India 5- Feast to the Eyes

Highlights of our time in Mysore:

Driving out to Dubare to an elephant camp to feed the elephants was a highlight for the children and Mark and me too really. How can you not be pleased and delighted to come across 22 elephants, munching on  straw, drinking from the river and a baby elephant sucking from its mum, so that was a bit of a bonus, particularly as we arrived too late to partake in washing the elephants – big disappointments all round.

Marvelling at their grey wrinkled mass and soft, friendly looking faces. The baby elephant clumsily teetering on her legs and the mum kicking her out the way. We are all fascinated. The children are over the moon -they even get to clamber up on them.

Sayeed suggests a swim in the local River

Sayeed, who has now taken on the role of our tour guide (this is clearly how this entrepreneurial man makes his money – taking small cuts here and there), takes us to a lovely large river weir on the outskirts of Mysore. Javeed, our now trusted tuk-tuk driver, comes to collect us (yes, we are probably paying over the odds for him to wait on us this week, but it makes life a lot easier and saves a lot of hassle and the costs are so minuscule) and we head out to the countryside, passing rice fields, coconut groves and oxen and carts plodding along the roads. We  stop off in a little shack under some coconut trees for delicious fried rice and river fish lunch, slightly wary of the coconut trees above our heads – numerous people die from coconuts falling on their heads! Sayeed attempts to reassure us by saying that the Hindus believe that there are 2 eyes in the bottom of the coconut and if the coconut falls it will make sure it misses you. Oh to have that kind of faith!

Something else that has changed since my last trip here 30 years ago is BOTTLED water. Good and bad. Gone are the worries of getting sick from the local water, even the fruit juice stalls on the side of the road are made with bottled water, though of course it is wise to be cautious. There is a scene in Slum Dog Millionaire, where the street boys fill up the water bottles from the side of the road and glue back down the blue seal! The downside is that with a population of over a billion, what happens to all the plastic bottles?? India TIme  magazine featured an article with the title  “584m tonnes of rubbish per year…”  We are also very aware that while we are travelling, we too will be consuming approx 4 litres of water between us  every day x365 days – that’s a lot of bottles adding to that heap of plastic. We’d better start using our water filter, which felt like too much hard work in Ethiopia, now it feels essential.

The river water comes as welcome relief from the heat, and had there not been so many people (rephrase – men in underpants) there we might have swum, instead we just find some  shallower bits of the water and  sit on some large smooth boulders. In a country where people are so unaccustomed to see scantily clad women, I decide to keep my clothes on.

When the crowd start gathering around us, (the children in particular attract a lot of attention) we decide it’s time to move on and stop for a chai where we see a flying fox eating fruit from a berry tree.

A Shopping trip in Mysore

We ended up buying a few arts and crafty things from a local emporium. (How can you not be tempted by these fabulous fabrics and colours?) Of course, buying things here does present a problem when you are restricted to 2 ruck sacks, … Hey-Ho , let’s not let us be put off by that. This is not surprising for me, as my most memorable artefacts in our house  tell a story, of their long voyage over land and sea.  (I presume  Sayeed is mates with these Kashmiri hard-nosed businessmen and is getting his cut there as well, still we feel he has earned it.) We buy a brass ox and cart ornament, which will remind us of India and Ethiopia too, lovely floor cushions for the kids, fabrics made locally from the various tribes… but how will we get this stuff back to St Margaret’s?

The answer is Sayeed! Sayeed will fix it. He knows a man with a sewing machine who will parcel it all up for us. I am happy to run errands today, this means spending some precious time alone. We tuk-tukked around Mysore, scooting down alley ways and through market stalls. And then we stop at a beautiful old wooden door. There, in a tiny alley, sitting with a sewing machine surrounded by press coverage framed on the walls, is a man with a boy (probably 7 years old) who miraculously packages up your bits and pieces and sews them into a parcel made of cotton. My doubts about whether the ox and cart would damage on the way are soothed by the meticulous way in which he handles this object. He and his son get to work, small bits of material, polystyrene are cut and card board are carefully folded around the objects. I sit and read my book and am plied with tiny miniature cups of chai, which miraculously appear from nowhere. Periodically I take  a photo of the packing process. Best to send this by courier! It will cost £80 -EIGHTY POUNDS!! NO WAY, that’s more than I paid for it in the first place. Let’s risk the snail mail, we are after all not in a hurry. I have faith with the mail and there is no way surely anyone would tamper with this Fort Knox of parcels.

All done! And for a price of £3 I leave with a beautifully wrapped cotton parcel.

Next, take the parcel to the post office. OH NO! Sayeed tells them what’s inside the parcel. OH NO – NO METAL allowed. SORRY, post office rules. I get out the photos of what’s in the parcel and all the post office staff come over and coo over the ox and cart “Isn’t it lovely! Where did you get it from?”……. It worked a wonder. OK, metal allowed after all.. (we shall see if that parcel ever does actually arrive or not). I don’t think Sayeed paid a bacshish, but all I can say is none of that would have happened without Sayeed. I would still be in Mysore fathoming the whole system.

This has taken me best part of a morning., but I have read a good chunk of “A Suitable Boy” and this is all fun stuff.

A wander down the alleyways of local bazaar

We spend a morning browsing the local market – each alley in the market specialises in one thing, so you move from the vegetables to the fruits, the coloured dyes and the flowers, literally millions of them, people sitting perched, threading flowers to make garlands of flowers for all the girls’ hair. (This is as normal as you or I putting an elastic in our ponytail.) Piles of coconuts, banana leaves being prepared and cut and rolled. As you can imagine, this is a photographers heaven.