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Published: April 16th 2017
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Jet lag has caught up with me big time tonight. I must have been running on excitement up until now, my body distracted from jet lag confused exhaustion into thinking it's fine to go with 2 hours sleep a night! Last night I just could not get to sleep at all. The heat, the noise from the ceiling fan spinning fit to bust and knowing that it's really 8 pm not 1.30am, my mobile phone obviously lying to me! Since normally I'm not asleep until well after 1am my body said 'No, what ARE you doing, just no!'. As I'm room sharing I can't just flick on the lights and read, so spend a very long night tossing turning instead. At least I'm awake in time to go up the tower to bird watch for a bit before breakfast.
We do the journey out of the Mudamulai Wildlife Sanctuary in reverse starting with the bumpy jeep ride. This morning we hit rush hour traffic - a small rabble of goats and some cows displaying the distain and nonchalance that only cows in India seem to be able to pull off with any degree of confidence. Soon we're back in our
fridge (minibus) and are prevented from melting into tourist shaped blobs like wax effigies left out too long in the sun. The little three legged, ginger dog spots us and comes lolloping over, it's tail wagging. We see more wildlife along the road out of the reserve and I'm pleased to spot a hoopoe and a woodpecker as well as peacocks, deer with massive antlers and loads more longur and macaque monkeys. We also see a fluffy tailed grey mongoose. Apparently in the north of India where there are many cobra snakes, families keep a couple of mongoose in the house over night as they catch and eat any cobras that slither uninvited into their homes.
We get out onto the main road again, this time heading for the huge city of Mysore, in the state of Kanataka.
We drive through a few smaller towns on the way, locals looking into the bus when they realise it's full of tourists, smiling and waving at us as we pass by. I see one little boy of about 10 years old dressed similarly to scouts back home, but he's not about to go all going gang gooly gooly watcha on
us as it turns out he's not a scout at all. This is a school's star pupil dressed to impress on a school function day, which I think is the equivalent of prize giving.
As we so enjoyed visiting the tribal village in Wayanad, Muthu has arranged a short stop at another village. This time one of our group hands out a few presents she's brought with her. Tourist companies like ours stopped visitors doing this a while back as children got to know the places this might happen and would run after the buses, sometimes falling and getting hurt. This little stop off was unplanned and Mouthou says it will therefore be ok just this once. The children aren't expecting anything so are delighted and excited when little toys and boxes of crayons are handed out. Some of them are very canny and hide theirs so they can try to get a second one. Our group's pied piper is followed all the way round the village and almost back onto the bus with us.
At a toilet stop on the way we find a coffee place and I have a massive piece of squidgy chocolate cake with
tea made capachino style with frothed up hot milk!
As we hit the outskirts of Mysore it's obvious that the holiday celebrations are hitting big time. Muthu is on the phone a lot trying make sure we are able to fit in all the things on our planned itinerary. It's going to be tight but Muthu is the man for the job 'Expectations high Happy-G'!
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