We (me, Becca and Alok) stayed at Alok's brother's house. His brother's name is Ashok and his wife is Pinky (her pet name, never learned her "good" name). They also have a 18 month old son named Mudit. When we were driving from the nearest big city (Coimbatore) to the property, it was late and dark already. Regardless I had my head out the window the whole way taking in all the smells. The air there is so pure and thick with moisture (it's more or less in a cloud). At one point in the drive we passed by some wild lemongrass (mom, thought of you). The drive itself consisted of scaling a mountain on one side and coming down the other side and included 40 "hairpin turns", which are, as you may guess, basically U-turns. I also looked up and saw the clearest and most populated sky I've ever seen. Becca particularly likes astronomy and was pointing out some constellations that she'd never seen with her naked eye before (and she does a fair amount of star-gazing from her home in Denver). It was a really neat way to start off the whole thing.
Ashok is actually the assistant manager of a Tata Tea Estate, the Valonie estate to be exact. Tata is a huuuggeee company here and probably has hundreds of estates, and Ashok has worked on several of them. They only just moved to this estate four months ago. Tata provides a furnished house for them wherever the end up. In order to get to his house from the main road, we drove at least 5 km through the estate. His house is perched up top of a hill, so when you wake up in the morning you can walk outside and look around you in all directions and see rolling hills and valleys and mountains and tea bushes everywhere.
Valparai is a middle-of-nowhere town in Tamil Nadu, the southeastern state in India. Now Tamil Nadu is a very interesting place and you have to be careful around there. Although India in general highly favors light or pale skin, Tamils are very dark, almost black being from the south. Regardless, they are a very proud people who more or less despise the northerners. To speak Hindi in Tamil Nadu is a big no no. No matter how much business people lose from it, they refuse to serve or sell or drive or whatever for anyone who speaks Hindi to them. You either speak English or Tamil, and even so I'd say only about 10% of the people I interacted with while there (I didn't meet many people there though) spoke English, so boy did Becca and I have fun trying to communicate.
The first day, the family took Alok to Coimbatore for some business, and Ashok arranged for a man to come and show Becca and me around the estate after lunch. So we wake up to a mostly empty house, with the exception of the servant. He speaks absolutely no English. So he would speak Tamil to us, and we'd discuss in English what we thought he was trying to say, respond in English, etc. You can imagine how fun that was haha. The guide showed up after lunch, and no surprise, didn't speak English. He mostly just showed us things and took us through the foresty/jungle area. There we got to see about 4 separate groups of monkeys, one being a highly endangered species (the black ones with the white mane-like patch of fur around the face). We also got to see a flying squirrel, but he didn't fly for us. Then we checked out the tea factory, which ended up being very neat, especially with an English-speaking guide to show us around. I've never seen so much tea before. The family didn't end up getting back until about 10:30, and the servant had to take the bus home at 10:00. However, we waited with him for the bus because in those parts, if you're out after dark, it's not unlikely to be carried off by a panther. In fact, from our house we could see another house where a little girl got taken just 3 years back, less than 50 meters from the place. Needless to say, there's not a big nightlife around there.
The next day we took a short car trip to a nearby dam. It really didn't matter where in that part of the country you went, it was all beautiful. At the dam, though, right as we were getting there a huge mist set in and covered the whole place in a cloud. It was actually really cold the entire time we were in Valparai, but especially in the cloud. From the dam looking down into the water, though, we saw a water snake creeping along the edge of the dam. We hung out for a while in a park and Alok showed us a plant called touch-me-nots. They're like fern-ish leaves that when you touch them or blow on them or knock them against other plants, they fold up their leaf-fingers as if to hide. I took a video of it and it was soooo much fun to go around touching all of them. The rest of the day Becca and I just played with Mudit. He is a darling kid. Though I didn't get any pictures of anyone, Ashok did and am hoping that he'll send them our way.
Yesterday was pretty much open to interpretation. In the morning Becca, Alok and I took a walk through the forest/jungle again, but a different path this time. We came across a cute little brook with a bridge over it. I honestly just felt like I was in some kind of movie or paradise the whole time, sorry I'm not putting much more into the description but nothing can really do it justice. On our way back we saw a barking deer, which I guess sounds like a dog barking for its mating call and such. We also came across this huge spider which I managed to get a picture of and a dead giant, endangered flying squirrel. At night we went down to Ashok's office and met with the manager. This was the first time I can recall that I've met a person and immediately known where he was from. His last name was Singh and he was pale-ish and big and round. Obviously a Brahmin from Delhi, and boy did I call it. I must be getting good at this. But seriously, anyone here can look at one another and know north or south and caste. Then if they get the last name they can narrow down the location to a village or city! I'm not there yet. But all of a sudden it dawned on me why the Tamils hate the Hindus (not Hindus in the religious sense, Hindus in the political sense). The northern Hindus are imported into their own country to manage their own people's hard labor. Ashok and Alok both are from up north, too, a village outside Varanasi to be specific. Duh. Moving on, though. Oh, and on our way down to the office we saw a beautiful rainbow, like in the picture, but what you can't see in the picture is that the rainbow actually reaches the ground in front of the mountain, not behind it, so I bet if we'd actually tried we could have found the end of the rainbow.
Basically, I had an awesome trip. I sat around drinking the freshest tea, in a beautiful bungalow, hanging out with an adorable kid in a kind of silence that I haven't yet experienced in India and an air so clean. I was surrounded by wildlife and greenery and forests and jungles and tea bushes and clouds. It was sunny and humid and cold and misty all at once. And for the record, Alok's brother is a hoot, man. He's hard to describe, especially without Alok as a starting point, but he is a very intense personality but very, very funny. What a life.
I leave tomorrow after my last exam for Jaipur, Agra, Delhi and Varanasi. I come back on the sixth.
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