Wednesday, 12 January 2011
HASSAN, HALEBEED, BELUR, MADIKERI
I have written something of our four nights at Hassan in the previous posting but will put it together on return. We made the correct choice in changing to the A/C Mercedes bus for the four hour journey because unlike most Indian buses the seat and the climate made for a comfortable journey over roads ranging from the very good new double roads to old two lane affairs where the driver could display overtaking talents learned as a rickshaw driver in Bengaluru! Anyway arriving in the dark at 7pm we got a rickshaw driver to take us to the Suvarna Hotel recommended in the Guidebook. I cannot praise Footprints too highly for their South India guide which seems to be spot on with its recommendations for hotels and restaurants over the previous trip as well. When besides suggesting a hotel also state it is recommended or highly recommended, these are well worth a try whatever the price range.
The Suvarna is being upgraded so the room was excellent, if the most Indian so far which meant continuation of good but hard beds which are comfortable when you get used to them, with a well fitted modern bathroom but without accommodation for toilet paper 'right hand for eating left for your behind', though like the rest it had hand spray shared between the toilet and shower but with two large buckets one which could collect the hot shower water the other water from a cold tap. Joan got an unpleasant surprise when she found there were only cold showers in the evening.
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| Indian water room (bathroom) |
On asking we were given a toilet roll, and told hot water was from 5.30 to 9.30am but they would bring a bucket of hot water at any time. Two comfortable armchairs, a ceiling fan, we have not felt the need so far to opt for A/C given the winter time (beautiful summer by UK standards) and the cool which comes with altitude. Breakfast has to be chosen and bought (typically 100rp for two) separately in the Veg Restaurant in the basement which is being revamped and more than doubled in size. Another restaurant is available termed multi-cuisine which means tomato soup, mushroom soup with meat and vegetable dishes Indian style including Tandori.
We set up a particularly good rapport with one of the waiters, who was initially reluctant to recommend what we should eat in addition to the three dishes he suggested the previous night, so we learned of Kaju Mutter meaning a curry of Cashew Nuts and Peas.
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| India nominally drive on the left, like us! |
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| Indian traffic (auto rickshaws, motor bikes, lorries, buses and cows!) |
Halebeed
The first full day here we went back to the bus station and caught one of the frequent buses to Halebeed (Halebid in the guide) which run a direct non stop service to and fro, an incredibly bumpy ride, which took about 75 mins. Bumpy because not only was the single track paved road itself full of pot holes but it meant whenever overtaking or negotiating past an oncoming vehicle each had one wheel on the road and another on the stony unmade hard shoulder. The other thing of note was that we passed an Advanced Control Centre with about a dozen large satellite like dishes, no doubt carrying out surveilence of India's air space. What a deserted place to hide it! Still as Joan noted the previous day where they had just built a modern section of road that was not yet in sevice which the farmers soon converted it into a rice thrashing area as though purpose built for the task.
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| Weeding the lawn, Indian style |
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| In demand, obliging as always |
Halebeed has a simply fantastic temple the exterior covered in delicate carving of gods, men, women, freezes right around with elephants or lions head to tail all different or scenes from the Ramayana. The secret is that the temple was constructed around 1100AD using soapstone blocks which could be fashioned in the most intricate fashion - the word filigree usually associated with fine silver work is the best I can find, but with luck the photos will say a lot more than I could conceivably describe. We spent five hours there just breathing in the beauty of the temples and the huge grassed and stone paved courtyard.
Pictures of HALEBEED convey more than words
Very few tourists visited Halebeed - they went to Belur instead which though inferior is easier to reach by relatively modern road, but we were accompanied by parties of young Indian schoolchildren who mobbed us continually, but with very good nature, to take our photographs or be photographed in return. There was a Museum with lots a of carvings taken from nearby Hoysala temples but for some strange reason you were not allowed to photograph them, though I stole a couple. Strangely the temples themselves had no such restriction but were equally fine if not better.
The following day I insisted on taking a day out much to Joan's annoyance who could only see a day in Hassan as a day wasted, but today I feel much better as though for the first time my whole body has adapted to the Indian environment. (Joan is essentially a serial site see-er, I am content merely to immerse myself in the country). I often used to find in earlier years that it took 3 or 4 days to adapt to say Bangkok, in which time I was completely without energy and without enthusiasm - often blaming it on the plane air circulation for spreading throat/chest infections, today it would appear the same adjustment is taking a full week, I think that was true last year as well. The luxury of taking a week to acclimatise is one of the biggest advantages of the low cost, slow, way we travel. I do not expect to have trouble hereafter on this trip.
She was not best pleased that I watched the whole of the Arsenal v Man City match ( 30 minutes of superb attacking by Arsenal until Man City decided to spoil the game with massed defence) delaying our evening meal in the going, but then she is no sports fan. But it's being different and most often tolerant that is our secret. Tonight I am missing the first One Day Test taking place in South Africa with India in order to blog, the top two cricket nations in the world - what penance!
Belur
Today, after the day off, we caught the bus to Belur which also run every 10/15 minutes. As Joan had predicted from the map it was a much better road. We took a rickshaw to the temples very similar to those of Halibeed, and although the interiors are said to be of more importance than the outsides they were so dark as to be scarcely visible. The interiors even more than Halebeed featured huge pillars turned on a lathe of a look more often associated with wood, this technique being feasible because of the integrity and softness of the sandstone of which these temples are built.
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| Temple Car, pull that if you can |
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| ENTRANCE GATE BELUR |
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| BELUR BOOBS |
There was a huge metal ceremonial car with huge steel wheels housed just outside the gates. Unlike Halibeed there were several 'western' tour parties here but also masses of school parties often with older children, not always so well behaved - one group of girls upset Joan by pulling hard on her fingers.
The Papers
(Talking of the cricket and the forthcoming IPL in India this year I think I wrote Pieterson was auctioned for 2 crore in fact it was 2.99 ie 3 would be better and also stated the full auction amount as 52 crore where it should have been 52 USD). The kids yesterday were not only collecting our photos but also our autographs, one lad went away delighted with the autograph of Kevin Pieterson. Only he and Stuart Broad from England were hired on the first day of the auction, the thing amazing today's journalists is the very high prices paid for young relatively unknown Indian players, this is because each team is now only allowed to hire four foreigners and the higher proportion have to be Indian. Peter Roebuck writing in The Hindu saw IPL as the death knoll of cricket as a game rather than an entertainment ruined by excessive wealth of the sponsors being spread to only a few marketable players. Some Indian students later explained to me that the idea was based on our Premier League, the weakness of that view is that unlike two hours of league soccer it is not a showcase of cricket at its highest level of skill.
A bit more news from the Mysore edition of the Times of India is pushed under my door by way of wake up call at 7am.
The first few Indian designed and made Tejas light combat aircraft are going into service (after 27 years of building!), so is the first Chinese Stealth Bomber.
The Prime Minister of a coalition (BJP& Congress?) government Manmahon Singh is looking rocky because of the terrible trouble with price inflation of basic foods like onions, milk and wheat, the average food inflation was over 18% for 2010 and it's not going to level off any time soon.
Meantime today's story was a terrible one of three farmers in Andra Pradesh (just east of this state) whose crops had failed due to frost and were therefore unable to repay their loans for seed let alone buy for the following year. Those three committed suicide by taking insecticide. This is a recurring tragedy in India this year, and presumably every year of crop failure.
There were 136 road deaths in Mysore last year and the impression given was that a high proportion of those were pedestrians, in part because they and we walk on the road for absence of any passable pavements.
A front page column reported that 'Mysore was Freezing' with a low of 8C the lowest temperature recorded in 27 years.
But a main headline was the nose diving of economic growth year on year for November from 11%+ the previous year to 2.7% 2009/2010. It is a bumpy curve but the trend is severely down, and the main area of concern is manufacturing.
An article on gave the results for the 200,000+ students in the CAT exam, 8 got 100% and another 11 including two girls 99.9%. This exam puts pupils in descending mark order and each of the Indian Institutions of Management (mostly for those studying engineering) use these results to decide who to interview, depending on demand they set their own cut off point, taking into account in their selection of performance in the interview and also a 10% weighting for their performance in the 10th grade exams at 15/16. The system seems to have some similarity to the French system, which Jim was describing at Christmas, for selecting pupils for the Grand Ecoles except that there a 100% mark is kept out of reach of even the most brilliant students.
Writing from MADEKERI Friday 14 January
We found the bus easy enough by approaching one of the station yard workers, got on and found best seats in the middle of the bus, I stowed one of the cases under our seat but could not do the same for Joan's slightly larger case before the bus quickly filled up so we were left occupying 3 seats which did not make us too popular, especially with one smartly dressed young man who like 20 or so other people had to stand. The first 3 hours rate as close to the worst shaking we have had. That brought us through an area of subsistence strip farming mainly of rice, and corn with some sugar cane to the third town of K......., which seemed incredibly prosperous by comparison and was obviously also a resort because of the number of good hotels, the outskirts of which had large quality built new houses with cars.
We were now in the coffee belt with those bushes dense under the shade forests of tall trees which gave just the right amount of shade. Climbing up the more substantial trunks were pepper plants. looking for all the world like ivy but Joan tells me they are just climbers like say beans or vanilla. This last good section of recently paved road took us one more hour making 4 hours in total as per the guide.
Arriving at Madekeri we got an auto rickshaw to the hotel of our choice Hilltown a popular family hotel, where we obtained one of their best rooms for1080 rp with breakfast extra (though the ordinary double is only 900rp). The food there is good and the size of the portions is designed for families so we will share a single dish tonight, the vegetables were clearly chunky, wonderfully flavoursome and fresh. The main drawback is the transmission of noise because of the bare concrete construction with nothing to deaden sound, not of course improved by a party of Muslim families in high, non alcoholic, spirits. .
Today we skipped breakfast and took a rickshaw in search of the Friday market or Shandy (the British corruption of the Hindu word Shanti). It is beside the main fixed market but the itinerant traders go from town to town with Friday being the day for Madekeri. Their produce is all laid out on canvas sheets on the floor and they sit cross legged whilst serving, occasionally using old fashioned balances and weights. As usual there were a few even Joan did not recognise like one she assumed was probably the bottom of the banana trunk, the bushes being cut down to this point every year. We walked through the fixed market which included big sections of fish and dried fish (from the lakes nearby).
Back in town we went to the Durba cafe for a large coffee 14rp and the waiter brought us two freshly fried battered banana as well, the backpackers standard, but then watching we found a surprising number of the ordinary Indians in the cafe were also eating fried banana, a case of culture modification I think. Later that afternoon we went for another coffee and a snack of Idly with Sambar and spicey coconut side dishes. Then we noticed people eating snacks a little redder than fried banana but otherwise similar, we enquired, they were Baji, not Onion Baji as they sell in UK Indian restaurants but containing large green chillis, I was offered one to try and it was good, not even Joan found it too hot. I was warned off Vegetable Hyderbadi last night as being very spicey, but in general though food is invariably spiced mostly it is not the macho hot flavour of our restaurants.
A second coffee brought an interesting episode with a bull and Joan as matador. The bull decorated as for Pongal, which is apparently the same date but with different names all over India, was this time wearing only little headdress of orange flowers but had approached the cafe entrance where it was fed by the young waiter with a chapati, I was content to photograph them but Joan decided to go out to the bull to get a closer view, the bull thought he was going to be fed again and disappointed pushed Joan with his horns and drove her back into the cafe, luckily the man on the desk had other ideas and moved the bull on by waving a big stick.
In between we took two 20rp rickshaw trips the first to Raja's Seat, a lovely small well kept flower filled park which sat on a cliff overlooking a magnificent vista all green with a row of mountains in the distance. The second to a temple, though we had to wait for it to open it was well worth while for the interesting paintings mainly about the life of Shiva on the walls of the quadrangle, of which we have a few pictures. We then walked back to check on our next point of call to book two nights in the coffee growing area, of which more later.
I am now up to date but may well think of things to add.
17 Jan
Next day we took a rickshaw to the Abbi Falls about 10 km away. It was a steep walk down to the falls the path was full of holidaying Indians for St. Sankranti (Pongal here) which made it an interesting trip we saw and photographed the impressive falls and the went right down to the bridge they had built over the river as a spectator viewpoint. Here we got into a long conversation with around 8 boy students, one from Kathmandu was here because of an offer of good education in computer technology, another now worked in London as a doctor, in a hospital near the London Eye, having just completed a post graduate course at Kingston University. Another was studying Interior Designed, the rest joined in a fluent conversation in English with only the occasional hick-up with pronunciation like mine of Jaiselmeer on the desert border with Pakistan.
Back to Raja Seat and then at 5pm on to the Mosque which was impressive for its wonderful display of modern mural paintings of scenes from the life of Shiva around the quadrangle. Then back out to Raja's Seat for a third time to see the magnifiscent sunset, not quite as dramatic as the one the night before we had seen in the streets, due to the absence of a low cloud formation which adds to add variety to the colour shades. We then paid 50rp a piece to go into view the State Dancing competition organised by the Cauvery Hotel, a huge crowd and not too impressive for the view of the centre stage was obliterated by the man videoing the performance. We saw only part of the first round for Primary Schools, with disappointment we observed they invariably chose disco show dancing rather than something of their heritage, though it was always done with some flair and a good sense of rhythm. But it was quite cool so we were wearing fleeces for the first time since London and decided to call it a day and walk back to town for dinner at our Hilltown Hotel.
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