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Published: January 4th 2008
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Dosa in Bangalore
Mivilli Tiffin Room, Bangalore. No menu, just go for it and see what arrives! Upon our arrival in Bangalore we were relieved. The airport was easier and less polluted than Mumbai. The climate was cooler and it seemed that this IT town (this is the place where a lot of your customer service agents reside) was more hospitable. We had booked a nice little townhouse with full amenities and felt comfortable. Little did we know that we had begun our descent into India.
We decided to take a walk around the town, tour the botanical gardens and other sights. This mistake gave us an overdose of the street level pollution with consequent irritated breathing apparatus and headaches. Walking through the shit, spit and debris of the city we came to a large river that ran blue/grey with banks of garbage and the stench of raw sewage. The gardens were a good getaway, but once out we were right back in the stew. We called an early night, but felt rather psychologically polluted as well.
At this point in our trip we were at a crossroad; we had not heard from our friend Sidharta (who inspired us to make this trip) since we had left the U.S. and weren't even sure in which town
Botanical Gardens
Mr T and the Big Tree he lived. The Trip to Bangalore was designed to be nearer to him, but we would have to improvise if we didn't hear from him. Again we were relieved, he e-mailed the very morning we needed to make a decision. We decided to meet him in Mettur. This was another initiation. We had to find a bus to this little town, and spent a couple of hours trying to buy tickets by phone through travel agents. Each had a different answer ranging from "call back tomorrow" to "no bus" to simply hanging up on us. We remembered what our friend Mitch said to me when I said "at least the people speak English." He said, "Well, they kind of speak English." Dead on Mitch. We also remembered Robyn's advice to have a sense of humor about these things.
The next day we headed to the bus stand, stood in various lines, were told that our bus was two Kilometers away . . .no 15, no just the other side of the terminal and so on. We found a bus in the approximate direction, insisted upon riding it despite the drivers objection and settled in for a kidney tumble of
Congestion
Two hours by bus to the edge of Bangalore . . .can you hold your breath that long? about seven hours before arriving in Mettur. There were aparently two hotels in town, Sid had suggested Krishna lodge. We bought the "deluxe" room which we found came with blackened walls, cockroaches, and a bathroom in which skin contact was contraindicated.
A walk out into the dingy town gave us a sulky feeling that this would not be a place where we could spend any time, let alone a week or two of dental work.
Somehow as if we had been purified by grunge, we awoke the next morning to the shining face of Sidharta. The dingy little town was surrounded by lovely chocolate boulder hills and the air was fine. We took a walk at "Dam Park" the local attraction, found out there was a brand new hotel opening there in two days, booked a room and headed to a hill station, with Sid, called Yercaud . We had a lovely couple of days in this retreat town at five thousand feet, even riding in the famed "duck-type boat." We headed back to Mettur as the first guests at the new Hotel Aishwariya. I could write at equal length of our strange experience there, but suffice to say,
Pilgrims
Our adoring followers. that it was sufficient.
We stayed another nine days in Mettur during which I had a lot of Dentistry done by the kind and noble Dr. John and his lovely wife Dr. Rena who are both specialists and professors at the dental college. We had a three days of hard rain, some days of mouth discomfort and pain, and a 48 hour flu for Mr. T. Overall, a lot of time spent in the little pink hotel done up in prison cell chic. We became more daring with the food, enjoyed multiple seven-cent chai each day and got the feel for living in a small town in India. I should add that as the extremely rare white folks in this town we were somewhere between minor celebrities and dinosaurs walking, waving, smiling and endlessly answering the questions "where from?" and "native land?"
Sidharta, consistent with his fickle Sadhu nature disappeared just after our trip to Yercaud and we haven't heard from him since. We are disappointed that we won't meet his guru or visit the ashram where he lives. Still out there Sid? We finished up in Mettur on Christmas day leaving with a
strange sense of emancipation tinged with a melancholic nostalgia for the little town that we had melted into and will probably never see again. We're now feeling fully immersed in India with it's contrasts of sights, sounds, smells and the softness and smiles that seem to hold it all together.
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Grace
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Chai Tea!!
You guys are so lucky getting to drink 7 cent Chai tea- I would be drinking it all day:) Mettur sounds wonderful- so happy you were able to meet up with your friend too- Much Love, Grace