18th October 2010 Kalpetta

So three days have passed since the last entry and boy have we travelled. It started on a train from Allepey to Coimbatore with cockroaches for company and thankfully some great people including the lovely Lakshmi who even sang to us and entertained us for a couple of hours - aged 70 but full of energy! Then a rickshaw to Mettupalyam where we stayed in a lodge that wanted to be modern but let itself sadly down once you left the reception area.....evening at the station to collect the station masters token without which we would not be allowed a ticket the following day - purely at the station masters discretion the tokens and we bypassed the hundreds of people on the waiting list - as we were collecting the token we witnessed a moving departure of people to mecca for the hadge - on their first part of their epic journey Mettupalayam to Chennai. A lovely man explained the principles of Islam and the hadge to us as the prayers and tears and shouts of allah akbar could be heard along the platform by the many relatives standing their to see them off. 5 am start and off the to station for the ticket collection and then stood in a queue for an hour or so to make our way through the srum and bag our seats for the 5 hour journey up the mountain to Ooty at over 2000 metres altitude it a hillstation that used to be manned by the brits to escape the heat. The train crawled steam driven up the mountain through tea plantations and with deep drops either side of the train on more than one occaision. We saw monkeys and amazing flowers and Martine appointed hersefl litter warden telling all the people i our carriage to put their rubbish in the bag she had and not to through it out the window as India is not a dustbin - she has her work cut out for her let me tell you! Ooty a disappointment - dirty, poor, nothing on offer although funnily they were actually selling scalves, gloves and hats outside the station - it was at least 25 degrees in the sun not -25! Then we took an epic 4 hour taxi journey down the mountain in possibly the oldest taxi in India with a driver who battled with his collapsing car and kept telling us to pray for him and performing elaborate signs of the cross on himself and the car whilst Christian songs blarred out from his stereo. We finally arrived in kalpetta and the ayurvedic clinic - yet another disappointment on the hygene front but otherwsie all ok. Then I realised I'd left my mobile in the taxi so we frantically called him and he drove to meet us in Sultans Battery (yes this is the real name!) so a later evening than planned but I got my phone back. Today we have all had a breif consultation with the Ayurvedic Doctore Dr Vinod Babu and had treatments this morning and this afternoon followed by some yoga and tomorrow we are off to clim the Chembra Peak at 6 in the morning before more treatments in the afternoon and hopefully and early night! Mysore will be the next stop...I hope to add some photos there of the last few days but suffice to say we have already had quite a journey here and we are all still digesting everything we are seeing every day of this trip...it will take some time to do so I think.....until the next entry. Namaste