Transmission 4 – The Karnataka Monkey Ride and Rest in Mysore

In my life, I’ve never encountered so many monkeys as I did on the roads through mountainous Karnataka. This brush with our simian ancestors was highly curious from the saddle of a motorcycle, but perhaps a usual sighting for them. The ride out of Gokarna through the uplands of the Sharavati wildlife sanctuary led me through a stronghold of the red faced Lion-tailed Macaque. Until now, I had become used to  cattle and chicken crossing, goats and their herders on the roads, even water buffalo, and serpents, but monkeys were new.

Starting the day sick, and cleansing whatever bad karma had gone bitter inside, I was starting to feel my vitality returning. As the bike climbed in elevation, so came the mists and fog of the lush jungle highlands. The rain which I moved through was like a wet blanket, that pervaded everything and made visibility limited to a 50 feet. Eventually it soaked through my riding gear, staining my hands black from the leather, and some deep puddles almost engulfed the chassis of the motorcycle further soaking my boots and feet, forcing me to wear three pairs of socks to keep them dry. Still I was taking it all in with a kind of zen of momentum, riding in low gear to carve my way up the switchbacks of the mountain. Another rider on a sports bike started to trail me, and at times we would coast pass each other, eventually I ended up leading. At the corners I would gear down to second and sound the horn for any big buses that might be coming down the other side out of sight. The nature of the curves were cut so sharp that often I veered into the right lane to make the turn with the clutch slightly depressed while revving in a pulsing fashion to keep the engine on.

 

Monkeys lined the edges of the road, with precipitous vegetative slope to both sides of me. Their red familiar faces stared and meditated on the rumbling beast that carried me swiftly past them. Around every other turn, there were broken melons smashed on the road, but my eye caught no sign of watermelon vines anywhere, besides these were obviously not wild, and I wondered if they were offerings. This were surely the domains of Hanuman. Riding above the canopy, I could feel the air texture change as it carried the scents of the jungle, fresh and perfumed as it rose, filtered through the green mass. This was a pleasant change from the dust and humidity of the eternal construction zones of the lowlands. Life was so abundant here, there were trees growing on trees, vines climbing every surface, sounds of hundreds of animals in a symphonic cacophony mixed with the motor, and the muffled winds. My own thoughts were silent, and I started to enter into a kind of trance state while the ever fluctuating shifting, turning, honking and breaking patterns became the effortless Dao.

Alas, some golden light came from above as I was rising above the morass of jungle to a lookout point, where I instinctively turned off the bike, and lingered awhile. The other rider on the Honda, parked near to me, and remarked that he thought I was an Indian rider until I took my helmet off. I guess was handling the roads like a local, this boosted my confidence in an offhand way.

Way below, the Kali river flowed out of this cradle of mountains from its source in the Linganamakki reservoir. These vast views I had not beheld since hiking in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec earlier this year. There were no villages, or man made structures to be caught by the open eye, only a deep green color palette varying in a hundred and one shades, with a sliver of glistening silver blue like the iridescent stripe of a fish running through this fertile land.

I unpacked a bushel of small bananas which I bought by the kilo at a roadside table on the way for 30 rupees. Then I suddenly had many friends at my behest, reaching outstretched palms for a taste of these morsels of fruit. A male macaque took to me, and accepted the bananas one after another cramming them into a pouch inside his mouth until he could not fit not a single one more. So I unpeeled one for myself, and sat on the ledge overlooking the Sharavati, engaged in a kind of cross species bonding, as we ate our bananas together. Other monkeys ate bel puri in the gravel, and baby monkeys fell clumsily from the flexible branches of low hanging trees. I was smitten by their likeness to children.

The enormity of the view heaved in my chest, and I carried the image with me all the way down the mountain. Taking another small diversion, I went to see the Jog Falls, which fell into a canyon, of which my eye could not see the bottom. It was at these elevations that I recall picking coffee beans in the highlands of Oaxaca mexico, and the landscape itself was reminiscent of those lands in central America. A few monkeys here at bananas off the backseat of the motorbike and were overall well behaved. Indian tourists were resting and chatting over food, but I felt restless to keep the tires turning.

I stopped in Shimoga for veg thali, and experienced the special privilege of being served in the south Indian manner. Each small dish was presented and given a portion on a tin plate, accompanied by a heaping bowl of rice to be eaten with the hands. Small cups of sambar gravy, chutney, chili, curd, and mashed sweet potato came in an everlasting offering until I was so full I wanted to sleep.

I determined to reach the hostel and cover the next 230 km before dark, stopping a couple times to rest under a banyan or some quiet shade spot. Just lying down for a couple minutes and letting my bones touch the earth felt grounding and worked to relieve some of the pain of the constant vibration the bike made. By dark I finally reached Mysore after 13 hours on the bike, a unique Karnatakan city with a heritage of Ashtanga yoga. Going through the maze of streets without a map, as my gps had turned off earlier, in time I came to the area of Gokulam. This was the hub of the yoga concentration, and I found my lodgings at the Tusker House hostel, and by morning felt like a new man.

My first day in Mysore I wandered in Gokulam, free of responsibility and unclinging to desire. There were several younger people starting yoga training courses today, apparently a famous Ashtanga teacher by the name of Sharath Jois, the grandson of Patabhi Jois, was in Mysore. Ashtanga is the branch that I followed and I kept my ears perked for any recommendations of ashrams in the district for a return trip. For now I had no intentions to stay longer than two nights, and simply walked without aim past the cafes, silk and spice markets, and rickshaws offering rides. There was a poster at the hostel advertising an herbal essential oil house that did pique my interest. Outside the hostel, an original ambassador was parked beside the lions school, and for I moment I imagined the streets of an earlier India in the time of the Raj, and the amabassadors and royal enfield bullets that were most popular in the old days.

A man greeted me in the streets and introduced himself as Samir. We found that we share a common likeness, being both farmers and guided by the plants. In time our conversation evolved over hot chai served on the street, and I found out he was the owner of the ‘Aroma herbal house’, which was ten minutes away by scooter in another district behind a Ganesh temple. Of the thousands of people in the road I could have met it was him whom I had the chance encounter. Perhaps my openness and complete lack of expectation, created a karmic magnet in which the circumstances would align for us to meet. It seemed a little uncanny, that this was the only reference point I had assumed in Mysore, from the poster in the hostel. I knew nothing else of this town, save for its rich emphasis on temples, gardens and palaces.

I was whisked into a small two storey shop where a woman was rolling incense by hand using a mixture of sandalwood, honey, charcoal, and almond oil, doing thousands by the day. In a lounge upstairs that reminded me of the Moroccan casbahs, I was signaled to a table full of apothecary jars and bottles, and wooden cupboards holding fresh incense. One after another, I was schooled on these richly perfumed plant essences and their benefits to the body and mental states, while they were dabbed all over my arms and wrists, some of them massaged into my temples, crown and forehead, even a short amber treatment to one of my knees that I had damaged treeplanting years ago. India, and Mysore in particular is famous for herbal oils, and the bottles were filled with colorful ambrosias of every kind; the exotic sandalwood, jasmine, musk, saffron, lemongrass, champa jakaranda, lotus and water lily, and a few herbs that I knew and used from home; mint, patchouli, camphor, cedarwood, basil and bergamot. I tried them all, and soon wondered how many times this man had practiced this routine, or if I just lucked upon special treatment. The rupees and euros soon to leave my wallet was an assurance that this day would not be so ‘free’, but I happily parted with these pieces of paper for a bit of the magic of these plants. I took with me six small bottles of these pure and potent oils and determined to use them sparingly, there were as good as gold or silver to me.

I found a cafe on the way back from the herbal house, that had pictures of all the great saints on the walls; Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Yogananda, Gandhi, but the one that caught my eye was Maharaji, Ram Dass’ guru, of whom I consider my guru from afar.

This small nook served what seemed to me the most hygeinic and highest quality food in all of Mysore. The traditional foods of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu were there, along with some staples from Rajasthan, and the North. I tried the Millet Kheer pudding, which is cooked with milk and cardamom, and a Kasmiri red bean dish with Rajmudi rice, pumpkin seeds and green chilis. Honestly I could have gone for anything on the menu, the himalayan lentil soup and proper Biryani with papdum were simple foods prepared with emphasis on spices and herbs, and the Punjabi lassis and jal jeera were the perfect drinks for this climate. A woman from Lebanon and I kindled a conversation, she was also here for the yoga, so I gave her my number, for a possible re-connection later.

Somewhere along the route from Gokarna to Mysore, my horn had stopped working. I had come to be reliant on this annoying little convenience, because no one obeyed the road rules in India. It was usual to be forced to the shoulder by huge goverment trucks blaring their horns and flying past, or bogged down construction lorries carrying three times their weight. I even witnessed a tractor hauling an enormous mountain of hay almost 30 feet high. Pair this with daring pedestrians running into your lane, all matter of livestock crossing, speeding boleros, and puttering rickshaws. The horn becomes no longer a nuisance but your best friend, and I would not like to ride without one. I assumed this would entail some mundane wiring issue that would just need fixing, setting me back a couple hundred rupees or so. Little did I know less than a kilometer from the hostel was a roadside two wheeler mechanic. I explained my problem to him knowing my english was in vain. He proceeded to crouch in front of the bike and moved a cable near the front forks, before I could even step out of the saddle, he pressed the horn and it gave a loud response. The bumpy roads of India sometimes knock the connector loose, and it was fixed in no time. This later happened again in Tamil Nadu, and was an easy roadside tweaking while I fueled up with petrol. Through trial and tragedy, and the passing of road beneath my feet, I was beginning to form an understanding of the kinks of my bikes temperament.

The fuel and fire was strong, and the following day I needed to reach Auroville in Tamil Nadu, but this leg of the journey passed by rather uneventfully. The route took me through another mountain sanctuary with posted signs reading ‘elephant territory’, and posts for tigers in the area, but these beasts of the jungle book did not reveal themselves. God knows what I would do if I encountered a bull elephant tramping down the road in front of me, let alone a tiger. But somehow it still felt exciting to be driving on these ordinary small village roads knowing there was a small chance, that some megafauna might come out of the jungle in a fit.

By night I had just found Auroville, after some of the fastest highway in India I have experienced, I covered 180km in just two hours, which in Maharastra took me almost eight. The toll roads along the way had motorcycle lanes to pass slowly by unchecked, these points served as a kind of bottleneck for the larger trucks, lorries, and cars, and the openness in the roads directly after them felt almost naked. The Auroville turnoff from the Irumbai road came just before the territory of Puducherry, and within the inner town limits are mostly well maintained red dirt roads. Palm trees formed live tunnels over the shaded paths, where motorbikes and e-bikes or cycles were the main form of travel. Auroville is an international city, where people from 53 nations live co-harmoniously regardless of caste, race, religion, or cultural conditioning. The Aurovillians promote a cashless society, and the ideals of karma yoga, with a bias towards mysticism and human evolution. It reminded one of Huxley’s Island at first impression, all that was missing were the mutual adoption clubs, but something similar seemed to exist here. A golden temple in the center called the Matrimandir was surrounded by two circular zones, divided into four sanctions of the town; cultural, residential, industrial and educational. Beyond this was a ring known as the green belt. This outer circle of wilder vegetation and jungle crop would be where I lay my head tonight, and for some time to come. This was an entirely novel India, and my first real station stop on this trek, where the old met the new.