Weekends Away - Ooty and the Jungle Retreat

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We have weekends off from the hospital (or rather, the hospital has weekends off from us), so we've been taking the opportunity to explore the surrounding area. The three of us from Team Gudalur are joined for these little excursions by Laura, ANOTHER Kings medic on her elective in Calicut (the city I flew in to, if you have been paying attention).

The first weekend we went to Ooty, a former British hill station. This was fairly unremarkable (look how totally blasé, and I've only been here six weeks...) but it did allow us to shamefully stuff our faces with western food. Real pizza! And something bizarre but wondrous called a 'sizzling' chocolate brownie which came served on a hot plate with rapidly melting icecream and chocolate sauce (Sidewalk Cafe). We went on the adorable funny looking little 'heritage' train from Ooty to Connor for the grand sum of three rupees (about 5p), then hired a taxi to take us around the local sights, which consisted of various different viewpoints from which you could observe the tea plantations. All very pretty. We also purchased some essentials we can't get in Gudalur... faintly embarrassing Indian clothes (how come they look so good on Indian girls and so silly on us?) plus two tubs of nutella, to see us through the week. Yes, Nutella... no amount of time in India will ever eliminate my desire for chocolate, though I am developing more of a tolerances for insanely sweet Indian desserts (I am not exaggerating, the first time you try them you think something has gone horribly wrong with the recipe but no... they are supposed to taste like that).

The second weekend we went to stay at a place called the Jungle Retreat which was (you might have guessed) in the jungle near the national park tiger reserve. I was super excited about this because despite a depressingly accurate knowledge of the odds I was convinced I was totally going to see a tiger. I did not see a tiger. But it was still a fun weekend.

The whole thing was really expensive and decadent by India standards, but well worth it. Our room was gorgeous and easily accommodated the four of us in a double, though I was devastated that we weren't allowed to stay in the tree house. Yeah that's right, tree house. Apparently, it was too windy. Gutted. There were a lot of rules. Don't wander off the path. What to do if you see a snake. Don't walk anywhere at night without a guard. Don't go near the pool after dark (for that is when the leopards come). Very exciting.

The pool was my favourite bit... it was fresh water so it wouldn't be bad for the animals, surrounded by plants and trees with a picture perfect backdrop of the misty hills. Gorgeous, loved it. Birds swoop down around you to drink the water while you're swimming. All meals were a buffet of Western and Indian food. Including meat. So I ate meat again. Only for the second time in six weeks, but I did eat it, a bit. Maybe a lot. Like, three different types of animal in one meal. I am quite happy to experiment with being veggy so long as no one waves DELICIOUS FREE MEAT in front of my face, ok? Then I crack.

You're not allowed into the actual reserve, so the wildlife watching safari consisted of just driving up and down the main road very slowly, at twilight. You could easily do this yourself, if you had a car. We did actually see a lot of animals, but we had already seen plenty just driving to outreach clinics in the mobile hospital van, which we pretty much treat as our own private sight seeing vehicle.

"Stop the ambulance! There's a baby elephant!"

We did spot wild bore, buffalo, peacocks, monkeys, wild elephants and at least 80-odd deer limbo-ing delicately under the electric fence around our camp. We saw the reflective eyes of jungle cats blinking down at us from the trees after dark. There was also (allegedly) a leopard, but unfortunately the only person who could see it was our driver. Communication issues hampered our efforts to pin down it's exact location.



By tree!
Which tree?
Tree on right!
Fucks sake!

It was dark. There were a lot of trees.

So, we saw the place a leopard had recently been, anyway.

We also went to the 'elephant village', which is actually one of the tribal villages which falls under the jurisdiction of our hospital. Some of the tribes traditionally made a living training elephants to clear dense jungle, move heavy loads, work as sacred 'temple elephants' or even lead wild elephants away from villages when they stray too close. These days they mostly train the animals to work in tourism. We turned up at elephant feeding time along with the (almost exclusively Indian) crowds, paid our money and stood behind the wooden fence to watch the elephants being washed and fed. This was a bit annoying because we had actually been to visit this village the previous week in the mobile hospital van. When we came as medics we were allowed to wander around freely, bother the elephants, pet the baby ones, have our photos taken with them etc. When we came back as tourists we had to pay to get in and watch.

Oh god, I've just remembered something strange that happened the first time we came to that village. We were standing around outside the van after the clinic has finished, laughing at the monkeys. They are inherently amusing creatures, monkeys, everything they do it hilarious. They are everywhere in India though, including the big cities, and they can be fairly annoying if not outright hazardous, so I was kind of over the excitement of monkeys by this point. A smallish one was climbing up a wooden pole supporting a tangle of electric wires. I was watching it and wondering to myself, "how come they don't get electrocuted?".

Well apparently, they do.

The poor monkey grabbed hold of two different wires, shrieked, jerked, went stiff and couldn't let go. Now I am not proud of this, but I laughed. I don't know why! I don't think monkey death is at all amusing. I suppose it was just a nervous reaction to something that was a bit... shit, I was going to say 'shocking'. You know what I mean. The poor thing was there for what felt like AGES, stiff and immobile aside from it's tail which was twitching unnaturally. The three of us watched, horrified. Eventually I think someone had the sense to switch the power off, causing it to drop like a stone and hit the road. One of the locals called a vet and carried it off into a hut (as it happened we were right by the entrance to the nature reserve so they had a vet on hand), but I'm pretty sure it was one very dead primate. I felt a bit like maybe we should have been more helpful, but I'm not going to resuscitate a fucking monkey.

The Jungle Retreat is set in 35 acres of land, surrounded by an electric elephant proof fence. The theory is that other animals can slip in between the widely spaced wires, but elephants can't. The current is alternating and fairly mild, it's supposed to give them a bit of a shock not actually hurt them. When we were given our talk on Dangerous Things That Can Kill Stupid Tourists at the start of the weekend, we were reassured that elephants can't get into the retreat. Now, we have learned from Dr NK that elephants = bad. We know that they can attack and kill people and are really dangerous if they come to close to a village. We were even treated to a slideshow presentation of various elephant inflicted injuries that have been treated at the hospital. Still though, we can't help but like the elephants. They're just so cool. On the Saturday night, after the other girls had gone to bed, I was sitting reading in the lovely wooden, open sided restaurant. I heard a bit of a commotion, and when I turned around there was a really fucking large elephant with massive tusks standing on the grass pretty close to us. Not too close. But close enough.

Here is roughly how everyone reacted -

English People - Oh my god an elephant! (grabbing cameras)

Indian People - Oh shit an elephant! (diving under table)

The staff assured us that it had been 5 years since they had an 'elephant incident' inside the fence. I was secretly quite pleased. Luckily the elephant was minding it's own business and was slowly chased away by the guards who lit fires and shone torches at him, I think to just irritate him into going elsewhere. They really can be dangerous though, even totally unprovoked. A few weeks after this, on the way to Mysore, Hannah's car was chased by an inexplicably furious charging elephant in the middle of the road.

So anyway. I had been promised that on Sunday I could go climb one of the mountains, but when I asked again the guide vetoed this, muttering darkly that there would be lots of park rangers around since it was Indian Independence Day. So clearly there was something mildly illegal about climbing the mountain. Instead I spent the day in and around the Awesome Jungle Pool, then had a two hour long massage. Not that this was a bad day exactly, but I am starting to feel like I really want to DO something. All my other trips have been full of activities. Diving, surfing, climbing, mountain/motor biking, trekking, paragliding, whatever. Aside from a bit of wandering about in the mountains when I first got here and some sporadic yoga, I haven't done much actual... stuff. Or got any exercise. I am starting to feel twitchy.

As I just mentioned, that weekend everyone was celebrating Indian Independence Day, which we really didn't know how to react to. Celebrating getting rid of us. Obviously I am happy that India threw off the shackles of our oppression etc, but at the same time we can hardly join in the celebration, can we? That's like saying "good riddance, India!". So we just said nothing and cringed our way through the towns on the way home (four white girls in a car with our Indian driver, he was even wearing a UNIFORM for fucks sake) trying to look inconspicuous. Everywhere I go in the world I always feel strongly compelled to apologise. Sorry! Sorry we colonised you / exploited you / did nothing while America bombed you. This guilt also extends to various atrocities committed by Western Europe and America (because lets face it, we're all just white people) and so has haunted me not only through India but South East Asia and South America as well. Our history is just so relentlessly awful. It's amazing how easy it is to forget that, until you leave the country and are confronted by it.

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Photos

Ooty
A rare photo that actually has me in it.

Lady
I feel bad using my zoom on unsuspecting villagers.

Hannah and the animals
[b]Hannah:[/b] "Look an elephant!!" (pointing at a statue of an elephant
[b]Hannah:[/b] "Oh my god look, a tiger!" (pointing at a statue of a tiger)
[b]Stella:[/b] "Look Hannah a panther!" (pointing at a small black cat)

Comments

[Atul]

Nay, you don't have to apologize for colonizing India and doing all those horrible stuff, just apologize for Iraq and Afghanistan and we shall call it even. By the way,i like that photo of tree house and a pool. would have been nice if the house were actually on that tree.

[Pradeep]

Thank
Thanks for comming to gudalur..