Every city bred person (well most) have this fascination for country life, running streams, vegetation, mountains, farms, clean air, you get the point. I had my visions rolling hills, coffee plantations, snaking pepper wines, great big trees and lots of greenery. So when the opportunity presented itself in form of a overnight trip to mudigere to a friend’s plantation deep south in Karnataka, I and another friend jumped at it.
We set off on a gorgeous Saturday after a hearty SLV breakfast, armed with a tooth brush and an excellent bottle of well Scottish Scotch! We rolled, we talked, and we rolled up and down the rolling Mangalore highway in the friend’s Scorpio. I guess all the rolling was the suspension of the SUV rather than real rolling, you get the point. Being with a nature loving friend has its advantages as we stopped on the way to pay homage to a unique tree that had been the nesting grounds of vultures being felled for widening the highway, who would have thought? We stopped for a chai and then for oota (that’s food in Kannada) before we got off the highway to head off into snaking small roads.
The ride was nothing short of test of all four the driver, the driven, driven in and driven upon; even with my height advantage, I was just shy of touching the roof quite a few times. Well one thing is for certain that my city car would not have survived this trip. So finally we reached, the outskirts of the village and stopped for ‘shopping’, I thought it was a bit odd since we already had the toothbrush but I soon realized we were buying food by the truckloads of biscuits, loaves of bread, buns, etc. I was too much in a happy state to question or think.
We reached the farm, a dirt track led to a gate, we passed though to arrive at this brightly painted farm house and as we opened the car door my friend was greeted by a bunch of paws and lot of whining, I stayed put in the car till the excitement died down a bit and then got out to see three diverse ones, one named camel (the brownish one) in Kannada, the other a bitch named rani (black) and third another bitch (just 3 months old) Mudhol hound called lightening (white) in Kannada, this motley crowd was totally enthralled by their master arriving all of a sudden. Soon the packets of biscuits started disappearing; the clean air of the farm seems to have been invigorating as the dogs just wouldn’t stop eating!
After taking stock of various things in and around the farm we sat down outside the house just resting and chatting, next thing to happen was lot of mooing and jingling bells and out came a couple of cows and calves, then the whole loaves of bread disappeared (that’s what they were for!). Did I tell you that there a 10 hens clucking around in arbitrary desperation? After all the animal husbandry our host got down to the serious art of cooking a dinner, he did a damn good job with it too. After a few drinks and the dinner we moved to more usual useless discussions around life, money and women (in that order) and as we are all aware they tend to go downhill pretty quickly. It’s odd that for something that actually triggers such pensive topics it hardly helps keep the cognition required in control. For example I had delusions that I could train the dogs to sit by offering them incentives of biscuits, for a while it did seem to work, but I am just thinking that the dogs figured out that if they touched their butts to the ground I would offer them a biscuit … hmmm stupid humans!
So we had a midnight stroll and finally crashed, got up to a splitting hangover of epic proportions, we took a stroll through the farm and around the paddy field hoping that at each step our foot came back with our footwear and nothing but the footwear! Host was gracious enough to make great upma for breakfast and after shutting down things we made a move back to Bangalore.
As we headed out the entire animal farm seemed to be saddened and was making all kinds of noises hopefully they were missing their master and not suffering from upset stomachs (with all the biscuits and bread). As we started driving back with a heavy heart and heavier head we wondered if all the bugs, clean air, fresh food, animal friends and jack fruit trees would make us move out of our cities and move back to the farms … de-evolve? … No way!
We set off on a gorgeous Saturday after a hearty SLV breakfast, armed with a tooth brush and an excellent bottle of well Scottish Scotch! We rolled, we talked, and we rolled up and down the rolling Mangalore highway in the friend’s Scorpio. I guess all the rolling was the suspension of the SUV rather than real rolling, you get the point. Being with a nature loving friend has its advantages as we stopped on the way to pay homage to a unique tree that had been the nesting grounds of vultures being felled for widening the highway, who would have thought? We stopped for a chai and then for oota (that’s food in Kannada) before we got off the highway to head off into snaking small roads.
The ride was nothing short of test of all four the driver, the driven, driven in and driven upon; even with my height advantage, I was just shy of touching the roof quite a few times. Well one thing is for certain that my city car would not have survived this trip. So finally we reached, the outskirts of the village and stopped for ‘shopping’, I thought it was a bit odd since we already had the toothbrush but I soon realized we were buying food by the truckloads of biscuits, loaves of bread, buns, etc. I was too much in a happy state to question or think.
We reached the farm, a dirt track led to a gate, we passed though to arrive at this brightly painted farm house and as we opened the car door my friend was greeted by a bunch of paws and lot of whining, I stayed put in the car till the excitement died down a bit and then got out to see three diverse ones, one named camel (the brownish one) in Kannada, the other a bitch named rani (black) and third another bitch (just 3 months old) Mudhol hound called lightening (white) in Kannada, this motley crowd was totally enthralled by their master arriving all of a sudden. Soon the packets of biscuits started disappearing; the clean air of the farm seems to have been invigorating as the dogs just wouldn’t stop eating!
After taking stock of various things in and around the farm we sat down outside the house just resting and chatting, next thing to happen was lot of mooing and jingling bells and out came a couple of cows and calves, then the whole loaves of bread disappeared (that’s what they were for!). Did I tell you that there a 10 hens clucking around in arbitrary desperation? After all the animal husbandry our host got down to the serious art of cooking a dinner, he did a damn good job with it too. After a few drinks and the dinner we moved to more usual useless discussions around life, money and women (in that order) and as we are all aware they tend to go downhill pretty quickly. It’s odd that for something that actually triggers such pensive topics it hardly helps keep the cognition required in control. For example I had delusions that I could train the dogs to sit by offering them incentives of biscuits, for a while it did seem to work, but I am just thinking that the dogs figured out that if they touched their butts to the ground I would offer them a biscuit … hmmm stupid humans!
So we had a midnight stroll and finally crashed, got up to a splitting hangover of epic proportions, we took a stroll through the farm and around the paddy field hoping that at each step our foot came back with our footwear and nothing but the footwear! Host was gracious enough to make great upma for breakfast and after shutting down things we made a move back to Bangalore.
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