Madikeri, the Rainforest Retreat and back to Mysore - jim

The next morning in Madikeri we had breakfast, visited a park with a beautiful outlook over the surrounding hills, and then went back into the center of town to look for a hotel a bit more in our price range. We had another night in Madikeri before going on to the Rainforest retreat. One of the budget hotels listed in our guide book had a room available, so we checked in and settled into our room. After a bit we went out for a walk to aquaint ourselves with the town. Madikeri is a modest sized hill station but because it is the market town for a large surrounding area of farms and plantations it has many more businesses and facilities than a town its size would generally have. We had a pleasant walk through town and a bit out into the countryside, stopping along the way at a Hindu temple, and on the way back at a few of the businesses selling spices. This is a spice, coffee and tea growing region. The spices most commonly grown in the area are cardamon, pepper, both black and white, cloves, cinnamon and vanilla, they all really smelled great and we bought a few things to bring home with us. After lunch I updated this blog and caught up on email while Adam caught up on his email. It was a quiet day, which was nice, I, at least, was a bit tired from all our travelling, especially the bus ride. The next morning we packed up, checked out of our hotel, called the rickshaw driver who was recommended to us for the ride to Rainforest Retreat, and when he showed up, a bit late, we loaded up the rickshaw with our backpacks and headed about 12K out of town.

Rainforest Reareat, or more precisely, Mojo Rainforest Retreat, is a twenty five acre organic plantation that grows a wide variety of crops, but specializes in cardamon, coffee, vanilla and pepper. It is run by an enthusiastic and friendly Indian couple who moved there 15 years ago after a first career as research biochemists at high powered lab in Delhi. They decided that someone needed to really try out in the field the things they were learning in their lab. A few years later they started the guest house part of the farm partly to augment the income of the farm but also because they had had to build several guest houses to accommodate the constant stream of old Delhi friends who were always coming to visit.

Our stay at Rainforest was a dream after all the hard travelling we had done in the last almost two months. The food was great, think hard to stop going back for more, the staff, mostly Indian with a few westerners were incredibly helpful and friendly, the room, in our case a large wall tent with two beds etc., was roomy and very pleasant and the location, peaceful and yet full of purpose, was just what we needed. The almost four days we spent there were a joy, it was just the kind of place we needed, no hustles, much beauty and time to walk, talk and begin to digest what we had seen, heard and learned over the previous six weeks. Our days fell into a pattern; up in time to get to an 8:30 AM breakfast and socializing with the other guests and staff, a walk from 10 AM till about 1 PM usually guided by one of the Indian staff who not only knew the countryside but also the trees, animals, birds and flowers of the area, lunch about 1:30, rest and reading till 4 PM tea and then another, shorter walk until about 6:30 PM. Generally after the walk we would clean up and after a bit stroll down to the eating area where by about 7:30 a campfire had been built and we would sit around it and socialize with the other guests, with maybe a beer or two before dinner a 8:30. Most nights we would be back in our tents by 10:30 or so for a nights sleep. After having to figure out every next move, every day for a few months it was nice to settle into this routine. Our fellow guests were great, there was particle physicists who worked at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, a woman who wrote about walks in rural France, a British wood worker, a recently retired doctor, a hospital manager, a Indian woman who was writing a review of the retreat for an upcoming book on the 100 best escapes in India and the list goes on, it was a great mix which made for very interesting conversation. All I can say is that at the end of our stay we really weren't sure we wanted to leave, but it was time to move on and we reluctantly did. All this and we didn't even break our $25 per day budget, though we did come closer to this limit than we did on most other days.

After bidding everyone farewell we rode back into Madikeri where we quickly found and boarded a bus to Mysore, where we were spending the night. We arrived in Mysore earlier than we had planned which gave me time to pick up the eyeglasses and shirts I had ordered and check my email. Adam went off to the bank to change some $$$ and also spent some time online. We met for dinner at a restaurant we had liked our last time in Mysore and after a filling meal went back to our hotel. The next morning we slept in a bit a had a laid back day killing time until our 2:30PM train to Chennai. It was a pleasant trip, which we shared as far as Bangalore with some European friends we had met at Rainforest. Our train pulled into Chennai, on time at 9:30 PM. Chennai, formerly called Madras, is, to my surprise, the forth largest city in India, at almost 7 million people, it is crowded and it is busy, we weren't at Rainforest Retreat any more. We managed to readjust to the big city and find our hotel for the night after a 20 minute auto rickshaw ride through the city. The hotel, which was listed, but not highly touted, in our guidebook was just on the edge of acceptable, no screens and lots of mosquitoes, but we made it through the night with the help of a fan and were up in the morning for our last excursion before leaving from Chennai in four days, hard to believe this three month dream trip is about to come to an end. That's it for now but I hope to get back to a computer before we leave to let you know how our days at the beach were spent.