A couple of weeks picking coffee
Somewhere in the Coorg district in the Western Ghats of India, there’s a little building that indicates the turn off to the coffee plantation that Romit and I bought. The Avandur Post Office, pin code 571201, slightly bigger than a phone booth, serves the village that we are now part of.
Just after Christmas last year, I got a ride up to Coorg from Bangalore with some friends coming to help us out as we prepped to host our first bunch of escapees from the city. The guests were going to spend New Year’s Eve with us picking coffee and building walls with mud, straw and lime. You can never tell with the city types!
Anyhow, with three days to go before they arrived, there was still a campsite to prepare, a hot water boiler to install, benches to be created from old construction scaffolding and tyres, firewood to be cut and dried, supplies to be bought (how much do we cook for 20 people? :-/).
The boiler turned out to be the most frustrating. The leak from the outlet meant that we had to wait hours for the sealant to dry before checking again if it was fixed. It finally stopped leaking around 10pm on the 30th. We picked up our guinea pigs at 5am the next morning from the post office beyond which their large van could not come.
Romit’s uncle, Rahul, was in charge of cooking and we quickly learned that cooking by a wood fire in the blazing noon sun can make an enthusiastic cook resign from the job at short notice! That said, the food that he managed to conjure up went down extremely well after a morning of coffee picking and playing in the mud. The breakfast upuma turned out to be enough for everyone twice over. Romit and I ended up eating huge portions of that for the rest of the day. Barefoot Experiment, with the emphasis on Experiment!
Our intrepid adventurers bathed in the waterfall a short walk away, basked in a bonfire, barbecued some chicken (the veggies didn’t barbecue as well), sang some songs, flavoured their drinks with freshly picked oranges, and packed into tents to bring in the new decade. I think some of them enjoyed our company and the birds and the trees, and I hope they come back again.
Incredibly, my first week back in Coorg was over. The arabica was ripe and needed picking before the birds ate all the berries. Some robusta was ripe and needed picking too. The persimmon and longan seeds needed planting, the extra peas needed either eating or planting, the sedimentation tank needed waterproofing and a cover, the orange trees were laden, the cow dung needed to be taken up in preparation to be used as fertilizer.
With Romit feeling a little under the weather and taking a trip to Bangalore, it was up to me to host Dillu and a couple of his friends when they made it up for the first weekend of 2020. Anvesha helped me with painting the sedimentation tank cover. The fire in the fireplace that evening was accompanied by singing every song that we could remember and pork fry from Bettigeri.
I had promised them no sign of other human life, so when Prachi woke to the sound of what sounded like a baby screeching and no sign of the rest of us, she was unsurprisingly a little perturbed. Well, we all learned that the call of a Malabar Grey Hornbill can be mistaken for a baby lost in the woods!
Romit brought back reinforcements in the form of Harshit and the coffee picking picked up pace. “Ants on my hands make me clap, ants in my shirt make me jiggle, ants in my pants make me dance, ants on my neighbours make me laugh!” Ant bites are quite the inspiration!
My last weekend in Coorg this trip was rapidly on me, and I had Urvashi, Vivek and Prabu come visit. Gari was back as well, to see how Evey, the pup she and Romit had rescued and brought up and to try and get our two adopted strays (Yerudu, the two coloured mom, and Muru, the 3 coloured daughter) spayed so that we wouldn’t end up littered with litters.
Vivek told us how he had picked coffee in Chikmagalur as a college student because he ran out of money for booze — 50 rupees a sack! He told us about his adventures stealing mangoes as a schoolboy in Mysore. He cooked a fantastic chicken curry for all of us. Vivek, Urvashi and Gari combined to make pakoras over the bonfire to go with the Old Monk and oranges. So good!
And then it was time to go back to the world of concrete and internet connectivity.
I’m back soon… anyone game for a little adventure? Maybe the peas I planted will be ready to be plucked and eaten.
