The drive here took 5 hours, one of which was was spent going nowhere,driving round and round in the forest, lost, then going back to the place you first thought of. Hmm.no sat nav here baby!
Ooty is in the Nilgiri Hills, it was a Hill station 7000 odd feet above sea level, a spot favoured by the British in early 19th century to escape the heat of the cities. Ooty and it's charismatic Toy Train journey was a dream we all wanted to realise on this trip to India. It was a subject of a documentary in the Uk a couple of years ago and we decided if we ever came back to India we had to do this journey.
We drove up the climbing winding road rising through a forest of giant eucalyptus trees, as tall as the sky and dead straight, the trunks covered with peeling strips of pink and sage coloured bark , it was surreal.
As we neared Ooty, at the top of the hill the landscape looked like Devon. Sweeping green plains bordered with tall pine trees ,a stream in the centre of the plain and long legged horses grazing in the sunshine. Idillic.
Ah ha! ..... but this is India, nothing is ever as it appears to be. We turned a corner and came across a basin of hillsides covered with what at first appeared to be multi coloured cement construction slum shacks: window - front door -window. Little boxes of vividly coloured two room buildings, propped up one on top of each other like pyramids of soup tins in the supermarket. These pyramids are on every hill side , not at all charismatic but choc a block , some of the modern blocks look how I imagine eastern European blocks to be but in miniature. There are areas so crowded that from a distance it could compare to the elite overcrowded hills of Monte Carlo. Trust me, the similarity stops there. The boom in Indian tourism has caused this area to be un controllably exploited by the developers for holiday homes . Sound familiar?
" All the world is a village" , as they say in Italian.
Our first hotel was billed as a trip down memory lane. Re live the British expat experience of the late 19th century. Sadly the project missed. Maybe no one had actually visited the house since that time. It was some how tragic, creepily breathing an atmosphere of bad karma, not helped by feeling cold. We ate the most revolting dinners of four different types of something with jellied brown gloop on top . Half a bottle of red paint stripper served with French fries. Well? They are chips aren't they?
We changed the hotel the next morning.
In our new modern , fairly clean, hotel , our lovely hotel manager gave us lots info about Ooty , it was good to be with someone who spoke an English that we could understand. We have spent a lot of time saying "yes" when we actually haven't a clue what has been said. He told us in conversation that the best things the British did for India was to give them a common language and the railways.
We learnt about the Baduga 's of Ooty. A village tribe with no script. No written language. Their law and order is structured and enforced by elders. They are not accountable to local police and if one them mis behaves they are taken to the elders who decide how they will be punished, their word is law. Franco thought this was just perfect. :-)
The tribe never marry outsiders and as a group they are wealthy. If one of them has to be admitted to hospital , they are visited by their friends who leave money under their pillow to pay for medicines. When someone dies , the whole tribe go to the funeral. Employers of a Baduga understand and time off is automatically granted. There turned out to be two Baduga 's working in management at the hotel. We wondered privately if they
Baduga tribe ran a closed shop for the best jobs. Anyway it was interesting to learn that there is still place for these village tribes in boom time India.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Ooty is in the Nilgiri Hills, it was a Hill station 7000 odd feet above sea level, a spot favoured by the British in early 19th century to escape the heat of the cities. Ooty and it's charismatic Toy Train journey was a dream we all wanted to realise on this trip to India. It was a subject of a documentary in the Uk a couple of years ago and we decided if we ever came back to India we had to do this journey.
We drove up the climbing winding road rising through a forest of giant eucalyptus trees, as tall as the sky and dead straight, the trunks covered with peeling strips of pink and sage coloured bark , it was surreal.
As we neared Ooty, at the top of the hill the landscape looked like Devon. Sweeping green plains bordered with tall pine trees ,a stream in the centre of the plain and long legged horses grazing in the sunshine. Idillic.
Ah ha! ..... but this is India, nothing is ever as it appears to be. We turned a corner and came across a basin of hillsides covered with what at first appeared to be multi coloured cement construction slum shacks: window - front door -window. Little boxes of vividly coloured two room buildings, propped up one on top of each other like pyramids of soup tins in the supermarket. These pyramids are on every hill side , not at all charismatic but choc a block , some of the modern blocks look how I imagine eastern European blocks to be but in miniature. There are areas so crowded that from a distance it could compare to the elite overcrowded hills of Monte Carlo. Trust me, the similarity stops there. The boom in Indian tourism has caused this area to be un controllably exploited by the developers for holiday homes . Sound familiar?
" All the world is a village" , as they say in Italian.
Our first hotel was billed as a trip down memory lane. Re live the British expat experience of the late 19th century. Sadly the project missed. Maybe no one had actually visited the house since that time. It was some how tragic, creepily breathing an atmosphere of bad karma, not helped by feeling cold. We ate the most revolting dinners of four different types of something with jellied brown gloop on top . Half a bottle of red paint stripper served with French fries. Well? They are chips aren't they?
We changed the hotel the next morning.
In our new modern , fairly clean, hotel , our lovely hotel manager gave us lots info about Ooty , it was good to be with someone who spoke an English that we could understand. We have spent a lot of time saying "yes" when we actually haven't a clue what has been said. He told us in conversation that the best things the British did for India was to give them a common language and the railways.
We learnt about the Baduga 's of Ooty. A village tribe with no script. No written language. Their law and order is structured and enforced by elders. They are not accountable to local police and if one them mis behaves they are taken to the elders who decide how they will be punished, their word is law. Franco thought this was just perfect. :-)
The tribe never marry outsiders and as a group they are wealthy. If one of them has to be admitted to hospital , they are visited by their friends who leave money under their pillow to pay for medicines. When someone dies , the whole tribe go to the funeral. Employers of a Baduga understand and time off is automatically granted. There turned out to be two Baduga 's working in management at the hotel. We wondered privately if they
Baduga tribe ran a closed shop for the best jobs. Anyway it was interesting to learn that there is still place for these village tribes in boom time India.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Ooty Nilgiri Hills
No comments:
Post a Comment