Coffee, Cardamom & the Forests of Coorg

The bus driver to Madikeri had a beaming smile, an immaculately maintained mustache, a steering wheel with a two-foot radius, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.  Sitting at the front of the bus, sweatily snuggled amongst mostly men, is better for the view but worse for the nerves.  Like, quite a lot worse.  The driving in this place is unreal. The bus also has a Suggestion Box though it was hard to tell if anyone ever had ever used it.

Three hours later on arrival, after arguing with a smarmy rickshaw driver who then got a commission from the hotelier, I spent the night not far from the bus stop at a characterless but clean hotel where the receptionist sleeps behind the desk so that he can be available twenty-four-seven.  There’s no getting away from the mosques and temples, so it was the usual 5am wake up call, which was also when a group of other guests decided to start making lots of noise in the corridor.  Sunday morning, god strewth.

Despite a somewhat uninspiring start, Madikeri turned out to be a true highlight of the India trip.  My randomly-found hiking guide Channappa was a local coffee farmer who’s been guiding for nine years.  He speaks six of India’s twenty-two official languages (122 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people) and wears slip-on sandals, in contrast to my full-on hiking boots.  We spent two days trekking up and down through muggy emerald forests and expanses of rice paddies, chatting with other small farmers who we met along the way in their burbling Kannada tongue.  Without wanting to romanticize these people, I was struck by how content they seemed – a light in their eyes or something in their faces that suggested the benefits of leading an outdoor rural life inscribed with agricultural labour.

I was blown away by the forests.  Several centuries of exploitation by colonisers and latter-day loggers, yet this earth is bountiful.  The monsoon brings 150 inches of rain here each year.  Many of the common crops grow happily amidst the jungle: coffee, cardamom, pepper, vanilla, ginger, lemongrass, cashew, pineapple, wild tobacco and the occasional avocado, orange and lemon trees.  There are less savoury things in the forests too: leeches which dance frantically on the forest floor and then back-bend their way up your shoes to bite through your socks; poisonous vipers lying quietly near the paths, one of which put Channappa out of commission for weeks as a teenager; nettles which will make you itch for a month; and yellow poisonous frogs.

Channappa’s grandfather purchased 14 acres of forest here in the 1920s during the British Raj, at a time when poisoning tigers was rewarded by the government.  He grew cardamom, an unassuming plant whose seeds grow in small fleshy bulbs just above the ground. India is the second largest producer in the world of this third-most-expensive spice. Nowadays farmers focus on coffee because the price has doubled in the last year or two, especially for organic coffee.  Many of the trees are already 40-80 years old. 

 Channappa’s spotless home is at the top of a steep climb, marked by roses, geraniums and hibiscus but otherwise fully ensconsed by forest.  He and his neighbours have put in their own road, their own water system and their own electricity.   These are impressive and expensive feats given the dramatic terrain.  He has two impeccably behaved children (there are government benefits for families who only have two offspring) who are fluent in English, a dutiful wife who spent hours preparing a sumptuous dinner, breakfast and packed lunch, and, importantly, a bathroom with hot water heated on a fire. 

The night brought soft rain and deep sleep.  I liked this place so much that I offered to come and help pick his coffee for free during the harvest season – though I imagine I’d be one of the most unproductive labourers.  Perhaps even the laughing stock.  In fact, almost most certainly the laughing stock.