A Turn in the South (II)

Richard W. Frank

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the pushbutton finger." -Frank Lloyd Wright

Eventually as I cruised around S. India I found myself marking time in one of the deeper ruts of the tourist trail. Is this it? Almost seems too easy. My search for the bizarre and the different was almost too fruitful. I couldn't begin to give an account (the Hotmail censors would not approve). Suffice to say my Simpson's Apu impression is improving by the day (please do not be touching the Slushie machine), and I have found that my stomach and my ass are impervious to all that India has thrown at me so far (heehee).

"There are only two kinds of people in this world: the doa and the loosa. Which one are you, my friend?" -Tom Woo

Gradually I found myself sweating under a geriatric dormitory fan swatting mosquitoes and longing for the hills-to the challenges and rewards of answering Muir's call to "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings." To grunt from one pass the next and sip a cup of tea with a sense of accomplishment after a day's travail. To get blisters and be proud of 'm. I love the south, but a part of me can't wait to get back to the Himalayas and the Karakoram and get good and properly lost in the hills for awhile.

"Freedom starts in the mind not by cutting rope."

-painted on a wall in front of the Godly Museum, Mysore

After reaching Kanyakumari at the confluence of the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean, I fled up to the cool green hills of Kodaikanal.

I sat in all my warm clothes, sipped fresh coffee, munched a warm cinnamon roll and looked down on the plains 2000m below in the only hill station started by Yanks. Them missionary fellers did good! Spent a quick eight days reveling in the fresh air and kept my legs ready for the Himalaya (with a refreshing lack of turds). A gaggle of poverty-stricken westerners gathered at the youth hostel perched on a pass overlooking the steamy plains. The hours stretched out before us like the endless summer days of youth filled with traveler's tales ("It really happened I swear!"), caffeine, sun worship, reading, sloth, and energetic lethargy. Darn, it's good to be the king.

But even Adam got booted out of the garden, and I find myself in Chennai looking forward to tomorrow's Howrah-Coromandel Express to whisk me up the east coast to Calcutta and Bangladesh. Two destinations not really on the top of most people's lists of places to visit which makes me look forward to them the more. Give me despair, give me overcrowding, just get me away from the banana pancake and toast-butter-jam circuit. To mercifully end my disjointed ramblings I leave you with the words of another Yanqi curmudgeon, Mark Twain: "So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round." Amen.

To Calcutta

Group chilling in Kodaikanal