The High Country

The side of the road that slipped past my window alternated with dark trees illuminated only by headlights and moonlight, and towns clustered against the roadside. The bus ride to Kodaikanal was long, and the majority of it was spent passing villages haloed in the bluish light of bare fluorescent tubes. Our longest stop was at a gas station in a town I can’t name at about three in the morning. The gas station’s bathroom urinal emptied from a rubber hose onto the floor below, flooding the floor tiles with about a quarter inch of piss and filling the room with the smell of old and new urine.


It was only in the last two hours that the road started the 7,000 foot climb into the Western Ghats. The villages grew smaller and further apart as the bus drove higher into an invasive forest of Eucalyptus, Mexican Pine, and Acacia. Closing in on Kodaikanal, the stray dogs plodding by the roadside looked healthier. Unlike the scarred, rib-baring dogs of Chennai, these appeared well fed and had full coats.

The morning I was greeted with in Kodaikanal was cold and clear. The days I spent there reminded me of early spring in California. From my time at the Vattakanal Conservation Trust and being driven around the Mountains in an old, blue Mahindra Jeep I learned how much the mountains had changed. Before the British and Indians imported invasive tree species, the ecosystem in the Ghats was grasslands and shola forests in protected ravines and the shadows of the prevailing winds.

The pictures I saw of still unchanged landscapes looked similar, from a distance, to California as well. Of course, at nearly 7,000 feet, the factors shaping life in Kodai are different, but from an atheistic and periodically homesick perspective, I guess I wanted to be reminded of home.

The thirty-minute walk from my friends’ house in Pambapurim to Vattakanal is among the most beautiful I have ever known. Every turn produces new mountain vistas of plunging slopes and when you find yourself right outside of the village, the left-hand side of the road turns into a pear orchard, which was just beginning to blossom with shy, white flowers while I was there.

Vattakanal itself is a strange dead end. The community is a favorite of young Israeli tourists and the sole café at the end of the road has come to serve exclusively Israeli food. From talking to a teacher at the Kodaikanal International School, I came to learn that there are even two rabbis who live in Vattakanal year round to keep the young people from partying too much. Nikola, another volunteer at the Vattakanal Conservation Trust, joked that I would have never guessed that here, at the end of the world, the people would speak Tamil, German, and Yiddish.