We left the business of Shimoga for the peace and tranquillity of the coffee and tea plantations, before reaching the jungle – or so we thought!
Driving through the plantations was wonderful, so peaceful and colourful and lovely warm, trusting people en-route, which hopefully comes through in some of today’s pictures. Several time we were able to stop and play cricket with the local children. The bats and balls seem to be going down well and will hopefully get well utilised over the comings months.
Today saw us climbing to over 1000 metres, via the inevitable hair-pin bends twice, but in between we had a wonderful drive along the edge of the Ghat mountains with the cars spread out and visible for several kms. As we are now all pretty comfortable with the hill climbs and this is India – there was another surprise that caught us all off guard, and that was approx 10kms of extremely narrow and very deep pot-holed roads – a huge test of anyone’s skill and reaction as a driver.
As the pot holes were much deeper and more frequent than experienced to date (on the edge of a vertical mountain-side drop!). In fact, they were now approx 40 per 10metre stretch of road – it’s similar to some kind of endurance puzzle that you have to weave through just to get down the mountain! This stage took about 3 hours to cover because of the intensity and slow speeds involved, and saw 4 cars lose their sumps completely and the mechanics had to work overtime. Sadly one car had its sump replaced and became mobile again, but because they had to collect another 2 passengers and their baggage (who had lost their sump too) they caught another big pot hole and broke another.
Losing a sump means that the oil leaks from your engine (usually at an alarming rate) and until empty and then if still driven the engine will seize completely. Imagine losing your car up a mountain in a foreign country.
We also saw one car go off into a steep and deep ditch which looked quite scary. To make matters worse the co-driver was bitten by two leaches. We stopped en-route for a fluid level adjustment later and headed off into the trees, only to come back with a leach of our own which was quickly ejected!
Eventually, we made it close to our destination in the dark, but once again the directions were incorrect – so wishing that the organisers would give us a map as it’s pretty tough to navigate at night on a mountain side with inaccurate directions. The funny thing is that it has become clear that they don’t have a map either which is nothing short of irresponsible, and something to be picked up on our return with the other health and safety issues. Again, we have been lucky with our car, but many of the others have been running on bald tyres and without seat belts since day one.
It appears that everyone got lost because of the directions, but eventually managed to make it to the jungle camp by asking directions. Great to meet the huge spiders that chose to share our room! They were huge! Still at least we weren’t in the room with the scorpions which weren’t discovered until the morning!
