Easter in Madikeri

I hope that everyone had a nice Easter this year. We celebrated the holiday by taking a couple of days off of work and going with some friends to Madikeri, which is about 160 miles outside of Bangalore. Madikeri lies in the Western Ghats, one of the major mountain ranges in India, and the city is around 1,200 feet above sea level. We left with our friends Roopa, Ravi, and their daughter Ananya, early Friday morning and arrived in Madikeri in the early afternoon, just in time for lunch! One of the specialties of the region is a pork curry, and as pork is quite rare in the Bangalore area, the omnivores among us (Eric, Ravi, and I) took advantage while poor Roopa and Ananya were forced to watch the ensuing gluttony. It was delicious. After eating ourselves nearly to death, we made our way to our lodging for the weekend, and beautiful old home nestled among the hills. The area is known for coffee growing, so we took a little tour of a coffee plantation where alongside the coffee, pepper, cardamom, and vanilla are grown.



After a long day, we settled in for the night (after the obligatory hour long power outage) and soon discovered that we were not alone in our bed, but were instead sharing it with a few visitors; namely cockroaches (who really had a taste for Eric's toes)! This is the price that we had to pay to get away from the noise and pollution of the city. I suppose that when you decide to get out and enjoy nature, you shouldn't be surprised when nature decides to enjoy you in return. After two toe biting episodes, we figured out that we could tuck our covers under the mattress really tightly and leave the light in our bathroom on to keep the critters away.



The next morning we got ready for the main attraction, a trek to the peak of one of the mountains. We drove out to a tiny little town at the foot of the mountains and proceeded to get into a four wheel drive which took us the rest of the way (about 4 miles of pretty rough roads) to the base of the mountain. We decided (wisely, I think) to scale the easier of the two mountains that we had to choose from, and with our guide leading us, we took off. The next hour or so was spent climbing up a narrow path to the summit. It was hard work, and the heat and humidity made the trek quite a task (at least for us, but our guide did not have a drop of sweat on him!), but it was worth the effort for the view. Spectacular! We made our way down the mountain and took a well-deserved break at a beautiful waterfall before having a home cooked meal back at "base camp". After returning to our lodging, the evening was spent by myself and Ananya picking up fallen flowers to make a collage and reading stories during the daily power outage while Eric got caught up on some of his radio shows (Roopa and Ravi spent the evening out meditating, no I am not kidding). After a hard but fun day, we prepared to face the cockroaches once again. The tactics implemented the previous evening did not fail us this night, and Eric suffered nary a single bite.





On Sunday we slept in and leisurely prepared for our departure. On the way back to the city, we stopped in Mysore and visited the palace which was (and is) the home to the Mysore Maharajah. The palace is beautiful, and certainly rivals those that we saw in Europe. After lunch in Mysore, we headed back to Bangalore. Back to congestion, traffic, noise, and so many people, but also back to hot water and cold drinks (the power in Madikeri was not stable enough for us to get hot water or for the refrigerator to continually work), and most importantly, cockroaches that know better than to crawl into bed with us!



Despite the cockroaches (and the slugs, I won't go into it, but cockroaches were only but one of our evening visitors), we had a great time, the scenery was beautiful and the company was fantastic. We are already looking forward to our next trip out of the city, and we'll keep you posted!