When I returned from a long-overdue trip to Waynad two months earlier, I planned to immediately blog it. That somehow didn’t happen. Before it is too late, I present my impressions of this and another, my most recent trip to the Malnad region.

We travelled to Waynad on bike, a thoroughly picturesque ride. The journey turns pleasant after you cross the nightmarish Mysore road and proceed towards H.D. Kote. The road forward leads you inside the forest–the Rajiv Gandhi National Park–till you reach the Kerala border, which begins at Mananthavady. From there to Kalpetta, where we lodged. We spent the next two days mostly travelling.

To say that part of Kerala is scenic is to repeat a cliche: God’s own country and all. The bias about Kerala that I harboured for long was pleasantly shattered in the two days I stayed there. Ever since Swami Vivekananda was horrified enough to call it a lunatic asylum, the image of l’il Kerala has suffered repeatedly: the average Keralite (living in Kerala, just to clarify) is a sloth, there’s absolutely no industrialization, the quality of life is poor, and Communism has not made matters the better. This is just a partial list of the sources for my bias.

I said “pleasantly shattered” with a reason: the one thing that struck me hard was the quality of roads: smooth and soft as a baby’s skin in direct contrast to their counterparts in Karnataka. The difference was directly visible. The Karnataka state border ends at the Bavali forest range, a treacherous stretch of road that strains itself to be seen as it is hidden amidst potholes. The same applies in varying degrees to the stretch from Mysore to H.D. Kote. Those who complain about Bangalore’s infrastructure need to travel just once from H.D. Kote to Mananthavady. I now know where all the money allocated for Gramin Sadak Yojana has gone. What also struck me was the absolute absence of road humps that is so common across Karnataka. But the average Kerala State Transport driver is truly a different species. You never know from which direction the next missile bus will come baying for your life. The omniscient driver will always jam the brakes hard right at the bus stop. If you’re lucky, you’ll manage to avoid hitting the bus from behind. Travelling in the middle of the road doesn’t guarantee safety either: the driver from the opposite direction will manage to push you to the side where you (again) are sure to encounter another of those hotfooting monsters. The fun danger is compounded the more by bend after hairpin bend. But I’m alive and blogging.

Kalpetta was another surprise. The district headquarters of Waynad, it is–was, to my surprise a bustling town. Another amazement was in store when I went shopping for footwear. The retailer had stocked major international footwear brands, and more surprise, I couldn’t find a single pair of Bata [insert local brand name here]! Gulf money, of course. The same Gulf money which thanks to the Great Indian Gold Obsession, has helped numerous jewellery shops flourish in that little town. I could count as many as 12 of these shops in a walking distance of 300-400 metres. And I haven’t mentioned the array of stores that stock assortments of very expensive interior decoration items. Kalpetta like any outback town is pretty laid back: commerical activity stops little after 8 in the evening. The several gully-wallah chaai shops are open, maybe throughout the night to serve wayfarers like truck/lorry drivers.

No account of Kerala–or part of the state–is complete without mentioning the political activity or its various manifestations, which screams for your attention. It was actually amusing. Every other (fine) road has posters, banners and signboards proclaiming the workers of this or that Union to unite. Walls proclaimed the latest call for strikes. There was this huge banner displaying the photograph of a prominent Mullah who also happens to be an MP with stuff written in Urdu and Malayalam all over. When we stopped for lunch, the waiter along with our order also gave us a small gift: a pamphlet. It contained boisterous words (in English) drawn from some passages from the Quran. Apparently, it had something to do with the Prophet’s call for peace on a certain holy day. The pamphlet ended with please attend the meeting in large numbers for a more detailed exposition by the same Mullah-cum-MP whose face will remain in my mind for a long time. I realized later that this exposition was part of some Islamic festival/celebration. And then there were Churches, a whole slew of them. You probably can find all denominations of Christianity on a single stretch of road in and around Waynad. Our Lady of the Holy Cross, Episcopal Church, the Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventist Church….. Attached to these sometimes, are schools and/or nursing homes/hospitals. For a certain someone wondering whether He cures, this sight will surely (re)convert him back to theism. The Good Lord not only resides in a Church, he also ensures that he takes of the ill in the adjoining building. Be Thou a Believer, Yazad.

Post lunch, we found ourselves visiting the quaint Wayanad heritage museum nestled in the Ambalavayal town. Quaint, but very interesting. We were the only visitors. The curator was at his helpful best. He didn’t at first allow us to take pictures, but some sweet talking on my part obliged him to shoot a couple of snaps of the wife and myself. The museum contains an impressive collection of hunting implements, stone artifacts, weapons used by the kings of the yore, paintings, musical instruments, and jewellery. A huge chunk of the Museum’s collection is contributed by hobbyists, and the rest by various government organizations such as the Archaeological Society of India. The museum and its ramparts are really clean–including the loo, surprise, suprise!–a fact which made me appreciate government work for the first time. The Tourism department, specifically.

Unlike the morons of other states, the Kerala Tourism ministry seems to know its job. It should. Tourism fills its treasury substantially: 6.29% of Kerala’s GDP comes from this industry. Maybe that explains the flawless roads, the direction/route indicators that dot the roadsides at regular intervals, and the general cleanliness that I observed at every tourism destination we visited in Wayanad.

Stay tuned for more to come in the next part.