Waving at the natives

Nine hours on the bus today - twenty-three seats, eleven travellers, and countless bumps and turns from Coonoor to Munnar. These are both hill towns, separated by a vast plain at about 400 metres. Across the plains we see coconut palms, ginger, sugar cane and rice, the rice more so at sea level. In places, narrow streams fed by mountain rain flow through forests of beetel nut palms or ginger.

All along the way, townspeople go about their business, generally oblivious to the bus nudging its way through their streets. Looking out, you notice the men with their lustrous black hair well beyond middle age, and nary a sign of male pattern baldness. The women's hair too is dark and long, some trying to emulate the images of impossibly beautiful women on billboards, cloaked in saris and bejewelled in gold, diamonds and other precious gems. No matter a person's station in life and apparent poverty, most women have some form jewellery - bangles, bracelets and anklets; toe, nose and earrings.

In the hills, the crop is tea, grown between 3000 and 7000 metres. As we climb to Munnar, mist clings to the tea bushes carpeting the slopes, with a criss-cross of paths for the pickers to move around. Only women, generally from the state of Tamil Nadu, are employed to pick tea in this region. Interspersed among the bushes - tea is actually a tree, but is kept to 2 foot bush height for ease of picking - are imported Australian she-oaks, planted to give shade to the bushes during the hotter times. The seeds for the she-oaks were actually not imported, but smuggled into India illegally in the skirts of the wife of a planter!