Carry On Up The Junction
A Travel Story from India
Welcome (or welcome back to) Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. Every weekend, I post a longish article exclusive to this page; during the week, I post a single Midweek Update of shorter, often news-related pieces. This particular weekend article is an unpublished, un-broadcast travel story from our family’s backpacking trip in 2016. If you like what you read here, or elsewhere at this account, please consider a paid subscription; you will soon receive - beyond my heartfelt thanks and hopefully good karma - additional benefits in the form of interview archives and more.
“KABBINAKAD.”
The bus conductor says the word we’ve been saying to him all along.
“Kabbinakad.”
There’s a worried expression on his face, and he’s not looking at us while saying it.
“Kabbinakad…”
He doesn’t need to say it a fourth time. Despite the fact that we are the only westerners on the bus taking the exceptionally long route from Madikeri to Bangaluru this evening, and for all that we’ve reminded him several times already to tell us when we get to Kabbinakad Junction, our conductor clearly forgot when the moment came. We have missed our stop.
The conductor goes to speak to the driver, and the bus comes to an abrupt halt. The driver looks warily at us – or maybe at the conductor – in the rear-view mirror.
“Kabbinakad!” says the conductor once more, but this time with a flourish, pointing at us and enthusiastically encouraging us to disembark. We gather up our two large backpacks, our son’s travel guitar, the annoying additional hold-all, our day bags, hand-bags and food bags; we have learned that, with effort and a little juggling, we can carry them all in one go. We drag them off the delapidated bus. The conductor steps off with us to what would be the curb side if there was a curb.
“Kabbinakad!” he says, pointing up the hill.
It is pitch dark. We are on a country road, in the Coorg mountains of Karnataka, in southern India, a place we have never been before. It is about 8:30pm and we have been traveling solid for the last two days. Yesterday it was from Palolem in Goa, via train, to Karnataka’s main port city of Mangaluru, where I had to forcibly insist that the taxi driver to take us to the homogenous but fully functional hotel I’d pre-booked rather than the one he’d get commission for taking us to instead.
After that, we had to convince a local café that was in the midst of closing down – it was late in the evening - to serve us what curries were left in the kitchen. And today, after a lengthy but victorious battle to secure an edible breakfast, an ultimately uplifting travel story worthy of telling in itself, we spent hours on a bus from Mangaluru to Madikeri. We would have traveled in the morning but in that madly bureaucratic manner that is the Indian way, we couldn’t buy a ticket for a government bus from the private travel agents in Goa, and it had sold out on us by the time we got to Mangaluru. Still, we made it to Madikeri. There, we had been assured by the hosts at our ultimate destination for three nights, Honey Valley – a small working coffee farm with what they call a home-stay program and what we had seen has a wonderful reputation – there would be a 7pm bus to Bangaluru that would stop at Kabbinakad Junction, where one of the estate’s jeeps would meet us. I found this hard to believe. Bangaluru – Bangalore to the rest of the world - is a few hours east along the highway from Madikeri; Kabbinakad, and Honey Valley, are due south. It didn’t compute.
But in that madly bureaucratic and yet somehow functional manner of Indian transportation, there was indeed a bus, taking this almost inexplicably long detour through the country roads before returning to the highway soon after Kabbinakad and on to Bangaluru before midnight.
Finding that bus had been a different matter. After a week spent lounging on the beach amongst fellow westerners in Goa, and a few days before that roaming Goa’s relatively relaxed State capital of Pajim, we have finally gotten ourselves off the beaten path, away from the tourists and even from those who would distinguish themselves instead as travelers. We are now fending and figuring things out for ourselves. It’s what I wanted from the trip all along, but as is often said to all and sundry, be careful what you wish for. For the entire sixteen hours since leaving Mangaluru, including two at the bus station here, we have been the only white people in sight. More to the point, in a country where it often seems everyone speaks English, we have found ourselves at a bus station where seemingly no one speaks English. And in a country where we have been starting to believe everything is printed in the local language and English, everything at the bus station – except for a timetable that seems to confirm our bus’s existence, pinned to the outside window of something that seems to be a dispatch office – none of the signage is in English.
Whether the destinations on the front of the ramshackle buses are in Hindi or Coorg, I couldn’t tell you. I can only confirm that I don’t know the spelling of Banguluru in either. Every twenty minutes or so I ventured to the dispatch office in the hope that one of the drivers rotating through there might speak English. Failing to find one, I’d walk up and down the parade of bus lanes, enquiring of the drivers or even of the waiting Indian passengers, “Bangaluru?” garnering nothing by way of response other than an occasional shrug . A couple of phone calls to Honey Valley resulted in absolute assurances that there would be a bus, but by 6:55pm we weren’t any closer to finding it, and it now dawned on me that we had no Plan B. Panic had just been finding its way to the surface when, at approximately 6:59pm, a driver at the far end of the bus lanes responded to my now rather desperate entreaty of “Bangaluru?” with a “Bangaluru! Now! Now!” Madly, we gathered up our backpacks, travel guitar, annoying additional case, day bags, handbags and food bags, rushed to the bus, and settled in for the journey.
And now those bags are back at our feet, on the street, as the bus conductor points up the hill without apology and with increasing impatience. “Kabbinakad!” he insists.
Now, I’m somewhat used to this situation, albeit from a different place, at a different time. In my earlier life in London, over-shooting my bus stop was routine; often the only way I knew I’d reached my destination in the first place was when I saw it out the window as we passed it by. I search my headlamp out of the backpack and prepare to call Honey Valley once more. They’ll know what to do.
But my wife is more cautious.
“Where?” She demands to know. “Where is Kabbinakad?”
“I think it’s just up the hill,” I say. I’m more than willing to stick up for my family, be as protective as need be. I just suspect that this is not a calamity.
“We have a child,” she tells the bus conductor, pointing at the 11-year-old to prove the point to someone who definitely does not speak English. “We can’t walk. You need to take us back there!”
Our 11-year-old son looks at each of us in turn. He’s game for most things and so far on this trip has trusted his dad. But he senses his mother’s understandable protectiveness and as a result, doesn’t seem much disposed to strap on his guitar, pick up a food bag or two and set off by foot.
It’s at this moment that a tall, trim, handsome thirty-something Indian man steps off the bus and introduces himself. “What is your destination?” he says in perfect English. “Do you have a phone number?” I tell him about Honey Valley, and give him the contact number. It’s for the estate itself, not the jeep that is supposedly waiting at the junction up the hill, where the driver is probably wondering why we didn’t just disembark the 7pm from Madikeri as promised what with all those nervous phone calls and what he’s meant to do now the bus has disappeared down the hill into the night.
The man makes a call, on his own phone. There is an extended and seemingly good-natured exchange of Hindi – unless it’s Coorg - on both ends of the line before he hangs up.
“Your driver is coming to meet you,” he assures us. “Don’t worry. I am a policeman. I won’t let this bus leave until they get here.”
As if understanding as much, five young men promptly disembark the bus, walk across the road and, in unison, unzip themselves and pee into the verge. Indian buses do not come equipped with toilets. (For that matter, very few toilets in India come equipped with toilets either.)
The driver shuts his engine off. A couple more people step off to see what the fuss is all about. A middle-aged man with a pronounced gut – in Europe, it would undoubtedly be from the beer – is among them.
“Please, my good friends,” he says, his delightful sing-song accent and choice of greeting straight out of casting central. “You are holding up our journey. The village is only just up the hill. Please: can you walk? It is good for your health!”
Yes, we know that, I feel like saying. We are confirmed walkers. Walking is what we do. Sometimes I think it’s all that we do. In fact, we are coming to Honey Valley in part because we want to hike the local hills. Our rotund friend, on the other hand, looks like he has long forgotten how to perambulate further than to the nearest dining table. He is the proverbial kettle calling the pot a dark color.
“I am a policeman,” says the policeman to the rotund man. “The bus stays here until their transport arrives!”
“Are you on duty, my good friend?” says the rotund man to the policeman, knowing full well the answer. The five young Indian men, having successfully relieved themselves, are now lighting cigarettes and watching, perhaps listening too, depending on their grasp of English, to the drama unfolding across the street.
But before the policeman can pull rank on the rotund man, a flash of light sweeps down the hill, closely followed by the sound of a jeep. The vehicle pulls to a stop beside us. It is overflowing with young Indian men hollering greetings. I holler back greetings of my own. This is the India I already love.
But my wife is still in protective mother mode. She looks at the jeep askance. Every seat is already taken. “How will we all fit on board?” she asks.
“This is India!” I say.
“Easy,” says the driver, in confirmation. “Your bags, please!” He wedges our backpacks, travel guitar, annoying additional case, and food bags into the tiny hold at the back of the open vehicle. (Of good habit, we keep our personal day bags with us at all times.) He then invites our son to sit up front, placing more or less on the lap of a young man he has never met before. My wife and I are similarly wedged into the back row, thrust tightly up against each other and the young Indian men, who are all well-dressed, well-groomed and clearly not the type to travel here on a late evening local bus from Madikeri.
We thank the policeman, who appears happy to have performed his civic duty. The rotund man appears relieved that the bus is resuming the long route to Bangaluru. The five young men appear grateful for the unexpected toilet and cigarette break and are now happy to reboard the bus to wherever their own destinations lie.
The bus and the jeep set off, in opposite directions, and our fellow passengers start peppering us with questions in perfect English such as we haven’t heard for two days. Where are we from? What are our names? Where have we been in India? What made us choose Honey Valley? In turn, I have a question for all of them: Where the hell have they all just come from? They certainly weren’t on our bus from Madikeri.
No, they weren’t. They’re from Bangaluru, the tech capital of India, and the Coorg mountains, it would appear, is that city’s version of New York’s Catskills, the weekend getaway from the big city stress. Our new friends – for they are, immediately, our friends – are part of the flourishing Indian middle class and get here by car. They have been at Honey Valley since yesterday, and hearing after their dinner that the jeep was heading off to pick up a white family arriving on the bus from Madikeri, they opted for the free ride down the hill to greet us in person. Apparently there’s not much to do here at Honey Valley. Except to relax. And walk the local hills.
