Night Job

The morning after we arrived back in Austin from India, Evan (and I) woke up at noon. He just loved it. And he set about trying to imagine jobs he could do that would let him sleep till noon. His first attempt: "I could fly back from India and be jet-lagged enough to sleep till noon everyday."  Me: "Umm - who would pay you to do that?" 

Sensing that neither Evan nor I were qualified to argue about jobs, Jo opened the question up to her Facebook page.

Heading Back Home

On the final morning in Coorg after a breakfast of alu poori and methi parathas we set out for the long ride back home. First step: a six hour drive to Bangalore. Here we are with Raveesh, our driver. I was trigger happy with my iPhone camera on the drive back to Bangalore - here are some photos.

We drove past coffee plantations and descended from the hills into fields of sugarcane and paddy and teak and coconut palms and colorful villages. Roadside vendors sold coconut water, vegetables, hand made wooden toys, tiffins (a light snack - the one in this photo and a couple of others I saw were named "somethnig-and-something Tiffanies") and Chinese stuffed dolls. The road was uniformly good except when we drove through small towns - where road bumps and zig zagging barricades popped up unannounced. 

We passed through the historic town of Srirangapatna where Tipu Sutlan fought the forces of the British East India Company in the late 1800s and beat them back a couple of times with the first large scale use of rockets in battle. When we got closer to Bangalore we passed through a surreal landscape of giant granite monoliths of the Deccan Plateau - some of the largest in the world. They dwarf our very own Enchanted Rock here in Texas, and Raveesh announced that large portions of Sholay (Bollywood's first huge adventure blockbuster, from the mid 1970s) were shot here. 

The photo of the Ford billboard is interesting in that Jo noticed that at the bottom it reads "To test drive a Ford EcoSport, give a missed call to: " followed by a phone number. India has one of the cheapest cell phone tariffs in the world - calls costs about a cent per minute and are only charged to the calling party. The missed call is a way for the caller to incur zero charges - call and hang up quickly and wait for the called party to call you back. It has progressed from a social mechanism to a bona fide user interface. You can give a missed call to the prime minister's office and get a call back that plays a recording of his latest report to the nation. Or to your bank and get a text back with your latest account balance.

A little bit further into Bangalore we ran into stand-still traffic. The ubiquitous auto rickshaws were everywhere - a familiar sight from what I remember four decades ago. But wait - see the driver staring at his smartphone attached to the rickshaw? Raveesh again explained - he's using Ola - India's home grown Uber. You can hail a rickshaw from your app.

And in places like the one advertised here, located upstairs from a store selling Kingfisher beer, young Indians are getting trained in hadoop and Amazon Web Services and are using big data from our buying habits and insurance claims and inmate recidivism to create apps and algorithms.

We arrived in Bangalore back at Suki's home and had one last dinner with her. Suki left to attend the opening of a new cancer clinic somewhere in the city and we went down for a nap. Our alarms went off an midnight and we showered and changed and packed and Raveesh dropped us off at Bangalore airport. The kids posed for a photo in this rickshaw at a store where Vivian bought some gifts for her friends. At 04:30 our flight left for Dubai. After a two hour layover in Dubai we loaded into the giant Airbus 380 for our 15 hour flight to San Francisco. Evan had an adrenaline and testosterone fest - he watched every X-men movie and he and I watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" together. At one point about 7 hours into the flight Jo overheard a fellow passenger complaining to a flight attendant about poor wifi and she replied "I'm sorry sir - we are flying over the North Pole and there aren't a lot of wifi satellites out here".

We landed in San Francisco (can you tell from the color palate that one of these photos is at airport in India and the other in America?) and a few hour later hopped on to our last flight - a three hour trip back to Austin. We arrived at the white wooden house a little after 11:00pm and everyone slept till noon the next day.

Elephants

One morning after breakfast we thought we'd go on the advertised "plantation walk". But the management regretfully informed us that the walk had been cancelled due to a problem with wild elephants. Not to worry - they were using tame elephants from the elephant camp to capture the wild elephants. Which piqued our interest to visit the elephant camp the next morning.

Situated on the other bank of the Kaveri River, we arrived at the elephant camp after a short ferry ride. The kids fed the elephants and watched them drink from the river. We walked around and looked at the enclosures for the wild elephants from yesterday from afar, under towering eucalyptus and teaks (if you look carefully at the left enclosure, you can see a elephant trunk sticking out from between the slats).

A few days later, back in Bangalore, Suki's mother asked the kids about the trip to Coorg. And Vivian replied "We saw an elephant pee. It's penis was bigger than my leg."

Biology class in the wild!

Speaking of wild, the elephants seemed well cared for and all that but it was disheartening to see them reduced to tame versions of what they once were - inevitable collateral damage when two species bump into each other in their search for resources and habitat.

Coorg

On the morning after the last of the wedding celebrations we drove off to Coorg, on the eastern foothills of the Western Ghats - the mountain range that runs parallel to the west coast of India. Our destination was a resort about 250 kilometers away, but due to our having to traverse the city of Bangalore during rush hour (which is pretty much mid morning to late evening) it took us seven hours. Our driver Raveesh drove as fast as he safely could while we napped, snacked, and enjoyed the passing panorama.

The resort was beautiful, nestled in a coffee, beetle nut, and black pepper plantation. It was also empty - being low season and not the weekend. We were pampered and we mostly lazed around, ate, played chess, and didn't do much for the next day.

One morning we drove to Abby Falls and the town of Madikeri. This is the view from the Raja's Seat - a place where the raja could sit and enjoy looking at his lands. A little bit later we passed this rickshaw full of kids from school. I would estimate that there were probably ten of them (and zero car seats :) in their school uniforms. They waved and smiled toothily at Vivian and Evan.

The next day we visited the Namdroling Tibetan Buddhist monastery - the exile home of one of the great and ancient Tibetan monasteries. A plaque in front of the temple explains how the Rinpoche started construction with Rs. 300 in his pocket and his bare hands. Today it houses over 5000 monks and is one of the largest centers of Tibetan Buddhist learning.

To mark this astonishing accomplishment Vivian bought some trinkets for her choir mates and Jo bought a souvenir for Carol.

We headed back through Kushalnagar town and procured some silk fabric and met with a tailor who measured the kids and told us he would have Evan's sherwani and Vivian's lehenga-choli ready for us by next morning. Then we stopped for a late lunch at a restaurant where Evan refused to eat almost anything and Vivian chowed down two plates of "lolipop" chicken. We were so stuffed by the time we returned to our coffee plantation that we missed dinner and were fast asleep when the worried chef sent hot Bournvita to our bungalow for the kids.