I woke up before my alarm went off. Normally, I have low blood pressure and am not very good at waking up in the morning, but during the trip, I wake up feeling good, perhaps because I am in a high state of excitement. I feel as if it would be a shame to stay in the bedding forever. Today, I will take a bus out of Coimbatore to a town called Kotagiri, where I will meet Rishi. I left the room to have breakfast first in order to get ready for the bus ride.
I started walking around the town, blending in with the usual scenery of this place. Soon after, a chai shop appeared in front of me. It looked like a chain store, not a street stall. I entered the store, hoping to fill my stomach with a hot drink and a light meal, whatever it was. I ordered a chai, but when I saw a mother and her son sitting at the table eating hot sandwiches, I wanted to have the same thing, so I asked for it, but they half-refused my order, saying they had no more bread. It was only 8:30 in the morning, in the middle of the acclaimed morning time, and they were out of stock, not unlike a coffee shop in Tokyo. I had no choice but to quietly sip my chai. The punch of spice and caffeine bit into my morning hunger. My body gradually became warmer and firmer.
“Are you from Japan?”
The mother sitting across from me spoke to me. She has worked for a Japanese company with a branch in India, and her son also likes Japanese culture and would like to visit Japan someday. She told me many things over a cup of chai in the morning. When we left, we took a picture together and exchanged instagrams. I wonder if I will see them again in Japan someday. One of the good things about traveling alone is that when you are alone, the people in front of you talk to you everywhere. I am always at ease.
By the way, yesterday I had a short conversation with the man sitting next to me on the plane to Coimbatore.
"Where are you from?"
He said, “Japan. What are you going to do?"
“I'm going to a yoga ashram.”
"That's great!
For how long?”
"One day.”
"One day? Just one day?”
“Yeah.”
"Really?
That's very short.”
After my comment, the conversation disappeared like a small cloud seeping into the blue sky. I had thought that if I went all the way to an ashram, I would spend at least a week or so immersed in yoga, but when I knew that some people go only for a day, the taut words that remind me of the holy place of yoga, "an ashram in India" were considerably loosened in my mind.
So, I infused my morning spiced drink, took out some bread from a passing cafe, and returned to the hotel to finish my breakfast. I packed my bags and headed for the bus stop. When I got to the bus stop, before I could even take out my phone, I asked the people around there where the bus stop for Kotagiri was, but they just pointed me in the general direction and I had no idea which one it was. Then I ask the person again and little by little I would go deeper and deeper inside the bus station.
Some of the people I approached offered me a cab that would get me there in two hours for 2,000 rupees(4,000 yen). I brushed it off and concentrated on finding my bus stop. I came to the very end of the bus stop. I talked to a guy there who said he was also going to Kotagiri. I decided to follow him.
As I sat on the bench waiting for the bus, I saw something moving near the bus stop fence. I immediately recognized it: A goat. I immediately recognized it: five or six goats were grazing as if they were in a pasture. It is common for goats to eat grass, but eating grass at a bus stop is not a common sight for me, having been a goat herder for three years. I wondered if it was a stray goat, like a stray dog, and when I asked him about it,he told me that the goat had an owner who was taking care of it by staying close to them. I thought that my knowledge of goats was only the tip of the iceberg when I saw that goats can be kept free-range in the city.
This country, where goats can be let loose anywhere in town, made me love it even more than yesterday. The goats here are playing a great role as weed eaters in the city of Coimbatore. Perhaps sensing my fondness for goats, they gradually came in droves, sat down on the steps in front of the bench, and began munching and ruminating with their narrow eyes. Behind the world's most common goat's face, bus after bus, all decorated with flamboyant decorations, crossed the street.
Goats and buses. I grinned and watched the goats, satisfied that I was able to put these two things in one view, which would never cross paths as long as I stayed in Japan. The bus to Kotagiri had arrived. It seems that luggage is carried to the seat. As soon as I took my seat, an old man came to collect my fare. I had no idea how much it would cost, but it was only 150 rupees (300 yen).
The bus departed with about half of the seats occupied. The wind blew directly into the bus without windowpanes.
The bus stopped immediately and the driver went away. I guessed he was going through some kind of procedure. After about 15 minutes, the bus started again.
After about 15 minutes, the bus started again, but this time it stopped again, this time at a dark warehouse. The driver got out of the car and started to wash the windshield with a hose and a brush. Was he washing the car before departure? I felt no emotion toward him for making me wait. With the car sparkling clean, we were ready to go.
But the bus stopped again, this time at a gas station. We topped up the gasoline and began to wipe the windshield with a towel, which he had just washed with water. Judging from the atmosphere inside the bus, where no one complained, I knew this was a normal thing to do. Perhaps it is only in Japan that everything is done before leaving the bus stop.
After that, the bus ride lasted about three hours without incident. The number of people gradually increased, and the bus became so full that there were people standing in the aisles. The bus crossed green mountains and valleys, and arrived at a small town called Kotagiri in the Nilgiri district.
There was not a single building around, but the road across from the bus stop was crossed with people and motorcycles, giving it the feel of a city in the countryside. When I got off the bus, Rishi was waiting for me and we were soon reunited. I jumped on the back of the motorcycle and headed for the house in the mountains where he lived.
After passing through a street lined with stores, we continued on to a series of houses. Every few dozen meters, some kind of animal would be walking along the road, mixed in with the people. Dogs, cats, monkeys, goats, cows, and horses, none of them chained, wandering about like people or sitting in the middle of the road like they own the place. I was impressed by the fact that a ranch became a town, or a town became a ranch, or whatever the case may be, this is what happens when two become one. Animals running off the road can be established as long as people are careful. I had been thinking too hard about it, but it became clear to me that the entire planet does not belong to humans alone.
Ten minutes away by motorcycle, the area quickly became unpopular, and we meandered up the mountain on a narrow road. We came to a high point where we could look down on a mountain range filled with scrub.
Following a sign that read “Galaxy Valley,” the motorcycle continued further into the mountains. Unlike Japan's satoyama, where trees are thickly overgrown, the mountains here are covered with tea trees as far as the eye can see, and there is a clear view everywhere you look.
Among the blue-green tea trees, one can sometimes see tea-picking women dressed in bright pink and yellow. As I pass a woman coming up the slope with a half-mat sack full of harvested tea leaves on her head, she smiled at me, and I was pleased to see her. The sweet aroma of freshly harvested tea leaves wafted through my nose, and the mere fact that I was in a mountainous area where tea was grown all around me lifted my spirits.
For the past two years or so, I have been hooked on tea after meeting a Taiwanese friend, and I have been drinking tea nonstop every day. I am totally addicted to tea, so much that I would like to drink all the water in my body in tea, and there seems to be no better place for me to do so. About five hours after leaving the hotel in the morning, my motorcycle, my final transportation, arrived at the top of a mountain slope where tea bushes grow eternally. At an altitude of 1600 meters, this is Rishi's home and mushroom house.
An electric fence surrounds the property. This is to keep out bison and buffalo. I thought, “Different lands have different kinds of animal damage."I didn't know the difference between bison and buffalo, but for now, I imagined that they both look like wild cattle.
The site on the slope is flattened into terraces, with a reservoir, a field, a dwelling and drying room at the top, and a guest room and a greenhouse for mushroom cultivation attached at the bottom. There is a well for pumping groundwater and a water storage tank for use in the greenhouses and fields, and all electricity on the property is provided by on-site power generation using solar panels. They only use public electricity that travels over power lines when they cannot generate power due to bad weather. Gas is purchased in tanks and delivered. I marveled at his home-plus-mushroom house, which is off-grid.
What is Rishi up to now that he has moved to the top of a mountain named Galactic Valley at an altitude of 1,600 meters of altitude? From chef to producer, the days in India have begun as Rishi's venture into the mushroom industry.
