The Cochin to Munnar Bus

Friday 22 February

Today I leave Cochin and head for the coolth of Munnar, a hill station high in the Western Ghat Mountains. I share a breakfast table with an Aussie teacher who's just completing a PhD on teachers who are bullied by their colleagues. She started while working at a school in deprived Margate, and is now teaching in deprived Kerala. She's finally persuaded her colleagues that teaching Indian children to parrot English nursery rhymes by rote does not teach them English (they don't understand a word.) Kerala is getting back to normal after the strike, which she says most people welcomed as it gave them two days' holiday, something they never normally get. I'm back to "normal", too, packing and repacking my case trying to find things I only just put down. My UK SIM card has gone missing. I finally get away at 11, take a tuk-tuk to the ferry jetty and enjoy the trip across the harbour to Ernakulam (modern Kochi city). Pass a pod (or whatever) of porpoises heading out to sea.

Cochin Harbour ferry

So I wave goodbye across the water to Fort Cochin, with regrets. With its narrow streets and squares of tatty colonial relics and renovated hotels and homestays, it is a tourist trap, mainly for Europeans. This is despite the heaps of garbage that make the streets among the filthiest I have encountered, a close second to Varanasi. I have not heard a single American voice since I arrived in South India, but here there are lots of Brits, young and old, including families (it's half term week), almost as many French, plus Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, but no Russians, unlike Goa.

I have just missed a Munnar bus and have over an hour's wait at the bus station (which has "platforms"). Unlike train stations with their plethora of notices garnishing every surface, the bus station has a dearth of information, not even a timetable or ticket office. But the man in the information booth is helpful and later points me to where my big white state bus is waiting to load.

I'm one of the first to board and nab a seat at the front just behind the driver's seat. A European of indeterminate accent, who's done the trip before, comes up to me and says, "Excuse, sir. You don't want to sit there." Why not? "It's too frightening. You can see the road. It goes 'zar, zar, zar'", he says, waving his finger from side to side like a conductor beating 3 - 4 time. Undeterred, I stay put. But not for long. When the (bus) conductor arrives, he points his conductor's finger at me, then up at a sign painted discreetly above my seat in curly Malayaman script. "That," he tells me, "says 'Ladies Only'. You must move." Indeed, the first five rows of seats on the starboard side all say 'Ladies Only' in Malayaman (a language incidentally with 19 vowels and 32 consonants and a nightmare for typewriter manufacturers). And, of course, by this time the rest of the bus is all but full. I protest, "I've been sitting here for ten minutes and now you tell me!" He relents (a little) and orders someone else to move so I can at least go next to a window, sharing a seat with an elderly man with a lunghi (Gandhi-style midriff cloth) and very few teeth.

We set off on time at 12.40, though it is 2.10 before we finally leave behind the suburbs of Ernaculam. It's hard to comprehend how big even small Indian cities can be. Further along, we start to climb into the foothills of the Ghats. The bus is like a giant tin box on wheels, not uncomfortable, but lacking any attempt at refinement. It's a "bog standard" state bus, but good enough for plebs like me. The windows are unglazed, but with pleated drop-down shutters, and it's exhilarating to have the sun on my face and the wind in my hair. But the old bus can certainly shift, pitching and rolling on the meandering road, its deep horn booming out at every bend like a lightship's fog warning. The last hour (it takes nearly five) is the scary bit, when the road narrows and the not-quite-hairpin bends start. Now I'm glad I'm near the back and cannot see the road ahead. The man was right. We stop at a small town, where teenage boys heading home from school squeeze in the standing spaces or sit four to a double seat. Their faces light up at the next stop, outside a convent girls school where the girls are waiting in crisp uniforms straight from the pages of Angela Brazil. Not sure if the boys understand double entendre, but the school is, I hope inappropriately, named Passion Mount. What were the nuns thinking of?

Nearly there - another blind bend

Munnar is a former colonial hill station in tea country, with the world's highest altitude tea plantations and one of the world's most exclusive clubs. I consider going there for a G & T in the male-only bar. But I can't. They admit guests, but don't allow over the threshold anyone in sandals. Unfortunately I threw away my shoes in Cochin. On arrival in town I hand myself over to the mercy of a tuk-tuk driver who takes me on a tour of the cheaper hotels and homestays until at the sixth attempt we locate an acceptable and affordable one. More on Mummar tomorrow.