One last journey before reaching my destination

I woke up this morning and hitched a ride with Yohann’s friends to the bus station in Bangalore. My first experience with trying to actually get from point A to B on my own could have gone a lot worse. Essentially, I approached the ticket window and three men started yelling at me. Intimidated, and not knowing what to do I repeated “Madikeri, Madikeri” as loud as I could hoping that somebody could direct me to the bus headed for my destination. Much to my surprise, this worked. Three minutes later I was seated in as comfortable a bus as I would expect in Canada, and within ten minutes the bus was leaving the station on it’s way to Madikeri.
Observing Bangalore from the bus window I was struck by the socio-economic diversity from one block to the next. One block would be covered in what I can best describe as slums. People would be huddled in tiny bamboo shacks, cooking over a fire. The next block however would be a massive IT complex. The Lonely Planet describes these buildings as being “high-tech, high-security university campuses” and I can only wish I had come up with that description. The complexes often house three or four buildings surrounding a central green-space, and IT workers sat on the grass eating lunch or breakfast as I drove by. This socio-economic mosaic is really like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. In Toronto a low-income neighbourhood’s location is often described by it’s central intersection (Jane and Finch) or the name of it’s large public housing complex (Regent Park). To see middle-class professionals working right next to members of the absolute lowest-income bracket’s homes was disconcerting. This separation is probably a positive, as it means that the poverty in a city is not hidden from the middle-class and treated as if it does not exist. The middle-class in Toronto has no reason to enter the lower-income neighborhoods, and I suppose it allows us to ignore the poverty that does exist within our city’s boundaries.
After six hours on the bus I finally arrived in Madikeri, a town of 30 000 people Southern Karnataka. I really can’t tell you anything about Madikeri, as I had pre-arranged for a taxi pickup to take me to the Rainforest Retreat as soon as I arrived. It will however be my main connection to the urban world for the next five months, so I am sure regular readers of this blog will become well-acquainted with the ins-and-outs of Madikeri culture. So if you are interested in small-town-Indian culture, this is clearly the place to be!
My taxi drove me down a beat-up road that winded through the foothills of Coorg for twenty minutes, before dropping me at the gate of the Rainforest Retreat. I will save my description of Coorg for tomorrow's post, where I will most likely alienate anyone who has never been to Coorg by overemphasizing the natural beauty of where I now live. But after four days on the road and months of planning, I finally stood at the gates of my new home, ready to begin my life as an intern-organic-farmer-jungle-man….
Stay tuned for my first impressions.