Monday, 10 March 2008
Sunday, 9 March 2008
What a difference a day makes 1
I've just had some high octane R&R in my beloved Tollesbury. The following pictures show the top of the daytime tide on Saturday 8th March 2008. The next post will show a tide half a metre higher on the Sunday, with the obligatory seaborne cars.
This is the Sunbeam, Tollesbury's finest vessel and also (IMHO) the finest of the Essex smacks, afloat or otherwise. She has an unusually fine entry, and a beautiful sheer line.
The view of Woodup from the walkway out by Rotten Row, at the top of the tide
It was indescribably cold in the sharp wind, this chap must have had his Ready Brek
The smack yacht Ripple looking a bit sorry for herself. She was built for the Sadd family (of timber merchant fame in Maldon) and skippered by Navvy Mussett for many years, who had not a kind word to say for her. He reckoned she was built to big and shoal draft to go to windward, and she was a pig to sail. He told a story of the imperious Mrs Sadd coming on deck and demanding to know what trade the merchant vessel that was close by in the Swin was engaged in. He replied that it was a banana boat, carrying fruit of London. She disappeared below immediately when the stench of the sewage enveloped the Ripple, on a sea of prophylactics. I've a store of Navvyisms, I'll post when time allows.
Wigborough Hill across Tollesbury Fleet, with Old Hall Marsh, site of Red Hall in Baring Gould's Mehalah, invisible in between.
Memory, hull down in a stiff breeze! The bones of the finest racing barge on the East Coast. Memory had the sweetest lines. She was owned by John Kemp of Maldon, and sailed under the pennant of East Coast Sail Trust. When she was beyond safely putting to sea, in 1968, I believe, she was sold to Fellowship Afloat, and was their first floating clubhouse, before she could hold out the tide no longer, and the new lightship was purchased.
Which brings us to the subject of rebuilding, and this one's nearly ready to go back into the water. Charlotte Ellen, four feet shorter than the Sunbeam, but a fast and well-sailed smack. She has been rebuilt by Cakey Drake in his father's old boatyard that used to feature a splendid thunderbox on stilts beyond the high water mark.
This is the Sunbeam, Tollesbury's finest vessel and also (IMHO) the finest of the Essex smacks, afloat or otherwise. She has an unusually fine entry, and a beautiful sheer line.
The view of Woodup from the walkway out by Rotten Row, at the top of the tide
It was indescribably cold in the sharp wind, this chap must have had his Ready Brek
The smack yacht Ripple looking a bit sorry for herself. She was built for the Sadd family (of timber merchant fame in Maldon) and skippered by Navvy Mussett for many years, who had not a kind word to say for her. He reckoned she was built to big and shoal draft to go to windward, and she was a pig to sail. He told a story of the imperious Mrs Sadd coming on deck and demanding to know what trade the merchant vessel that was close by in the Swin was engaged in. He replied that it was a banana boat, carrying fruit of London. She disappeared below immediately when the stench of the sewage enveloped the Ripple, on a sea of prophylactics. I've a store of Navvyisms, I'll post when time allows.
Wigborough Hill across Tollesbury Fleet, with Old Hall Marsh, site of Red Hall in Baring Gould's Mehalah, invisible in between.
Memory, hull down in a stiff breeze! The bones of the finest racing barge on the East Coast. Memory had the sweetest lines. She was owned by John Kemp of Maldon, and sailed under the pennant of East Coast Sail Trust. When she was beyond safely putting to sea, in 1968, I believe, she was sold to Fellowship Afloat, and was their first floating clubhouse, before she could hold out the tide no longer, and the new lightship was purchased.
Which brings us to the subject of rebuilding, and this one's nearly ready to go back into the water. Charlotte Ellen, four feet shorter than the Sunbeam, but a fast and well-sailed smack. She has been rebuilt by Cakey Drake in his father's old boatyard that used to feature a splendid thunderbox on stilts beyond the high water mark.
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Incredible India 3
3pm was the alloted time to meet Jepu Uthappa at the bottom of the drive of Dalquarren. I have known Jepu for 27 years, 26 as Mr Uthappa. He is Mr Coorg to me.
The story of Mr Uthappa starts with Independence, as that was the time that many of the British coffee planting community retreated with the Viceroy and the estates were sold to Indian successors who have taken the industry forward to the success it is today. And a big success it is too, as there is so much IT money sloshing around Banagalore (Silicon Valley East I heard it referred to recently) that the latest 'must have' is a coffee estate, and prices have risen to £12,000 an acre for a top notch estate.
History as they say is written by the victors, and we haven't really got to the revisionist era yet if there is going to be laundering of the hitherto tarnished image of the Raj, or at least its closing stages dramatised by Attenborough's 'Ghandi', and I don't need to comment further on the rights and wrongs of independence and partition. The point I do want to make is that the handover of the estates in Coorg was by all accounts a gentlemanly affair, with properties passing from the hands of the old ruling class to the new, and those friendships between Indian and British families last to this day in the form of the Coorg Coffee Planters Association. Jepu Uthappa is prominent among those Indian gentlemen.
This wonderful association was formed in 1979 by Maurice Webb, succeeded by Mike Michell, who is one of the most indomitable characters I have ever met. Now well into his eighties, Mike has held the association together through thick and thin, and has organised well over 25 annual reunions since the early 80s.
I will freely admit right here that in 1981, when my mother invited (read required) me to attend this strange reunion of old planter families and a load of Indians in a curry house in Virginia Water, I was less than thrilled. I kicked off at the very idea, and then petulantly demanded that my then girlfriend Louisa should come, and at least we'd get a decent curry.
What an eye-opener that was, meeting Mr Uthappa in his full Coorg regalia, complete with ceremonial dagger that had caused a stir at airport security even back in those carefree days. I was also struck by the close relationship of all these old friends, irrespective of nationality, but still felt remote from the unifying bond they held. Just jumping ahead in this story, the next day we visited Mr Uthappa's house, where he showed us his treasured photo album, and there, carefully named, are Louisa and I in the full flower of our youth, idealistic vegetarians both, thin as laths with fine features and 80's haircuts.
It was perhaps a tad indelicate of Jepu to point out that I must be very successful to have expanded my girth so, but I was happy to confirm that when I last saw Louisa a couple of years ago, she remains as thin, beautiful and vegetarian as she was preserved in those pictures.
Being a mildly rebellious twentysomething, I didn't do another 'Coorg' until the late 90s, and that was really born of necessity for my mother's and others safety. It was her driving, you see. Minnie, as the entire world knew and loved her, was to put it bluntly, a nutter behind the wheel, but endearingly she was completely unaware of it. When advancing years took her idiosyncratic driving style to new extremes, it became expedient to offer one's services as chauffeur, which suited Minnie right down to the ground, as she got to show off her baby boy at the reunions.
Mr Uthappa only flew over on the odd occasion to attend the reunions, and I think it was 2001 that I finally met him again, and this time it was his turn to not look a day older than our first meeting in Virginia Water. All the latter reunions that I did attend were held at Jane Turner's fabulous home on the Hog's Back in Surrey, and over the years I finally put together some of the Coorg jigsaw of family and estate names that I had heard through my youth, Bucknall, Tumiaih, Rye, Somaiah, Humphreys, Tweedie,they sound down the years.
So that is the backdrop to meeting Jepu Uthappa at the gates of Dalquarren on that beautifully warm February afternoon. He must have thought me a real anorak when I insisted in sitting in the front of his car and filming the entire length of the drive, one whole kilometer, as I wanted to have my first glimpse of my mother's childhood home preserved on film (what a saddo!). So he climbed into the back, and his driver took us up the track.
The track gently climbs up the contours of the hill above Chetalli, escorted by well kept hedges both sides, with tall, thinned out trees beyond, falling away on the left side and rising quite steeply to the right. Beneath these trees are the coffee bushes, heavy with deep red coffee berries. The trees were thinned to provide shade, but not block light as a forest canopy does, as shade-grown coffee is a premium grade. Up the trunk of every tree is a carefully managed pepper creeper, as this is the other premium-priced crop the Coorg coffee estate yields. Half way up the track were wrought iron gates, that were padlocked. It felt like we were entering the estate as the first visitors for years, as the gates creaked their resistance to this uncustomary work. Then there was a sign that stated 'bungalow' and also 'office'. That made me wonder, as I perceived there could only be one building.
The track wound on and on, and I wondered how long this anticipation could possibly last, when there was a sweeping bend, then a short incline, and we were through the gateposts of Dalquarren!
It was horrible! But only to someone who hasn't loved the idea of the place for nearly fifty years of unvisiting, who hasn't pored over faded sepia photographs of the end of Victoria's reign searching for familial features in the starchy faces, with the Empire bungalow behind. I will qualify the horror immediately because it appeared one of subsequent owners had plastered a truly ghastly Sixties concrete edifice on the front of my beloved Empire bungalow
This story now has to split into two; the business and the personal. Getting the business out of the way first will give my tax inspectors the rest of the story off, as my entire trip was funded by work as a bona fide business trip, as I was genuinely there to source coffee as a new commodity. Dalquarren is a big estate as they go, 450 acres, and it has infrastructure to match. Jepu retired from Tata Coffee some years ago (yes, the same Tata as the cars, and new owners of Corus/British Steel) but still wields a big stick in the industry locally, so he was our expert as we took instruction on how coffee gets to Starbucks.
The first principle is that all the estates in these parts are on a hill, so gravity is used as the vector in the flow diagram.At the top of the process is a concrete pen with a hole in the bottom of the lower wall, with the floor sloping down to the hole. The deep red coffee berries are hand picked (the terrain doesn't allow for mechanisation, and trials failed as the machine savaged the bushes too severely) and tipped from the pickers' baskets into the pen
When the donkey engine starts up, it pumps water up a high pressure hose which is played on the heap of coffee berries, and carries them down through the hole into the second process
Then the beans flow down a concrete gully into a sump.
The idea here is that the four sides of the sump retain the beans that float, which are then discarded (or made into instant coffee, more like, won't have the muck on the premises)and the good stuff sinks to pass under the retaining walls of the centre section, and thus flows into the machine that takes their coats off.
I have dozens of pictures of the machine, but will describe it with fewer words. A series of wheels with coffee bean-sized indentations in them first of all pulls the jackets off, and then allows the beans to sit tight in the holes whilst the jackets are separated, ending up in a nice big heap outside
This is the David Bellamy shot of the "luvverly slushy slimy compost that will grow more luvverly coffee"
The next bit was a bit of a surprise to me. What colour are coffee beans? Wrong! They are white, or cream to be precise. The second process in the de-hulling machine is pressure washing the beans to remove the muscillate, the clear sticky glue that surrounds the dicotyledon inside the skin. The two beans inside each berry are thus separated and washed, and are then transported by water to the drying process. About 10% of berries contain a single bean, and this single 'pearl berry' is prized as the top grade, because its uniform shape affords more even roasting.
Then the beans go over the waterfall best described by this picture
And are spread out one bean thick over large concrete/tiled areas that are swept scrupulously clean for the purpose. During late afternoon, as we saw, or if rain threatens, the beans are windrowed and covered with plastic sheeting to avoid the ingress of dew.
There were three such terraces at Dalquarren, and the water is collected at the bottom and recycled back up to the holding pit at the top. And this is what puts the gold into Gold Blend:-
And this is a glum looking Man from Del Monte. Being a bloke, I can't multi task, but I can look stupid and concentrate at the same time. Jepu don't 'arf know some stuff.
The coffee takes three or four days to dry out to less than 10% moisture, and is then shovelled into whopping great hundredweight hessian sacks (try telling that to our nanny 'let's make the next maximum weight a bag of sugar' state, no wonder we've got an obesity epidemic, no one's allowed to lift anything anymore) and transported on ten tonne lorries to the curing works. There, the husk is removed from the bean, which is a very thin mica-like covering, and the naked bean is ready for curing. That is the state that coffee beans are shipped in, as roasting needs to be done as soon before consumption as possible.
Full marks if you're still with me, we now turn to the place, and the spirit of place. It is as well to start with the view. Like the Maharajah's Seat, it is breathtaking, but more enclosed by the tall trees surrounding and immediately below. It was almost as calm as meditation, quietly absorbing the vista, and was overcome with a feeling of wanting to end my days there.
Our family home in Essex was called Great Downs, and I was finally looking at its blueprint, a ramshackle rambling Empire bungalow, desperate now for major works exactly like Great Downs in the latter days, but still ringing with the laughter of the parties my step-grandmother was so fond of hosting. Quite bizarrely for an abandoned house, at least as far as habitation is concerned, there were chairs still set out in the sitting room
The office that George Parsons built on to the bungalow is still used for just that, but the house is unused.
I'll post more photo's as I get them from the girls, but for now I want to close with the spookiest thing that happened. I took myself off away from the rest of them, and found a wall to sit on outside the long room, that afforded the finest view. I was at my most wistful for a few minutes, when Mary joined me and was instantly on my wavelength. What I didn't realise was that Jules captured the moment through the filthy glass of the long room. The fella in the hat is my father.
The story of Mr Uthappa starts with Independence, as that was the time that many of the British coffee planting community retreated with the Viceroy and the estates were sold to Indian successors who have taken the industry forward to the success it is today. And a big success it is too, as there is so much IT money sloshing around Banagalore (Silicon Valley East I heard it referred to recently) that the latest 'must have' is a coffee estate, and prices have risen to £12,000 an acre for a top notch estate.
History as they say is written by the victors, and we haven't really got to the revisionist era yet if there is going to be laundering of the hitherto tarnished image of the Raj, or at least its closing stages dramatised by Attenborough's 'Ghandi', and I don't need to comment further on the rights and wrongs of independence and partition. The point I do want to make is that the handover of the estates in Coorg was by all accounts a gentlemanly affair, with properties passing from the hands of the old ruling class to the new, and those friendships between Indian and British families last to this day in the form of the Coorg Coffee Planters Association. Jepu Uthappa is prominent among those Indian gentlemen.
This wonderful association was formed in 1979 by Maurice Webb, succeeded by Mike Michell, who is one of the most indomitable characters I have ever met. Now well into his eighties, Mike has held the association together through thick and thin, and has organised well over 25 annual reunions since the early 80s.
I will freely admit right here that in 1981, when my mother invited (read required) me to attend this strange reunion of old planter families and a load of Indians in a curry house in Virginia Water, I was less than thrilled. I kicked off at the very idea, and then petulantly demanded that my then girlfriend Louisa should come, and at least we'd get a decent curry.
What an eye-opener that was, meeting Mr Uthappa in his full Coorg regalia, complete with ceremonial dagger that had caused a stir at airport security even back in those carefree days. I was also struck by the close relationship of all these old friends, irrespective of nationality, but still felt remote from the unifying bond they held. Just jumping ahead in this story, the next day we visited Mr Uthappa's house, where he showed us his treasured photo album, and there, carefully named, are Louisa and I in the full flower of our youth, idealistic vegetarians both, thin as laths with fine features and 80's haircuts.
It was perhaps a tad indelicate of Jepu to point out that I must be very successful to have expanded my girth so, but I was happy to confirm that when I last saw Louisa a couple of years ago, she remains as thin, beautiful and vegetarian as she was preserved in those pictures.
Being a mildly rebellious twentysomething, I didn't do another 'Coorg' until the late 90s, and that was really born of necessity for my mother's and others safety. It was her driving, you see. Minnie, as the entire world knew and loved her, was to put it bluntly, a nutter behind the wheel, but endearingly she was completely unaware of it. When advancing years took her idiosyncratic driving style to new extremes, it became expedient to offer one's services as chauffeur, which suited Minnie right down to the ground, as she got to show off her baby boy at the reunions.
Mr Uthappa only flew over on the odd occasion to attend the reunions, and I think it was 2001 that I finally met him again, and this time it was his turn to not look a day older than our first meeting in Virginia Water. All the latter reunions that I did attend were held at Jane Turner's fabulous home on the Hog's Back in Surrey, and over the years I finally put together some of the Coorg jigsaw of family and estate names that I had heard through my youth, Bucknall, Tumiaih, Rye, Somaiah, Humphreys, Tweedie,they sound down the years.
So that is the backdrop to meeting Jepu Uthappa at the gates of Dalquarren on that beautifully warm February afternoon. He must have thought me a real anorak when I insisted in sitting in the front of his car and filming the entire length of the drive, one whole kilometer, as I wanted to have my first glimpse of my mother's childhood home preserved on film (what a saddo!). So he climbed into the back, and his driver took us up the track.
The track gently climbs up the contours of the hill above Chetalli, escorted by well kept hedges both sides, with tall, thinned out trees beyond, falling away on the left side and rising quite steeply to the right. Beneath these trees are the coffee bushes, heavy with deep red coffee berries. The trees were thinned to provide shade, but not block light as a forest canopy does, as shade-grown coffee is a premium grade. Up the trunk of every tree is a carefully managed pepper creeper, as this is the other premium-priced crop the Coorg coffee estate yields. Half way up the track were wrought iron gates, that were padlocked. It felt like we were entering the estate as the first visitors for years, as the gates creaked their resistance to this uncustomary work. Then there was a sign that stated 'bungalow' and also 'office'. That made me wonder, as I perceived there could only be one building.
The track wound on and on, and I wondered how long this anticipation could possibly last, when there was a sweeping bend, then a short incline, and we were through the gateposts of Dalquarren!
It was horrible! But only to someone who hasn't loved the idea of the place for nearly fifty years of unvisiting, who hasn't pored over faded sepia photographs of the end of Victoria's reign searching for familial features in the starchy faces, with the Empire bungalow behind. I will qualify the horror immediately because it appeared one of subsequent owners had plastered a truly ghastly Sixties concrete edifice on the front of my beloved Empire bungalow
This story now has to split into two; the business and the personal. Getting the business out of the way first will give my tax inspectors the rest of the story off, as my entire trip was funded by work as a bona fide business trip, as I was genuinely there to source coffee as a new commodity. Dalquarren is a big estate as they go, 450 acres, and it has infrastructure to match. Jepu retired from Tata Coffee some years ago (yes, the same Tata as the cars, and new owners of Corus/British Steel) but still wields a big stick in the industry locally, so he was our expert as we took instruction on how coffee gets to Starbucks.
The first principle is that all the estates in these parts are on a hill, so gravity is used as the vector in the flow diagram.At the top of the process is a concrete pen with a hole in the bottom of the lower wall, with the floor sloping down to the hole. The deep red coffee berries are hand picked (the terrain doesn't allow for mechanisation, and trials failed as the machine savaged the bushes too severely) and tipped from the pickers' baskets into the pen
When the donkey engine starts up, it pumps water up a high pressure hose which is played on the heap of coffee berries, and carries them down through the hole into the second process
Then the beans flow down a concrete gully into a sump.
The idea here is that the four sides of the sump retain the beans that float, which are then discarded (or made into instant coffee, more like, won't have the muck on the premises)and the good stuff sinks to pass under the retaining walls of the centre section, and thus flows into the machine that takes their coats off.
I have dozens of pictures of the machine, but will describe it with fewer words. A series of wheels with coffee bean-sized indentations in them first of all pulls the jackets off, and then allows the beans to sit tight in the holes whilst the jackets are separated, ending up in a nice big heap outside
This is the David Bellamy shot of the "luvverly slushy slimy compost that will grow more luvverly coffee"
The next bit was a bit of a surprise to me. What colour are coffee beans? Wrong! They are white, or cream to be precise. The second process in the de-hulling machine is pressure washing the beans to remove the muscillate, the clear sticky glue that surrounds the dicotyledon inside the skin. The two beans inside each berry are thus separated and washed, and are then transported by water to the drying process. About 10% of berries contain a single bean, and this single 'pearl berry' is prized as the top grade, because its uniform shape affords more even roasting.
Then the beans go over the waterfall best described by this picture
And are spread out one bean thick over large concrete/tiled areas that are swept scrupulously clean for the purpose. During late afternoon, as we saw, or if rain threatens, the beans are windrowed and covered with plastic sheeting to avoid the ingress of dew.
There were three such terraces at Dalquarren, and the water is collected at the bottom and recycled back up to the holding pit at the top. And this is what puts the gold into Gold Blend:-
And this is a glum looking Man from Del Monte. Being a bloke, I can't multi task, but I can look stupid and concentrate at the same time. Jepu don't 'arf know some stuff.
The coffee takes three or four days to dry out to less than 10% moisture, and is then shovelled into whopping great hundredweight hessian sacks (try telling that to our nanny 'let's make the next maximum weight a bag of sugar' state, no wonder we've got an obesity epidemic, no one's allowed to lift anything anymore) and transported on ten tonne lorries to the curing works. There, the husk is removed from the bean, which is a very thin mica-like covering, and the naked bean is ready for curing. That is the state that coffee beans are shipped in, as roasting needs to be done as soon before consumption as possible.
Full marks if you're still with me, we now turn to the place, and the spirit of place. It is as well to start with the view. Like the Maharajah's Seat, it is breathtaking, but more enclosed by the tall trees surrounding and immediately below. It was almost as calm as meditation, quietly absorbing the vista, and was overcome with a feeling of wanting to end my days there.
Our family home in Essex was called Great Downs, and I was finally looking at its blueprint, a ramshackle rambling Empire bungalow, desperate now for major works exactly like Great Downs in the latter days, but still ringing with the laughter of the parties my step-grandmother was so fond of hosting. Quite bizarrely for an abandoned house, at least as far as habitation is concerned, there were chairs still set out in the sitting room
The office that George Parsons built on to the bungalow is still used for just that, but the house is unused.
I'll post more photo's as I get them from the girls, but for now I want to close with the spookiest thing that happened. I took myself off away from the rest of them, and found a wall to sit on outside the long room, that afforded the finest view. I was at my most wistful for a few minutes, when Mary joined me and was instantly on my wavelength. What I didn't realise was that Jules captured the moment through the filthy glass of the long room. The fella in the hat is my father.
Monday, 3 March 2008
Incredible India - Part 2
Our second night in the Lalitha was unremarkable, save fishing a few frogs out of the swimming pool. Day 3 saw an early start, and as Mysore gave way to the foothills of the Nilgiri Hills, India proper (for this country boy, anyway) started.
The roads became a mix of old and new, with evidence of a massive road building programme going on, but not with very joined-up thinking. Several miles of road that reminded me of Ireland before the EU arrived would suddenly give way to a mud track with potholes that could swallow a small car, and buzzing over the mountainous surface like ants passed cars, trucks, motorbikes and cycles, with only placid cows moving serenely and untroubled through the mad scramble. Usually, the good road would be rural, and the unadopted stretches would be through ribbon villages.
We stopped for lunch after crossing the Cauvery River in a village just beyond Kashalnagaur, where we dined with the Somayas. Two notable things happened there. Firstly, I got the heebeejeebees when this critter flew in
It was dismissed as being a 'wasp', but it looked like a genetically modified hornet and scared the bejaysus out of me. The other noteworthy moment was seeing a photograph of me in this house in remote South India. I'll expand later, but both our families had been at the same party on the Hog's Back in Surrey last year.
Chez Somaya. The reason for my brandy glass figure is actually a money belt bulging with 10 rupee notes!
Next stop was our home for the next three nights, and an education in hard beds. It was the charmingly named 'Home Stay' offered by the Bopayas in the coffee estate near to the village of Chethalli, the village where our journey's end lay. But this trip was like pass-the-parcel, as there were many layers to unpeel before we got to the jewel, and despite being only four miles from Dalquarren Estate, the whole point of our pilgrimage, it was to be nearly 24 hours before we would see the wonder of the place.
After a night hiding under a linen cover, listening to countless drive-bys of a mosquito that I was obsessing was malarial, on a litter as hard as a Europallet, I felt quite humbled to find that Vasantha, our driver for the rest of the trip, had slept in the back of the tiny little Tata, and however we remonstrated with him, that was the way it was going to stay for the next five nights. This is probably as good a point as any to touch on the cast system. Our first brush with it was in a posh restaurant in Mysore, where we insisted our first driver dined with us. The staff looked him up and down, and short of shoving him out of the door, ushered him to a table near ours, but made it obvious he was not permitted to dine with us. Vasantha wouldn't even eat at the same times or places, as we learned on the road to Ooty later. Whilst every liberal gene in one's being wants to scream 'stuff your cast system', we were the visitors, and had to adjust to the 'When in Rome' principal.
The first trip of the morning was probably the high point for the girls, as it involved getting up early, and climbing into a river and scrubbing elephants. I scored major points with my Antipodean brother-in-law by keep the moral and literal high ground as official photographer whilst the wimmin rolled up their trousers and did what BIL referred to as 'Coolie work', all in aid of knowing what it is like to scratch an elephant behind the ear. I have a gross of pictures and few tales, apart from Mary upsetting a German lady tourist by loudly referring to elephant turds as 'Bismarks'.
The elephant wash had to be approached by boat, which was my yachting interest for the day.
This was the register, probably half of which turned up for scrubbing
The prewashing ritual
Up periscope
Down to business
And my favourite, looking like the next Spice Girls
Enough! Once decorum had been re-established, it was elephant feeding time, and for some time it seemed the heffalumps were being fed their own Bismarks, but we were assured it wasn't predigested and full of things pachyderms thrive on. These were, after all, working animals shifting timber in the jungle.
From there, Vasantha whisked us to Madikeri, but again we got tantalisingly close to Dalquarren, going past the end of the long drive, and seeing this sign, allegedly original from our grandfather's watch.
The drive from Chetalli to Madikeri is nothing short of paradise. By now I had fallen head over heels with Coorg, or Kodagu as it is now known. Madikeri is the new name for Mercara. Finally, I realised why when I had looked at the large scale maps of India (I must do a cartaholic post soon, I can't be alone in my mania for these wonderful artifacts, surely?) that I couldn't find a single name from the days of White Mischief without realising that neither could I find Bombay or Calcutta.
The Mountain Road (sorry, that's the name of one of my favourite Irish tunes)
Madikeri is absolutely beautiful. Our first stop was at the Maharajah's Seat, which affords quite the most beatiful view we had seen since arrival. It was so mesmerising, I could still be sitting there now, transfixed.
I think it was the feeling that my forebears had stood right there, a grandmother that died twenty years before my birth, an uncle who died a hero in Albania in 1945, a grandfather who died in my dimmest of memories and a mother seeing that vista with a child's eye that moved me so much, more so than anywhere else so far.
We went to the North Coorg Club, where we met by chance an Indian couple from Manchester and enjoyed a chotapeg. This was the hub of the social scene, and we were proudly told that whilst much of the fabric of the club had changed, the floor was original and had definitely reported the passage of my grandfather's brogues.
Perhaps Vasantha isn't David Bailey, but this does show the style of the North Coorg Club
The second poignant moment was visiting what is now the Madikeri museum, but it is in fact the deconsecrated Anglican church, where we virtually had to get local government permission to take this photo of our uncle's war memorial.
Mother always said that everyone loved Alex, who amongst other great character traits was allowed to stay on at Downside for gratis (when times were bad in coffee) as he was 'a good influence on the other boys', so much so that he rose to be Head Boy. I greatly miss having never met Alex.
In the next installment - Dalquarren! Better than my dreams.
The roads became a mix of old and new, with evidence of a massive road building programme going on, but not with very joined-up thinking. Several miles of road that reminded me of Ireland before the EU arrived would suddenly give way to a mud track with potholes that could swallow a small car, and buzzing over the mountainous surface like ants passed cars, trucks, motorbikes and cycles, with only placid cows moving serenely and untroubled through the mad scramble. Usually, the good road would be rural, and the unadopted stretches would be through ribbon villages.
We stopped for lunch after crossing the Cauvery River in a village just beyond Kashalnagaur, where we dined with the Somayas. Two notable things happened there. Firstly, I got the heebeejeebees when this critter flew in
It was dismissed as being a 'wasp', but it looked like a genetically modified hornet and scared the bejaysus out of me. The other noteworthy moment was seeing a photograph of me in this house in remote South India. I'll expand later, but both our families had been at the same party on the Hog's Back in Surrey last year.
Chez Somaya. The reason for my brandy glass figure is actually a money belt bulging with 10 rupee notes!
Next stop was our home for the next three nights, and an education in hard beds. It was the charmingly named 'Home Stay' offered by the Bopayas in the coffee estate near to the village of Chethalli, the village where our journey's end lay. But this trip was like pass-the-parcel, as there were many layers to unpeel before we got to the jewel, and despite being only four miles from Dalquarren Estate, the whole point of our pilgrimage, it was to be nearly 24 hours before we would see the wonder of the place.
After a night hiding under a linen cover, listening to countless drive-bys of a mosquito that I was obsessing was malarial, on a litter as hard as a Europallet, I felt quite humbled to find that Vasantha, our driver for the rest of the trip, had slept in the back of the tiny little Tata, and however we remonstrated with him, that was the way it was going to stay for the next five nights. This is probably as good a point as any to touch on the cast system. Our first brush with it was in a posh restaurant in Mysore, where we insisted our first driver dined with us. The staff looked him up and down, and short of shoving him out of the door, ushered him to a table near ours, but made it obvious he was not permitted to dine with us. Vasantha wouldn't even eat at the same times or places, as we learned on the road to Ooty later. Whilst every liberal gene in one's being wants to scream 'stuff your cast system', we were the visitors, and had to adjust to the 'When in Rome' principal.
The first trip of the morning was probably the high point for the girls, as it involved getting up early, and climbing into a river and scrubbing elephants. I scored major points with my Antipodean brother-in-law by keep the moral and literal high ground as official photographer whilst the wimmin rolled up their trousers and did what BIL referred to as 'Coolie work', all in aid of knowing what it is like to scratch an elephant behind the ear. I have a gross of pictures and few tales, apart from Mary upsetting a German lady tourist by loudly referring to elephant turds as 'Bismarks'.
The elephant wash had to be approached by boat, which was my yachting interest for the day.
This was the register, probably half of which turned up for scrubbing
The prewashing ritual
Up periscope
Down to business
And my favourite, looking like the next Spice Girls
Enough! Once decorum had been re-established, it was elephant feeding time, and for some time it seemed the heffalumps were being fed their own Bismarks, but we were assured it wasn't predigested and full of things pachyderms thrive on. These were, after all, working animals shifting timber in the jungle.
From there, Vasantha whisked us to Madikeri, but again we got tantalisingly close to Dalquarren, going past the end of the long drive, and seeing this sign, allegedly original from our grandfather's watch.
The drive from Chetalli to Madikeri is nothing short of paradise. By now I had fallen head over heels with Coorg, or Kodagu as it is now known. Madikeri is the new name for Mercara. Finally, I realised why when I had looked at the large scale maps of India (I must do a cartaholic post soon, I can't be alone in my mania for these wonderful artifacts, surely?) that I couldn't find a single name from the days of White Mischief without realising that neither could I find Bombay or Calcutta.
The Mountain Road (sorry, that's the name of one of my favourite Irish tunes)
Madikeri is absolutely beautiful. Our first stop was at the Maharajah's Seat, which affords quite the most beatiful view we had seen since arrival. It was so mesmerising, I could still be sitting there now, transfixed.
I think it was the feeling that my forebears had stood right there, a grandmother that died twenty years before my birth, an uncle who died a hero in Albania in 1945, a grandfather who died in my dimmest of memories and a mother seeing that vista with a child's eye that moved me so much, more so than anywhere else so far.
We went to the North Coorg Club, where we met by chance an Indian couple from Manchester and enjoyed a chotapeg. This was the hub of the social scene, and we were proudly told that whilst much of the fabric of the club had changed, the floor was original and had definitely reported the passage of my grandfather's brogues.
Perhaps Vasantha isn't David Bailey, but this does show the style of the North Coorg Club
The second poignant moment was visiting what is now the Madikeri museum, but it is in fact the deconsecrated Anglican church, where we virtually had to get local government permission to take this photo of our uncle's war memorial.
Mother always said that everyone loved Alex, who amongst other great character traits was allowed to stay on at Downside for gratis (when times were bad in coffee) as he was 'a good influence on the other boys', so much so that he rose to be Head Boy. I greatly miss having never met Alex.
In the next installment - Dalquarren! Better than my dreams.
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