Locals

We started the day with a visit to what was supposed to be a visit to a model village of the Toda, the indigenous people of the Ooty region. But when we got there, we discovered nothing but the burnt out ruins of their temple. It turned out that they’d moved the village somewhere else and ceremonially burned the temple to the ground. All that was left were a handful of normal Indian buildings on the periphery, some little kids and some sedate cows.

A little boy of about five came up to me and gravely informed me of something in Tamil, tapping my Italian leather shoes with a dirty stick he was holding, then glaring at me earnestly before wandering away.

“He was telling you you’re not allowed to walk in the remains of the temple,” Mr Fixit informed me, something I’d already surmised from the signs around the edge of the temple ruins.

Meanwhile the Guardian of the Toda had walked up to one of the sleeping cows and was vigorously whacking it in the horns with his stick. The cow opened its eyes a crack, then moved its head and went back to sleep.

From there we walked down the hill through the Ooty Botanic Gardens, home to a surprising number of Australian native plants, including gum trees, bottlebrushes, cordylines and a very tall native frangipani. Then after a restorative coffee and some local chocolates, we set of on our main excursion of the day to the animal sanctuary in nearby Bandipur.

To get to Bandipur, one has to descend from the mountains along the Ooty-Gundlupet Highway. Unfortunately, this has been illegal for anyone except locals for the last five years after one too many idiot tourists tried to take it too fast and plummeted off the cliffs. As a result, the only way to get a car down the mountainside is to hire a local driver in Ooty and drive you and your car down, while your normal driver follows on the back of a motorbike. So that’s what we did.

About halfway down the mountain there’s a police checkpoint where they confirm that your driver is indeed a local, and your car is assaulted by a troop of monkeys looking for an open window and subsequent food. Fortunately we were on the ball and they could only glare at us through the glass.

At the bottom of the mountain, Mr Fixit resumed his driving responsibilities, and we continued on. The lush greenery of the mountains transformed into an arid scrubfield so quickly it was like somebody flipped a switch.

After another hour or so, we arrived at the Tiger Reserve for a tour of the bush in an open-sided bus, which seemed a little foolhardy, but that’s probably why there were also men with machetes and a rifle up the front.

The bus staff searched high and low for a tiger, but given that tigers can be invisible even in the limited space of a zoo enclosure, it wasn’t surprising that we didn’t see one. Instead, we saw a monitor lizard, a couple of wild elephants, egrets, an eagle, a wild boar, and a single, beautiful little bird, with feathers in every colour in the rainbow from its red head down to its indigo tail.

We also saw a new variety of monkeys. First the monkey thieves, now this pack of simian Justin Trudeaus. So problematic!

After leaving the tiger reserve, as the sun started to set and the light turned golden, we stopped at an elephant sanctuary to watch these huge, slow, stately creatures enjoy a much-deserved meal of rice, coconuts, sugarcane and vegetables.

I also encountered a wild peacock, who seemed deeply affronted at my photographing him. The very nerve!

We drove back to Ooty as night fell: fortunately there’s no laws against tourists driving up the mountain road, just down it, presumably because most cars can’t go too fast up roads that steep. Mr Fixit handled the hairpin bends with aplomb, while cheerfully regaling us with grisly stories about the horror crashes that occurred before the downhill drive was banned.