPad did not drag up a solution on Google. After a marathon struggle I was trying to reformat the text when up popped an App that solved all sorts of blogging issues. Obviously most modern challenges have been solved already and are now available as an App! 
Note to self, if its an iProb search for an App.

So two new blogs got published and a draft set up for future editing. They were all missing photos and probably still are.

Hanging around like teenagers all afternoon, we turned up early for supper and got given a set menu, which was the first we had seen all trip.

To recover from the shock I wandered off to snag a whisky from Alex where, over a bunch of laughs, we got set up for supper with snifters. Pre-gaming they call it in US universities.

Chris announced he had agreed with his roommate Tony to turn over a new leaf. No more swearing or bad manners, which was added to their early list of minimal bodily functions in the room and early warnings for unsocial behaviour. this they had agreed included snoring or rolling in drunk and waking the other one up. It was all very disconcerting.

So after supper I wandered out to share a smoke and a chat with Michael, As we were starting on the 'total lack of goals' section in his analysis of my vague life, Chris trumpets his arrival and issues a lengthy stream of single syllable swear words. Safety valve released he wandered off to his shared room in peace and harmony.

It was an early night, helped along by a sleeping pill that set me up to be on fire in the morning....