I repent in dust and ashes – again.

I am a Himalayan lad. I grew up in real mountains in North India. “How will these mounds, bumps and pimples spread across the landscape of the South ever appear impressive to me?” But now into our seventh year of regular visits to the South, mine has become a life accustomed to repentance. Whether it be Ooty, Kotagiri and Coonoor in the Nilgiris, or Munnar in the Cardamom Hills of Kerala, there is a magic in the South. And over this recent weekend, we discovered…


Yercaud (yer-kaad).

Looking back towards Salem, two-thirds of the way up the hill to Yercaud – on a murky, monsoon day.

The plains of India are hot. Salem was 36 degrees as we passed through and it is not even summer time. Throughout its history, especially during the era of the heat-averse British, hill stations emerged wherever there are hills in India. The air is cooler there. Mussoorie (where we grew up) and Ooty are among the more famous ones.

Not too many people have heard of Yercaud. “The poor man’s Ooty” is how a colleague described it to me yesterday.

Nah. It is far better than that.

The 30km drive up from the plains takes about an hour, on an immaculate road. The ‘hairpin bend’ count is a mere 20 (compared with 38 across in Ooty), but they seem to be spread across a much more concentrated space than with those other roads up to hill stations.

For our overnight stay we checked into Happy Nest. Couldn’t recommend it more highly. A reasonable price, comfortable rooms (and yes, also the customary hard bed and shower that floods the entire toilet) – but also a garden that is cared for (unlike the Botanical Gardens for which we paid INR30 to drive through fields of overgrown weeds!), with little pockets of places where small groups could gather. An open-air dining area on the roof. An ideal location for a retreat of some kind.

The pepper vines growing up the trees in the garden.

There is always so much to see in India when you walk. The order and the chaos. The beauty and the could-be-beautiful. The colours. The smells (yes, even they can be seen oftentimes). The smiles and the sadness. All the stuff that can never be captured in those books and on those websites. And so we walked – and then we walked some more.

Pepper and coffee are the main industries – but which is which?

The Christian presence was visible.
Like this church, with its familiar address and its unfamiliar teaching.

One of the clubs looked like my kind of club. What a place.
Surely this can be the only club in the world that combines books and sports?!

We took in some of the recommended sights. While the Botanical Gardens did not work out so well, the climb down to, and up from, the Kiliyur Falls made us, in the words of our driver, ‘full sweaty’.

One of the joys of these recent visits to India, when compared with our childhood here, is the increase in domestic tourism (because there has been this rise of a middle class). I love watching Indians take delight in their own places of beauty.

Along with the cooler air, it is the panoramic view that brings people back. They even create seats from which to look. There is a Lady’s Seat, a Gent’s Seat and a Children’s Seat from which to enjoy the view.  The Lady’s one wins and the Children’s one loses, but the Gent’s one invites various possibilities.

The view from Lady’s Seat

Another, closer, view from Lady’s Seat.

The trip to Yercaud was an opportunity to show Ian, our friend of more than 40 years, a little bit of India.

We sought to add value to some of the statues near the ‘seats’, but, clearly, one of us is more adept at doing this than the other.

One other enjoyment in this trip to Yercaud was the quality of the road between Bangalore and Salem. I am from the North, remember! The beauty along the way was matched only by the number of stops we had to make to pay a toll. But it gave me an opportunity to prove, now beyond a shadow of doubt, that the best place to get ‘change’ in change-averse India is at the toll-booth. On the way back I provided a steady supply of INR500 notes to pay tolls as low as INR30 and now I am change-rich … for a few days, anyway.

Tamil Nadu – taken from the car, as we whizzed by…

nice chatting

Paul

PS: Be warned. If you are a friend of ours and you give us one free day with a visit, we’ll arise at 5am and we’ll do Yercaud in a day. It can be done. It will be done.

I know we beat you in the Cricket World Cup semi-finals, but, seriously, was this necessary?!  😃