Summary day 06

Thursday 23 January

Wellington – Marari Beach

We were at Ooty station to buy our toy train tickets at 07:30 – the station building is lovely – but covered in scaffolding as it’s being restored.

The ticket office opened at 0800 … already there was a long queue of people waiting.

I feared that we might not get a ticket. So while Mathew and Vaishakh queued, I explored the station – they have an old Swiss Railways steam locomotive on display – and it’s possible to walk across the railway lines to get close to it.

The Nilgiri Mountain Railway was opened in 1908 – it took almost 60 years to complete. It’s 46km in length and since we’re so high up, it includes some of the steepest track in Asia – a maximum gradient of 8.33%. The railway is narrow gauge, with a rack and pinion system on the steepest sections between Mettupalayam and Coonoor; it still uses steam locomotives. In its early days, the railway used locomotives built by the Avonside Engine Company that’s based in St Philip’s in our home city of Bristol! In 1994 the railway was given UNESCO world heritage status. The scenic mountain views from the train are spectacular – and there’s a possibility of seeing lots of wildlife, including elephants, monkeys, bisons and leopards.

When I returned to the ticket hall, the queue wasn’t much shorter – it can takes ages to buy a railway ticket! Not long after, and as I’d feared, it was announced that the train was sold out. Vaishakh said that the maximum number of tickets that anyone could buy was four and that lots of people were buying four tickets. It was also obvious that coach loads of tourists were arriving having bought packages that included transport, accommodation and a ride on the toy train. No wonder it sold out!

I had considered telling Vaishakh that he could just leave us at the railway station and head off to meet us at the other end in Mettupalayam – he wouldn’t have agreed to that, I know, and thankfully I hadn’t suggested it – or we’d have had to ask him to come back to Ooty to collect us! Without the train, we were all going by car to Marari Beach – near Kochi, on the west coast in Kerala. A journey of nine hours! Vaishakh seems to take these sorts of drives in his stride – but it horrifies me!

All is not lost on the Toy Train front – we may be able to reserve seats in the opposite direction – from Mettupalayam to Ooty when we return to Mysuru in four days time.

The drive brought us down from the mountains – lots of tight hairpin bends, dense mist, monkeys and waterfalls. In fact, lots of what we would have seen if we’d been on the train! As usual Vaishakh drove with enormous skill.

We passed through the Coimbatore – a huge textile centre, known as the ‘Manchester of South India’! Palakkad, which has an enormous 18th century fort. Thrissur, which has a very large number of temples and other religious buildings – it’s thought that Christianity, Islam and Judaism came into India through Thrissur. The Catholic basilica in Thrissur is an enormous bright white edifice and it’s the largest Christian church in India.

We stopped for breakfast in a busy ‘family restaurant’ – really nice and being with Vaishakh meant that we didn’t need to struggle to order vegan food – It’ll be a nightmare when we part company with him next week!

On to Kochi, which is the most populated area in Kerala – a beautiful city bordering the coast and an ancient and historically an important centre of spice trading with the Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Chinese. From the early 1500s Kochi was colonised by the Portuguese who built a fort here. Dutch colonists took over (!) in the 1660s and the British arrived after the French revolutionary wars/British victory over Napoleon that enabled Britain to return land that the French had taken from the Dutch to the Netherlands in return for Dutch handing over land that the British wanted – including South Africa and here in Kerala.

Vaishakh told us that Kochi is the only city in India to have a water metro – electric boats connecting Kochi’s 10 islands with the metro system – it looks great!

Also, Cochin International Airport is the first in the world to operate entirely on solar power. We also saw the Chinese fishing nets along the waterfront that are a symbol of the city.

I noticed on our journey that there seemed to be far fewer stray dogs in the road – when I commented on this, Vaishakh said that the local authorities rescued them and had shelters/re-homed them. I hope that’s the case – I was reading about some animal welfare charities in India … one boasted about how many stray dogs they had sterilised (a good thing to do) but then said that they returned them back to the streets (not a good thing to do!). I sense that there is a very troubling indifference among many people here to animal and human suffering – it’s unexpected and bothers me … but I don’t live here and I’m very aware that what tourists glimpse from their air conditioned cars and hotels does’t really give us the ability to come to meaningful conclusions.

We arrived in Marari Beach around 5:30 (having left Ooty at about 8:30. Our ‘hotel’ is really a gated resort – we have a little bungalow to ourselves with an adjoining bathroom open to the sky. It’s lovely and warm here in the south. It’s also very White here in Marari Beach Resort, which we didn’t expect. It’s luxurious, artificial and there’s some discomfort about feeling the echoes of the colonial past.

We walked through the ‘compound’ in the dusk – a beautiful sky and nice to see the stars – then on to the beach. The beach was almost deserted and there was the Arabian Sea – it was breathtaking … in less than a week we’ve travelled from the Bay of Bengal to Arabian Sea – that’s 700km/450 miles.