Blog 14. Breakfasting in a kitchen garden in the jungle, armageddon in the air and five star scaffolding
Day 12 – Monday 25th November 2019 – In transit to Delhi
Having arranged to have breakfast at 08:30 we sauntered down to the central hub knowing all the other guests would be out looking for tigers. We were led down a new path to the kitchen garden where, in the centre, was one of the little shelters like described on the trip from Panna to Tala. Here our breakfast was brought to us. Fresh watermelon juice. To eat, a savoury crepe which I found delicious and French toast with chocolate and banana which the ever lovely found delicious. The die were cast; I ate her savoury and she my sweet.
Zen saying: “You should sit in nature for 20 minutes every day…unless you are busy. Then you should sit for an hour”. We were not busy but we lingered over breakfast for well over an hour.
Treehouse Hideaway had made the decision to create the kitchen garden in order to grow organic fruit and vegetables for the guests. As much as possible they currently use local villagers for supplies.
We had an even bigger surprise when we got back to the hub, Adwait had not gone out on a drive this morning, instead he stayed back to say goodbye to us. We had bonded with Adwait. He was great company and really made our stay at the Hideaway something special. His knowledge and enthusiasm of Indian wildlife was exceptional. He said “you are my family”. We exchanged What’s App details and went through a few more of my clicks on the iPad. “Wait a minute!” Adwait exclaimed at one the the photos of the leopard leaping through the trees in Panna “there is your leopard”. Sure enough one picture is a perfect portrait of the leopard looking straight at us see Blog 9 . We had scanned through these photos time after time finding only an ear here, a leg there, maybe a little tail but completely missed the obvious, camouflaged amongst the foliage. Another great spot by Adwait!
We felt sad to be leaving Tree House Hideaway, Adwait and Bandhavgarh Reserve. Pugdundee Safaris had produced an excellent reference book “Photographic Field Guide – Wildlife of Central India” We bought a copy. It was only when we took it back to the treehouse to do the last bits of packing that we smelt ‘the smell’. I immediately recognised the smell of moth balls. The book reeked of them. It is the only way to keep a book safe from the termites in rural India. As I publish this, some eleven months after the holiday, the book can now be opened without recoiling, though I suspect the smell will linger for many years yet! Another guide they had was a photographic guide to the tigers of Bandhavgarh reserve, it was the 2015 version so unfortunately not all of the tigers we saw were in it.
As we waited for the car to take us away I spotted a framed message on the wall from Pugdundee Safaris, the people who owned Treehouse Hideaway. It simply read “Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints”. How true!
Janu from Tala, our driver, arrived in his pristine white taxi.
As we left Tala and headed up the main road towards Magdhi gate we had to pull off the road. Coming in the opposite direction was a motor scooter. Behind the driver was another man, arms fully outstretched, holding in his bare hands the edges of a large sheet of glass. No gloves! You really see it all in India!
Janu was quite chatty and spoke reasonable English. He told us that in 1945 Tala had a large mill where they made paper from “Big Bamboo”. The factory died a long time ago and like many places the tourists keep Tala going nowadays.
Janu was playing a music selection on an SD card “Madhu 50 tracks”, it was rather excellent. I commented, and he turned it down…we both pleaded for him to turn it back up. Bollywood classics interspersed with modern hits but all with a heavy Indian tinge and none of this all-pervasive rap nonsense.
On the way to Umaria we passed a man carrying his new wooden plough on his bicycle. Another feat of determination – I wish I had been able to click this.
When we crossed the single rail track at Umaria Janu explained that it took five trains and several days to reach Dehli.
We turned left at Sepura onto the main Jabalpur Road. It was market day, I decided to take a video along the main drag and we saw just about everything including the bicycle milkman, an enquiring dog or two,and the obligatory cow taking his share of the vegetable stall. Here were potters, police, purveyors of every kind intermixed with food stalls, carts of melons, motorcycles and the gaudily painted Indian lorries.
On the far outskirts we stopped for a toilet break at “the top hotel”. It was very Indian, very grubby and looked out onto the ubiquitous rubbish heap. There were piles of wood and iron, assorted buckets, plastic sheeting and pipes. The garden was far from manicured or natural. On the way out I offered the owner ten Rupees for the pleasure of his facilities he declined to accept it. “For Eeenlgish it is free”. He didn’t even try to entice us in to try his dining delights which was just as well as we had packed lunch in the car.
Now Indian pack lunches are predictable, they always contain fruit juice in a carton with a straw which is too short to reach the bottom. They always contain a piece of fruit which needs peeling to be eaten, but no knife. There is always something which you did not ask for….In this case a muffin. I hate muffins at the best of times, but Indian muffins tend to be large and like eating a natural sponge. Inside the recycled newspaper bags, the stars of this particular snack lunch were two samosas and, Fun Top Krazy sauce in sachets – several of them! Whatever you eat savoury in India at least one sachet of tomato sauce is present.
Feeling almost replete we were finally satisfied when we remembered the Treehouse Hideaway butter biscuits from the jar in our room which we had stashed away before we left. On safari other tour guides and drivers swoop on cars from the Treehouse Hideaway to have these biscuits; these we kept to ourselves.
My eyes drifted to the passing Indian fields where I saw a man pulling a plough with a second man steering. Then the view was blocked by a bright, shiny, state of the art combine harvester…the type of complete contrasts which greet you time and again in lovely, enigmatic India.
A little further on we crossed a river and passed a parade of brightly clad ladies returning from washing clothes in the river, each had a little bundle on their head. See the end of Blog 13 for the picture.
As we approached the outskirts of Jabalpur, Janu turned off the main road and took us into a very narrow road through a native village. He explained that this is the quickest route to the airport and takes us past the army camp. On Googling on the internet later much of the ordnance for the Indian armed forces is manufactured on site at this camp. i thought security seemed very low key as we skirted the barb-wired fence.
As we pulled into the airport I realised that neither the ever lovely nor I had any money to give to Janu. There was no cash machine either. We felt very mean not tipping him. He had been good, if not exceptional company and deserved more from us.
Inside the terminal we checked in and to our surprise our attempt to book excess baggage and do online check-in had worked. Without this we each had only a 10 KG, my backpack alone was heavier. Airside we drank hot chai from the kiosk.
As we walked out to the bus to take us to the plane I sneaked a quick shot of the terminal building and was shouted at that I “should not be doing this thing”. This reminded us of almost one year earlier when I took a photo of the tail plane of our South African flight into Windhoek from Johannesburg. Then I could understand, as slap bang in the photo was the control tower which served both a civilian and military purpose.
The only memorable part of the flight into Delhi was the sunset seen through the clouds of smog; it looked like the world was about the end!
We were greeted by Abhishek (Abhi) our latest, and as it turned out, last meet and greet walah. We were introduced to our driver Dharamveer. Dharamveer has silver hair which is very unusual in India as they usually use henna to the hair to keep it black (see earlier reference in Varanasi). We were told that Dharamveer would be our driver tomorrow also. In the car we nibbled at a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate we had purchased at the outrageous price of IRS 675 (£7.67 sterling equivalent) – we craved sugar and this was Eeenglish chocolate..
We hit The Claridges, our hotel late in the afternoon. This establishment was very much a step up from the rest of our accommodation, a true 5 Star Hotel, chosen by the ever lovely. After registration we were taken up to our room. It looked very fit for purpose until we opened the curtains. One would normally expect the room to get lighter when you open it to the day outside. It remained dark – the window looked out onto scaffolding and tarpaulin. They were renovating some of the exterior of the hotel including where our room was. We made it known we did not wish to sit for three days looking out at an aerial building site or worse still have workers looking in to us trying to relax. Having eaten the hand made gorgeous Indian sweets, beautifully sweet with condensed milk, jaggery, coconut and infused with green cardamom, we were taken to another room just down the corridor. The first thing I did was open the curtains to be greeted by a view of the inner courtyard and gardens of the hotel…. much better, though to be honest uninspiring.
Before we settled down for a nice hot bath and a relax I went to see the concierge. I had identified that there were a number of book shops in Delhi and we hoped that if we asked the concierge they might be able to track down a copy of Raghu Chundawat’s Tigers of The Emerald Forest (See Blog 8). I provided the ISBN, title and author and the concierge promised he would find a copy…somewhere. A little later the concierge phoned our room to say that he had succeeded, Barhisson’s Bookshop on the case.
Now we settled down to decide where to eat. Our combined memories and various reference sources (Trip Advisor, Rough Guide and Lonely Planet) failed to identify the restaurant we had gone to with fellow travellers Kathryn and mum Angela, on the first night of our first trip to India in 2015. As tomorrow was going to be busy we decided we would explore the six or so eating establishments in the hotel as they boasted “our restaurants are amongst Delhi’s most renowned, loved and felicitated restaurants.” I’m not sure I wanted to be felicitated but one of them must be suitable for us.
We discounted Jade, a contemporary Chinese, as being a bit unreal, not to mention pricey. Sevilla, “A Mediterranean experience and Spain” failed to tantalise the taste buds. Aura despite its 55 brands of vodka and “Piping hot pierogi” fell also for the chop. Ye old bakery was just an overpriced cake shop and was closed anyway at this hour. Dhaba, the supposedly authentic Indian experience was certainly not demonstrating authentic Indian prices, we could get a taxi to and from a true genuine restaurant complete with a whole meal of unquestionably better quality for two plus drinks for the price of just one dish at the Dhaba; “The theme of rustic vibes of a Punjabi village never fails to attract visitors.” It failed to attract us.
We settled on Pickwicks, which served some Indian, some Mediterranean a right old mixture. I had spiced tomato soup (there we go again even in the five star hotels they assume tourists want tomato something) followed by a delicious mutton curry and rice both were excellent. I don’t recall the ever lovely’s starter but due to her spice aversion she had some pasta thing for the main which she proclaimed was very good. We were both attracted to the phirni, which from the description sounded like a green cardamom flavored payasam. It was okay but slightly disappointing in that it was like a set custard, vivid green and over set. Dinner cost us £74. In contrast we ate an all you can eat Thali in Agra in 2015 which cost us £2.00 each, that’s more reflective of the good honest food the locals enjoy.
Back to our room after the meal. We spent a little time planning our day for tomorrow when we would have a car and driver at our disposal. We were trying to avoid the touristy things but it is hard, they are popular because they are both interesting and quite beautiful.
The ever lovely is enchanted by the palatial Lutyens buildings that are occupied by the Indian Government, and before we left the UK she had found an opportunity to visit them. She applied for our tickets, which involved several pages of questions and passport details. Sadly. our trip to the Rashtrapati Bhavan at 5pm the next day was not going to happen. For some reason we had booked it for today, some 1 ½ before we landed at Indira Gandhi Airport. At least this resolved how, after a day out and about in Delhi, we could arrive at the president’s place without camera and with passports as required. I was bushed and drifted off to sleep, whilst the ever lovely wrote up her daily log.
I usually end each blog with a picture from the next week’s episode. But as I refine these notes for typing I am saddened by the news that Solo a cornerstone tiger from Bandhavgarh has been found dead with one of her young cubs. They are believed to have been poisoned. So here is a picture I took of Solo who we were lucky enough to see for ourselves on this trip.
Join me next week as I enter an old city from Delhl’s past, visit mighty wells and vast tombs.
