Indian Samurai इंडियन सामुराई

My friend knows by now, you must be an adventurer to travel with a samurai! After encounters with Naxalite terrorists in Bastar (Chattisgarh), with rhinoceros and dancing monks in Assam, this time I offered a dive in the heart of the jungle of Karnataka...

A good girl, she trusts me and hardly checks on the destination. A good girl, she doesn’t make any comment when we arrive in our guesthouse at one in the morning after a flight of an hour and half and a five-hour drive on a bumpy mud path. Not such a good girl, she wakes me up in the middle of the night screaming: “I'm terrified! I want to leave!” And I discover her, sitting on the bed, trying to beat the pitch darkness and see with the light of her mobile phone what beast has invited itself. Cautious me, before turning the light on, asks her if she thinks it’s a rat. Cautious her – she knows that if she answers yes I would be out of the room in no time and she would have to fight the monster alone –responds that she doesn’t think it’s a rat. So I turn on the light. Samurai til the end of the night... And bravely, I get rid of the intruder: a pillow. Yes yes! The pillow was weighing on her feet and following her movements, slyly imitating a snake. Or a rat. 

After this agitated night, what a reward when we open the door in the morning: hibiscus, bananas, plant this, plant that! And butterflies. And dragonflies. And spiders. And insects coming straight out of Alice in Wonderland. As we are fully into observing nature, we stop dead when we come across a handsome male... Huh ? Hellooo? Whatthehellareyoudoinghere Gael*? Breathtaking! So this is here, in the asshole of Karnataka, that super hot guys hide away... Who would have thought?? 

We go straight to the point with this French chilo-italo-belgio-spanish specimen: in the jungle, no place for pretences. We girls are dressed like truck-drivers, with tans that goes with it (due to a nasty sunburn during the first walk), and hairy, the truck-drivers! (Our hairs appear to have got inspired by the lushness of the vegetation and who says jungle says no electricity says no removal and with the humidity you start looking more like Cheetah than Jane in no time!). And our Apollo spends his days gardening, shirtless, with leeches stuck between his toes, cobwebs in the beard, paint under his fingernails and a swimsuit that makes him scratch his butt constantly. And if it was only that… After a month and a half of manual chores (and loneliness) in the jungle, he is so happy to find compatriots (and girls, young and single) that he can’t stop talking.  

So he goes on telling us about the frequency of his showers (twice a week), his sexual frustration (or how he discovered how to download porn pictures on his ipod for his lonely nights), his difficulties linked to the absence of toilet paper, his Don Juan behaviour who fucks everything that moves, his failed studies and his Indian-style ‘school of life’, his macrophage attitude with girls (he painted himself as a ‘fungus’ that phagocytes his girlfriends and thrives thanks to them), his desire to run around naked in our room. Yes Yes, we also fell speechless... Especially after he clarified that he liked hairy women (an asset in the jungle, given what I explained above). And that he’d love to spend the night between us two! Ah the energy of 25 year old males!  

I  had chosen the place for its seclusion: no phone network, no internet, no TV, no computer, no nothing. But fate had decided otherwise and forced me to listen to the stories of George of the Jungle, who seems to have missed out on the concept of “be beautiful and shut up”. Eight hours of non-stop blabla. I have to say he lost my attention after his tirade on zoophilia... And the worst, yes the worst, is that after this unloading of atrocities you look at him and think “how hot is this guy”! Ah women, go figure... 

During our scrabble games, my friend and I observe Georgee gardening fervently. And between games, we watch him catch cockroaches to feed his scorpion and frogs, frolic in the river, carry bamboos, respond to the smiles of the blushing Indian girls... Ah Georgee... Who also refused to answer to this sweet nickname of a “failed Tarzan”! 

There is nothing like speeches on organic farming to calm raging hormones... I had indeed chosen the guesthouse of an organic plantation run by a couple of botanical researchers (a Canadian of Indian origin guy and his Indian wife) who fled their Delhi lab to see how agriculture works in real life... We learn that extensive monocultures and pesticides destroy the soil, the ecosystem and our organisms. And the proliferation of coffee plantations in the region threatens the natural habitat of elephants, pushing them to attack the fields and villagers. We also perfect our herpetological and subarachnoid culture. Which did not prevent the eyes of my friend's to spring out of their orbits whenever they locate a huge hairy spider while she is quietly reading in bed! Or call Georgee to the rescue when a giant grasshopper decides to play trampoline on the bed! Because in addition to being beautiful, he is strolling around everywhere with his ‘girl-trap’, a small net with which he is catching frogs... 

Our hot horny male is forced to get out of his way to satisfy his sexual needs! So he invites us for a spicy rum drink by a bonfire lit up by himself with love. It turned out that he fell head over toes for your humble servant and... went back to his room as (damm) hungry as before. Like I said, women, go figure... ;) 

We heartily thank him for spicing up our jungle 3 day-stay that would have otherwise consisted only of morning treks, tasty and healthy (maybe even a little too healthy!) food, naps, games and discovery of organic farming! 

*He looks big time like Gael García Bernal.  

Coorg, Karnataka - Nov 2013

I strongly recommend Mojo Plantation, Madikeri district, Coorg, Karnataka. 

 Here is an interesting angle to tell about my trip to Sundarban...

Departure from Kolkata at 8:30 in the morning for a 3 hour ride in a van falling into pieces. Thighs glued by the sweat to the fake leather seat. No need to complain; better to just try and avoid fainting by swallowing gallons of water. 

We arrive at the pier to embark on a motor boat that a guy is vigorously bailing out. It is midday, not a shadow of shadow, and the “cruise” is not ending – an hour and a half by 40 degrees seems to last much longer...

We finally get down on our island, where the eco-village is set up. Hell and damnation, there is network!! I do as planned (be without a phone for 4 days) and switch off my Blackberry as if there was no network: I'm on holidays!

On our left, a kind of big pond of brownish water in which a water buffalo is chilling. And in which we are invited to jump... Since we are not sure whether this is a joke, we first go and drop our stuff in the room. And, to my surprise (and I daresay even relief, since I had opted for “roots” holiday (without electricity)), there is a fan – so I won't die of heat! 

I enter the dark bathroom to discover that...

(Click on Lire la suite to read more)

... 1. In fact the fan is just for decoration, there is actually no electricity and 2. The water coming from the taps stinks and there is sediment in the bucket. We therefore reach the obvious conclusion: the water of the shower comes from the natural “swimming pool”. So hop hop, we jump in our bathing suits and run and jump in the muddy pond! And how good it feels! 

The tone is set... Special treatment for my skin which will be repeatedly rubbed with sunscreen, muddy water and mosquito repellent... All this stuff mixed by sweat, because I sweat like a sow. I sweat so much that despite drinking three litres of water every day I hardly pee! 

At night, I wake up suffocating. No air under the mosquito net... I'd sleep outside but rats are roaming around. 

Sitting on the floor mats of the main hut, or outside, we have a happy time eating with our fingers!! However the same operation on the boat proves a bit more adventurous: with the wind, we end up splashing curry all over ourselves and with rice in the hair. We live dangerously! 

Two days in a row we get up at 5:30 in the morning to spend the day criss-crossing canals of the Sundarban delta, hoping to see a tiger. As we are far East and India has only one time zone, the sun comes out very early. So at 5:30 it is sunny and yet still a bit cool! Up to 6 AM when you feel it's already noon because it is so hot! 

Knocked out by the heat, I divide my time on the boat between deep naps and less deep naps on the mattresses. When a sailor comes out of his bunker with a pillow bearing large white traces (his sweat I presume, myabe others’ too) I am too tired to think and just lay my head on it with delight. I keep pushing back the boundaries of hygiene! 

And then they bring us chai. It's funny, the cup has a salty taste. So okay, they probably washed it in the brown water of the river. Normal. Just drink your chai and shut up!

We get down from the boat once or twice to climb into an observation tower and watch the animals that come to drink in an artificial clear (rain) water pond. Except that the animals do not come out at noon! Nor should we for that matter! A short walk for twenty minutes and I almost faint from dehydration...

The return to Kolkata has something epic since our boat is under repair... 

It takes us fifteen minutes of walk to reach the pier. Then ten minutes to cross the river on a boat overloaded with Indians, bicycles, food etc. Then forty-five minutes on a cart pulled by a type pedalling as a devil and hardly sweating – whereas me on the other side, I sweat just by looking at him! Crossing the main street of the village takes us a long time: it is market day. And we have to cross the river again, on a boat even more loaded. 

Then we hop in the same busted van to Kolkata.  

At this stage my head hurts, I am covered in mud, my skin is almost burnt and I am tired... So when someone passes me a guava washed with God-knows-what water, I just have a look at how the driver handles it and just like him I bite into it, to the sheer amazement of the Quebec tourists who are with us!

We finally arrive at the airport in a state of utmost dirtiness. I dream of shampoo, soap for intimate hygiene (because washing myself with water flavoured with Buffalo dung goes well only a few days...), moisturizer, a mirror and tweezers, a deodorant that can actually be of some use etc. But all of this will have to wait... For the moment I make an unconventional use of the toilet hand spree and wash myself as I can in the airport loo! I feel alive again...

Good Grief it was hot! 

And how I longed for of a fresh lime soda sweet (not easy to get when there is no electricity...)!

I should have listened to the Bangladeshis who refused to take me on a tour in May or even googled the weather – I just did it right now: “Summer season is here and the region becomes a hut furnace. Days are very hot but nights are comparatively cooler, but are still beyond the comfortable zone. This might not be the most ideal time for sightseeing and jungle activities. Visiting Sundarbans in May will require sun protective gears.”*

NB : My travel buddy asks me to precise that I must be particularly sensitive to heat because he didn’t find it so unbearable…

* http://www.mustseeindia.com/Sundarbans-weather