So Before the madness and badness in Kannur, and after the loveliness that was Mangalore, I was in Madikeri (Mercara) and I wanted to see something of the Kodavu (Coorg) people.
You are going to have to get used to all the bracketed names here in India - for various reasons the Disctrict Commisioners and the Central Government has been renaming places over the past years at differing times and for differing reasons.
Some want to shake off the image of the British Raj and Portuguese (and French, and Dutch, and Muslim, and Christian etc etc...) occupations or influences, and some may just want a prettier new sign for the town.
Either way it can get confusing so you have to learn both names for any given town, and be ready to deploy either or both when asking anyone about anything when travelling from place to place.
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Anyway - Madikeri is a small town, built on a series of ridges and hills that the roads follow lovingly and calf-achingly, but the map doesn't. One thing I have learned in India is that the Lonely Planet, lovely as it is, actually wants you to amusingly fail to get anywhere sometimes, and the maps in there are sprinkled with the occasional lie.
Almost every map has been broadly accurate, but streets obviously decades if not centuries old very occasionally appear or disappear from the map, even when they are main thoroughfares. I can see the guys in the LP office having an occasional snorting chuckle about this from time to time, and I appreciate the need for humour in the workplace, but some things can get beyond a joke just occasionally, and if I ever run into the guy responsible for page 262 of the LP South India guide, 5th edition, I am going to stab him with a fence post.
In Madikeri the map was merely a wood-pulp-derived artefact of fatuousness, celebrating perhaps exactly how many visual lies it is possible to fit into each square inch of published work.
Even after navigating the way through my usual ritual in these situations: find an undeniable point of reference; turn the map around; turn yourself around; find any road, path or straight up-and-down thing that corresponds to anything on the map; check drunkenness level (00:00 at that time, in case you were wondering); check stupidity level (50% but that's my mean, median and average);look for the signs of any OTHER indefatigable landmark; bite the bullet and ask someone; find someone who understands you and ask them; start crying quietly in the street, whichever fucking one it actually is) I couldn't find a damn thing that looked even halfway like anything from the map.
Perhaps rather stupidly I followed the LP's other main notation, that a guesthouse, the Cauvery Hotel, was right besides the bus station.
Right beside the bus station was the first of a million hills I would see, laugh at, and completely refuse to climb during my experience in Madikeri. This time after laughing though I climbed it, possibly because I had also recently been involved in a little gentle crying (see above) it didn't bother me this first time, and on reaching the top I saw what you can predictably expect to see in these situations, at least 5 different buildings called Cauvery Hotel (or Caveri Hotel, or other variations. Names cannot be precisely trusted, as we saw at the very start of this post...) because many Indian businesses take their inspiration from the non-existent copyright laws here and, as soon as a place is mentioned by name in an edition of the Lonely Planet, up spring several others with the same name in the same street, or at least very close by.
Some of these might be okay, but the majority are guaranteed to be like that Norman Bates' motel from Psycho at best, and cesspits surrounded by 4 vertical stacks of brick at worst. But with a cash drawer somewhere.
With a speed of thought that stunned and impressed me I remembered that the LP lists telephone numbers, I have never called a hotel in advance to make a booking so quite why this occurred to me I'll never know, but it did and by comparing the ones on the charlatan's signboards and the one in the book, I found the genuine, recommended Hotel Cauvery (their sign had it spelled `Caveari` so it just goes to show, you really can't trust names).
For the price, it was a palace. Fuck it, it really was a palace - apart from a few small cockroaches in the bathroom it was just great; the bed was soft (a real rarity), there was cable TV with all 5 documentary channels available, the power never failed while I was there (first time for that, then!), the staff were polite and helpful and the corridors were actually really tastefully decorated, with semi-lush draped curtains between room doorways, discreet gold braid surmounting the tops of each wall and the whole outer side of the corridor was half cut-away, with a stretch of wall alternating a stretch of railed openness that afforded an airy view of the rest of the hotel with its similarly attractive openly railed corridors, and the courtyard below.
If only the courtyard hadn't contained an angry taxi driver, a cow, lots of the cow's shit and an unfortunate accumulation of litter (because it was at the centre of a depression thanks to the surrounding roadways) at almost all hours of the day, the effect would not have been spoiled.
As it was, it was a pretty enclosed courtyard and there was a restaurant right next to the hotel lobby entrance. Now don't get me wrong, this was a budget place, but it was truly wonderful in its own way and very well priced.
I wanted to do some kind of trek in an effort to prove my manliness (bad idea, as we shall see) and see the famed countryside, and on checking in, seeing my room and instantly starting that internal cackle of the traveller who has been given the price for a room, haggled it down a bit, seen the room and realised he has struck gold, I threw everything onto the bed (including my lovely new rucksack recently bought in Mangalore, by the way, which is worth mentioning because it cost 1050 rupees from what seemed an up-market but genuinely local shop, and from spending a good few minutes checking out luggage prices in other places to find that similar things were priced at 2000 to 3500 rupees on the more popular, well-mapped-in-the-lonely-planet streets, I was well pleased with my savvy and cunning) and went back downstairs and checked in.
Immediately the receptionist guy offered me details of a guided trek - almost always a bad sign because if a place doesn't make its money from the room, it makes its money from all the other shit they try to flog to you - but I felt strangely trusting, and having enjoyed Mangalore so much and realised that I was going to taxi it everywhere in this new town thanks to the laughable hills, I enquired further.
There was one leaving the very next morning and they usually take a day or two to arrange, so I was hopeful - there was, apparently, an Israeli girl and a German guy already lined up for the trip and I could join with them so to speak, I thought, quite happily.
The price included all experiences for an entire day and was 200 rupees under my Daily Target Spend (which almost always gets thrown out the window: thus, thanks to the joy of mathematics my D.T.S. has decreased continuously since November) so I signed up for the 3 days of economical joy that this offered on an impulse.
The `includes everything` is often a caveat rather than a positively mentionable feature: `includes everything` can feasibly exclude food, water, bedding, a bed, a house, a guide, any actual trek at all or possibly even an escape route if you find someone really untrustworthy, but this was Coorg town, the capital of the only district in India where citizens can legally own guns, and quite honestly I had in the back of my mind that I could possibly fulfill my fantasy of being shot at here, or perhaps even steal a firearm all of my own, so I was feeling open to possibilities.
This trek actually included everything though - it even included the novel idea (you're gonna hate me for this, folks) of spending 3 days in close quarters with a German and an Israeli; someone almost certainly Jewish; and devilish thoughts of making unsettling jokes and horrible double-entendres entered my mind like a truly dastardly bastard. I'm a bad bad man, aren't I?
Sod it. You know I wouldn't have done anything, on purpose anyway - I would have probably felt more awkward than the others did.
I met the German guy when I returned to my room as his presumable palace was right opposite mine, and he was a really great bloke, very friendly and intelligent, spoke fluent English and was a general all-round interesting guy; a highly skilled photographer (hoping to be a photojournalist so if we stay in touch, there may be some professional collaboration in the future if things go well for us both) with the most impressive camera I've ever seen, bit of a writer, bit of a technology geek (all men actually are, really, some of them just find the church or sport or something earlier in life) and, my mind leapt at the possible deliciousness of the awkwardity (that's a new word - I just made it), he served for eight years in the army.
3 Days with no-one but a native guide for company-
A (Ex)German soldier.
A Jewish girl.
An Evil, Evil, man called Tim.....
I have to admit that I virtually let go of all my qualms, scruples and decency and almost started preparing material on paper the night before, but, I went and ate after chatting to Stefan (such was the German guy's name) for 20 minutes and in the place I went for an evening meal was one other obvious traveller, a girl of about my age, who asked to come sit with me.
Although she looked quite pale by comparison and her accent was not typical, it turned out she was the aforementioned Israeli girl, and she told me she wasn't going on the trek tomorrow when I brought it up in conversation.
Still, not all of us can make Jokes About The War at Other People's Expense all day, can we?
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The trek itself is, I am afraid, hardly going to be done the justice it deserves today. I have an abundance of photos and when I finally catch up to the current day in the photo situation, this will all seem a lot more coherent, but for now, let me just give you the facts and the gruesome details, and in about a week or two when the pictures appear here I'll remember anything funny, thrilling or interesting that happened to accompany each photo, or just make some stuff up in the intervening time 
Basically, we walked for 3 days. Sounds exciting, I know, but that's what trekking is - what trekking shows you of course is the main draw, and we started off after a 30-minute bus ride (just me, Stefan and the guide who was a good guy called Kumar who really knew his stuff, and spoke pretty excellent English) we saw one of the biggest local sights after just 30 minutes of walk; Abbi falls.
In the main language of Karnataka, Kannada, Abbi actually means falls, or waterfall, so in a desperate bid to detract the ridiculous and leave just the sublime (the waterfall itself really was beautiful) the British Raj injected a local governing family somewher4e back in the 19th century, and ordered the parents to have caused a tragic accident to a spare daughter at the waterfall, so that they could subtly change the name and pretend that `Abby` falls was named in her honour.
Unfortunately for the convenience of British etymologists, the daughter was called Rachel and the whole plan was fucked up.
I made that up. Well, some of it - there actually was a girl called Rachel named and even displayed in some ancient portrait who was part of the British Raj's local governing family, and her naming and framing (as in pictures: forget the stupid little yarn from above) was indeed noticeable at Abbi falls, right next to the visitor's shit-strewn shack centre, although I'm really not sure why because the little display by her picture gives only her name and family, the fact she was the governor's daughter and, from memory, that she went back to England and married someone-or-other after being a sensible human being and growing up.
She didn't die there, she only even lived within a hundred mile radius of the place, and the whole purpose of her picture being there at all was beyond me, Stefan, Kumar the guide, and probably even the local government. If the sole fact that some British girl `really liked` the place a hundred and fifty years ago is good enough for her likeness to be immortalised there forever, then I want my fucking picture and entire life story displayed very prominently in Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Prague, Mangalore, the Olive Tree Pub in my home town of Romsey and a thousand other places by the time this trip is over!
And the negative cosmic equivalent - and an ancient and deadly curse - placed in Kingston-Upon-Hull (especially in the council office building), and inside every autorickshaw in Bombay....
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Anyway the trek continues, for several painful hours, my manliness is tested as we pass coffee plantations which were in bloom, and there may be no sweeter bloom on Earth than that of the coffee bean bush, or at least when half a million of them are wafting their scent up the hillside and into your nostrils it certainly seems that way.
The scenery, was simply incredible.
We passed a whole bunch of coffee plantations, and the flora of the landscape seemed to be able to germinate, propagate and distribute just about every spice you can think of; we pass a palm-looking tree and dates (or chickoos or something, I forget the details of that one exactly) hang in bunches, pass some tall grass and it's lemongrass; yes, glorious lemongrass, the stuff from all those great Chinese dishes that Waitrose will cheerfully extract a quid from you for grows in vast swathes by the roadside, and the trackside, and it just fills in the gaps between the coffee and palm trees - it is, in fact a weed.
A tree we went past was set upon gently by Kumar, he knifed a little of the bark off near the base - Cinnamon! It's the bark of a bloody tree! The rest of the tree is next to useless after this fact of course, because cinnamon is the finest flavour and spice in the world.
Another leafy plant held the secret to Cardamom - it's in the roots somewhere although I couldn't actually pick out a cardamom in an identity parade, not even next to the Birmingham Six, so I'll just mention that it was there, too, and move on.
There was mint on the ground, and the horrible smelling, gigantic, knobbly Jackfruits growing in clusters from trees, Mango trees, Coconut palms (obviously - they are everywhere in India) and a whole bunch of other spices, flavours and scents, and I was in a strange botanical paradise from which I hoped never to emerge, except unfortunately that was all we could do, and we had to emerge by walking and my feet had predictably begun to blister a bit.
I actually, truly, genuinely, can walk a lot and my stomping gait over the last 10 years or so has given me armoured feet, and if not an immunity to blisters, then an ability to completely ignore them until about the 3rd day, or the 80th or so mile
We stopped at some point about 1pm, after walking through the hottest part of the day (?????) for a lunch of rice, with rice-flour bread on side and rice-derivatives to flavour (the staple food of India is not rice, the staple rice of India is also sometimes called food) and I checked to see how many of my possessions had been claimed by the bush or otherwise demolished; incredibly, everything had survived intact up to this point.
We wandered through more scenery for a bit (several bits actually - we had gone up and down and up small mountains for many hours, and my manliness was hiding somewhere at the base of my soul screaming "WHHHYYYY!!!!! YOU TERRIBLE C***!!!!!" at me. I ignored it and concentrated on the strangely exquisite pleasure of blisters instead, and tried to look at the scenery every once in a while) then the day ended quite early, at a local house up a hill.
The owners of one of the very many coffee plantations also participated in these tours as the provider of a nightly stopover point, very familiar with these travellers Kumar kept bringing along, the lady of the house spoke no English at all but gave us cup after cup of coffee - real coffee. Coffee made from beans, not synthetic compounds with a wlittle coffee somewhere mixed up in the petri dish - it was thin, but wonderful, and I am now a convert to Real Coffee. We had at least 24 cups between us; and I don't think I'm even joking.
Staying here was strange - the food was nice and plentiful, served around 7pm after at least 3 hours of Stefan and I drinking all the coffee, chatting and joking, and wandering about taking photos until the light faded - but then everyone, the man and wife and a few errant workers and Kumar and by Inference also Stefan and myself - went to sleep, at about 8pm.
The thing is, there is no electricity at all, so once day's work is done while light holds, and food is eaten by the extremely dim light of some ancient paraffin lamps, there's nothing to do.
So they sleep.
And wake up at sunrise, and begin working.
It's surely a noble way of life and the scents and flavours are incredible - but Fuck That, as a form of existence, quite frankly.
Mind you, they do get to own guns....
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Anyway the second day was heavier going, we walked higher hills, my manliness disappeared and I regressed to the personality of an 8-year-old girl, and after a lot of sweating, heavy breathing, and only just about restraining myself from crying for a rest stop, which we only had a couple of each day, besides lunch, we reached down into a little pocket of jungle-like dense humid forest, and, while whittling my walking stick down a bit, I dug my beloved CRKT M-16 AUS8-steel, tanto-pointed knife a generous three-quarters of an inch straight into the end of my thumb, end-on, and it pissed blood over me, Stefan, and all my clothes and possessions.
Stefan, bless him, doused it in the neat whiskey I had brought because I'm still a little bit of an alcoholic - an experience I do not ever wish to have repeated - and he wrapped it all neatly up for me and fed me half the painkillers in my bag (which obviously was quite a lot 
) while Kumar decidedly looked nervous - although we had seen almost no wildlife beyond some birds, one giant spider in another bit of forest which WOULD have killed us please get away from it, says Kumar (their webstring is so strong it is woven to make bullet-proof jackets, among other things) and the tail end of a massive King Cobra (damn thing slithered right away as soon as we had noticed it but it was BIG) - there was still a very real danger that such a generous quantity blood would attract other nasty beasties, so Kumar was very pleased after we had washed all the blood that I apparently had to spare from off my trousers, arms, boots, and from off poor old Stefan, too.
We carried on cheerfully, soon I was physically hallucinating from the painkillers and didn't give a shit about what was left of my thumb, the trekking, animals attacks, global warming or anything else, and we arrived at another home-stay sometime in the second evening, although by this time my legs were about to detach themselves from my pelvic region and fall down the hill on their own, in a last desperate bid to escape the total bastard who was powering them along.
As it turns out, a group of 3 Israeli lads turned up to share the same hilltop with us and were, as I have observed before with their countryfolk, a little bit standoffish. Not so much with me, but they found Stefan after a few minutes of settling in and stretching grunting and looking a bit overly-macho to be quite honest (none of them were wearing shirts, and there's not much point in that, you see. You sweat just as much as if you wear white cotton as I, Kumar and Stefan had done, but get bitten a lot less if you're not half-naked, but I guess it looks a bit more macho that way) and upon realising he was German, they were actually quite rude I thought.
I mean he's not a fucking 1941-dated card-carrying SS officer, is he?
Problem is, as observed before, the Israeli tourists in India almost exclusively come straight from 3 to 6 years in the Army, and frankly I think the Israeli government, especially through the army, indoctrinates their young into always keeping the holocaust and a vague hatred of North-central Europeans at the back of their minds.
It was no issue though - Stefan made friends easily, I gave them my whiskey in a gesture of international friendship and wanting to make sure no-one got any funny ideas about putting that on my thumb again the next day, and we all retired to bed like good boys around 8pm.
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For 2 days, since realising the excellence of local coffee on the first night at the first house we stayed at, Stefan and I had kept ourselves going through bush and path and forest and jungle and plantation and hot, baking, real long hot and baking desert-like roads in places, with wish dreams and recipe ideas for Frappuccinos - you know the things; you go to Starbucks and give them about 14 quid, and they can then supply you with delicious flavoured iced coffee loaded with ice-cream, full-cream milk, fruit syrups, loads and loads of caffeine in fluid quantities somewhere approaching about a pint each time.
After all the banter, teasing, planning of actual ingredients and thirsty longings for anything in any way cold to drink (sadly unavailable both in 38-degree sunshine, and smoky hillside huts without electricity) we were gonna do this in style.
So, when we finally finished the trek, we got to the hotel and set our bags gratefully down and escaped to the cafe where, for 48 hours beforehand, we had visualised the truly obscenely delicious Frappuccinos that we were to have there.
It took a little thinking, and some shopping around, and a lot of persuading to the restaurant staff to let us have a jug big enough, but basically what we did was make ourselves very full, and more than just a little bit ill, by consuming a truly mammoth quantity of home-made frappuccino.
The ingredients for which I will list below as my final word for the day:
The result of which was that, although we had walked 16 kilometres up and down hills in 38-degree heat and eaten only some rice and a bowl of thin veggie curry all day, neither of use had any dinner that night.
The pictures from which, due to my traditional timekeeping skills, you will see in about a week or so.
Good evening to you all 
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Stefan & Jimbo's Truly Stupid Frappuccinos.
You will need - Materials
* A big fucking jug. No, bigger than that. You got it.
* A lack of common sense.
* A spoon capable of serving the main ingredient in `people's heads stew`
* A lack of any sense of scale (3 days walking in hot places dreaming of cool drinks are good for this)
* About 120 rupees
* Somewhere to lie down.
You will need - Ingredients
* 3 ½ litre bags of semi frozen, full fat milk
* 4 double Espresso coffees
* 6 large ice coffees. Big. Larger - minimum half a pint each
* 8 tubs (about 300ml each) of vanilla ice cream
* 500ml (half a litre) of coffee-blossom honey
And collapse....
and extremely heartening 
