Driving my bike back from work in Munnar-1

A few years back, I used to work in a Resort near Munnar, Kerala. Munnar is a hill resort, about 4 hours drive from cochin or Madurai. It is a nice cool green place, where TATA TEA had its tea plantations. Most of the town was linked to TATA TEA or to some other plantation company like Harrisons Malayalam.

The rolling hills and tea gardens give Munnar a level of greenery, that is not seen in a normal hill resort. From September till Feb, the Fog is heavy in the evenings. Initially I used to stay in a small room, about 35 kms away from Munnar, and about 16kms away from my place of work. The drive to office and back was along a long winding road, with lots of turns, and a few tight hairpin bends, and a little portion of about 4 Kms was through cardamom plantations. Having spent all my life in cities, the drive to work and back to my room was an adventure, which my citybred education hadn’t prepared me for.

A cardamom plantation is not like a tea garden. Tea grows as shrubs which are pruned like a bonsai plant, and is grown on the hill tops with no other trees except occasional silver oak trees which are grown to help retain the soils moisture. So when u look at a tea garden, you can see long distances without many trees to obstruct your view. The hills themselves look various shades of green, depending on each patch of plantation, whether it had been plucked, or was sprouting new leaves, or had been burnt by dew

Cardamom plantation on the other hand was a thick forest of cardamom plants which would have lots of other trees within it. This was wild elephant country. There were numerous elephant corridors crisscrossing this, since it was close to Thekkady- the Periyar Tiger reserve forest. An elephant corridor is an elephant created highway where herds of elephants cross regularly on their way between forests. When a herd of these heavy creatures move, nothing stands in their way, they flatten everything and everybody in their path, when moving from forest to forests which are connected. These elephant corridors sometimes cross human roads. Woe is, if u happen to be in their path while they are crossing. It would result in either a Photostat copy of your former self or a new kind of fertiliser paste

There was about 4 Kms of cardamom plantations that I had to drive through every day.The morning drive was quite pleasant, the cool shady trees and the myriad birds chirping in them. The road had 2 shoulders, one higher than the road, and one lower. The upper shoulder would have the cardamom plants higher than me on my bike, while the lower half was below the road level. In places, the shoulders would have crumbled by soil erosion or crushed to form a slope by the elephants. My mobile phone was pretty useless, as the range was never stable and in the cardamom forest, there was absolutely no range. When I reached these parts, I would normally slow down, looking nervously on both sides, to see if any elephant was hiding to jump out on me, and say”Peek a boo” before smashing me and my bike to kingdom come. When I drove through this stretch, each turn would hold a surprise, there might be fallen trees across the road, elephant dung, or jeep taxis coming silently down the wrong side of the road, having switched off their engines to save fuel, and taking advantage of the steep incline of the road. Once I did meet a jeep taxi in this fashion on my bike and literally fell head over heels on it, ending in a passionate hug of its bonnet, breaking my left forearm. This required a steel rod to be screwed on inside my arm for a year. Before this misadventure, every night, after work I had to take the 16 km drive back to my room. The thrill ride started then.

The 1st stretch through the tea garden would usually be in thick fog, where the lack of streetlights on the road meant, the only light was my headlamp, which wasn’t much use in the thick dense fog, limiting my vision sometimes to a few feet in front of the bike. Sometimes it meant literally walking, while astride the bike, so that I went slower than my bike would permit me. If I tried any thing faster on the bike, I would either drop off into a sheer fall on one side or go smashing into the tea shrubs at the corners. Either way, wouldn’t have done me much good. Each time there was fog on the road, my heart would go into overdrive, blood rushing into my head, as I peered into the fog to make out if it was in fact a wild elephant standing just ahead out of reach of the bikes light. Then as I got closer, it would turn out to be just a rock or the result of an overactive imagination. If there was a slight breeze and the thick fog was flowing towards you, then it was easy to imagine hidden shapes materialising just out of your eyesight, but waiting for you to reach them.

The cardamom plantation stretch was a living nightmare for me. It was only 4 Kms, but it felt like 40. I would enter it expecting my nemesis the hidden elephant to jump on me any time “Surprise”. All the wild elephant stories I had heard would be going through my head. “Lone Elephants are dangerous. They would attack you for no reason”. “Mother elephants are dangerous because they guard their calves” “If its been raining and is cold, its dangerous to drive through the cardamom plantation. The elephants would be standing on the road which would still be warm from the days sun”. “Its dangerous to be crossing the elephant corridors, because you might cross when there is a gap among a herd crossing the road, and they may not like a human standing between them and the rest of the herd”. “Beware of mad elephants which will attack for no reason”. “You are not safe in the Tea gardens either, because elephants come there too.” In short the general idea conveyed to my city bred mind was to stay as far as possible from them, if you could help it. The straight stretches of the road where the plantation ended, would mean the bike would be literally flying along, to get out as soon as possible, but the hairpin bends inside the plantation meant I had to be very careful and slow going down, wondering if there was any loners waiting to meet me as I turned down the bend towards them. I always used to wonder, what would I do, if there really was one, when I turned my bike down the hair pin bend. I wouldn’t be able to turn the bike fast enough, on the steep upward slope of the hairpin bend, to escape. The only choice would have been to get off the bike and run into the plantation itself, hoping to out run it. But then there was no guarantee I wouldn’t bump into it again in the dark plantation, or one of its other kin.

Thinking of all this elephant lore and the terrifying stories of people, who told me of narrow escapes which they had when elephants attacked, the ghosts in my head had a merry time, when I entered the cardamom forest. My heart would be having a peak cardiac workout. I would be licking my lips to wet my dry mouth, and my eyes would be dry because, I wouldn’t close my eyes for fear of missing to see an elephant. Each tree, each clump of tall bushes would mean my heart did a tap dance. If the bikes engine faltered, because I didn’t shift up to tackle a climb, I would have a minor heartattack. Every night, when slowly negotiating a bend and coming down, I see the plants crushed on both sides of the road with me in the middle, fresh elephant dung on the road, and the wind blowing from the plantation brings the strong smell of elephants. My heart stops beating,the blood rushes into my head, my mind freezes, I peer anxiously into the shadows out of my bikes light area, and pray. These are moments when you understand what they mean by animal instincts and survival instincts.

Luckily or otherwise, during the one year I travelled through this stretch, the elephants did not fix an appointment with me, though there were many times, jeep drivers and people who took the same route, before me or after me, asking me afterwards, “Didn’t you see the 2 Tuskers today. They created hell on the road, smashed a small grocery store and then went into the tea gardens where the workers had to chase them away. You must have narrowly missed them.It was a memorable sight” or “Do you know, yesterday night around 10.30,2 labourers who were repairing the road were attacked. After work they had had a couple of drinks and walked into the forest to take a leak and they bumped into an elephant in the dark. The elephant picked one of them and threw him. He landed on a tree and escaped with some broken bones. The other guy was squashed like a bug. Ooh! you should have seen the sight”

I used to thank my guardian angels for missing the memorable sight. After I broke my arm in the Jeep accident, I couldn't drive the bike for some time and had to shift to a house in Munnar town, and the night drives through the plantations stopped.