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Madurai is famous for it’s temple, which has five towers that are covered with a riot of colorful statues. Hindu temples have lots of small temples inside of them, and the interior of the temple at Madurai was more of a compound, alternating courtyards with buildings holding the smaller temples that, in turn, housed the statues of the gods. Worshippers milled inside of the buildings, performing a wide variety of activities. Some sat or stood pensively in front of the idols; some were walking around one of the smaller temples in circles; a rambunctious crowd of young men, supporting a likeness of Ganesh on a litter, trotted through and beat drums, singing at the top of their lungs. In the courtyard areas and passageways between the buildings, people sat and talked, sometimes sitting down and eating food that they had brought. Some of the worshippers had their heads shaved, and then painted with a turmeric-yellow paste, although I couldn’t find the head-shaving place.

Other than the temple and the tailors, Madurai was unpleasant. It rained on the first day I was there, and the streets were muddy; it was impossible to walk around without getting filthy. Men approached me and always asked, “Have you been in the temple? Have you been up in the tower?” If I said “No” to the latter question, they would offer to take me up into the tower of a nearby business — which just happened to involve passing through four floors of tourist goods, and having people try to sell them to me on the way back down. It was a stupid ploy, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone who fell for it wouldn’t be sufficiently put out to walk out without buying anything. So I saw the temple, got my pants made, and got out of town.

I planned to practice my rusty French skills at Pondicherry, a former French enclave on the Bay of Bengal, but first I wanted to go to Ooty, another hill station in the Western Ghats. Although I had seen a side to Kodaikanal that most people didn’t get an opportunity to visit, I hadn’t really hiked around the hills at all. And more importantly, there was a narrow gauge “toy” train running up to Ooty. I had become slightly obsessed with trains since reading two Theroux books back to back, and I was fascinated to see what this tiny, ancient train was like. I caught the train from Madurai to Coimbatore, which was a five-hour ride that put me into Coimbatore at five in the morning.

Woman making idli dough, Madurai.

I rode first class, which is a somewhat misleading name. “1AC” was real first class, the most expensive way to go; regular first class is “FC”, without air conditioning. Since it is being phased out, most of the cars are quite old. And when Indians say “AC” there is usually more than just air-conditioning involved. With hotels, where AC rooms were more than double the cost of non-AC rooms, it often implied a larger room, satellite TV, a telephone, running hot water and other such amenities. On trains, it meant starched white sheets, a thick wool blanket, and a waiter who would ask you what you would like for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then bring it to you, totalling the bill just before you left the train. Still, plain-vanilla first class was nice in that it was spacious and you got a metal door on your compartment. I shared it with one other man. I said “Hello” and got a grunt in response. It was eleven-thirty at night, so we went to sleep, and didn’t speak another word for the duration of the ride to Coimbatore.

My guidebook said that the train for Ooty left from Coimbatore at seven-thirty. But when I went to buy a ticket, the eyes of the man behind the counter opened wide and he said “Ooty!” and walked off. It was a pretty bizarre reaction to a simple request for a train ticket: did he not know where Ooty was? But the reason for his reaction was clear upon his return: the train had just left, and the next one was in twenty-three and a half hours. I got a hotel room; I napped.

Coimbatore was a university town and although it had no temples or any attractions whatsoever, my stay was very enjoyable. No one tried to sell me anything. The streets were clean for India. Since there was nothing to see, I ran errands. I got a haircut that I was quite happy with (sometimes in Berkeley I can’t get that for eighteen dollars, and here it was fifty cents), bought miconozole for what was looking like it might be athlete’s foot (seventy cents — and it worked, so all mothers, and doctor’s daughters, on the mailing list can remain calm), got four passport photographs for the next visa or permit (a dollar), got a tailor to sew more velcro on the side pockets of the new pants (another dollar) and wrote up a story on what was, for India, a blindingly fast connection (fifty cents an hour). At lunch at a thali place (fifty cents), a standard south Indian institution that is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, the man who served me took an interest in showing me a few nuances of how to eat: put the yogurt into the really spicy curries and they taste better.

In the predawn darkness of the next morning, I walked to the station and bought a ticket to Ooty at quarter before five. I walked to the platform the ticket agent had indicated and paused: this was not a narrow gauge train. It had twenty cars, and they were big. Walking down the length of the train, I kept saying “Ooty?” to anyone in a uniform, and they kept pointing towards the front of the train, until the next to last car, when a chai-wallah (chai is “tea” — actually in India it means “cheap tea with loads of sugar and milk” — and wallah is a suffix added to nouns to indicate a person who works with respect to that item. Hence, a chai-wallah is a tea-seller. An auto driver is an auto-wallah. Et cetera. It is also used to denote a resident; a Delhi-wallah is a person living in Delhi) told me to get on. I confirmed this with a more official looking man. Inside the car, I broke out the guidebook, and read the section on the Ooty train again: the narrow-gauge line started in Mettupalayam, and it was from there that the train left at seven-thirty. Oops. Had I known, I might have had a chance to sprint for this train the day before; but I was happy to have stayed in Coimbatore for a day.

Dravidian temple sculpture, Madurai.

I was in one of two second-class cars from The Nilgiri Express, from Chennai, that continued from Coimbatore. The man across from me was sleeping and didn’t budge for the entire two-hour ride. Two women, flat-nosed and tribal looking, sat on the other side of the aisle; one wore a red scarf around her head and the other with a four year old sleeping boy in her arms. The Nilgiri hills are home to various cultures that, historically, have been fairly disconnected from Indian society as a whole. Indians regard them as being below the lowest of the castes, and refer to them as “tribals”. Don and Betchen’s daughter, who lives in the United States, had adopted a tribal girl, and Betchen had brought the girl from India to Minnesota; in the process, they had opportunity to run into some of those prejudices, although as foreigners they had little import for them. The train station in Mettupalayam had one broad-gauge track, which I arrived on, and on the other side of the station there was one narrow-gauge track, where the train to Ooty waited, the engine puffing little white bursts of steam.

I bought a ticket for second class, fought like mad to get my pack to fit in the space below one of the benches for five minutes, and then took a look around. There were three other caucasians on the train; a middle-aged but ruggedly attractive French couple and a blond man wearing grubby clothes and tortoise shell glasses who looked a lot like the picture of Theroux on the back cover of my copy of The Old Patagonian Express. There were two big groups of Indians who had each colonized one end of the train: behind me was a group of two or three families, and in front of me a group of what appeared to be Indian frat boys. The frat boys all wore baseball caps, seemed to have gotten a haircut in the last week, and they talked and joked loudly in Tamil. Ten minutes later the train lurched out of the station, and for several miles it kept lurching until it started to gather speed. At five miles per hour, it was quaint; at fifteen, I began to wonder if I might get seasick; but then again at thirty it smoothed out to a gentle pulse that seemed to come in groups of five: da-da-da-da-daaaah, da-da-da-da-daaaah. All of the windows were open, and many people were hanging their heads out of them and gawking at the train and the land passing by. In The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux describes a black Costa Rican woman who was riding in a train with him, who suddenly switches from Spanish to English to yell at her son: “Get yo’ haid otta de winda! Tree gonna lop it off!”, and every time I saw somebody doing that I resisted the urge to say that to them. But I did it too; I was facing the back of the train, so I always glanced over my shoulder first to make sure a tree wasn’t gonna lop my head off, and then looked at the engine.

The locomotive was at the back of the train, pushing us rather than pulling, and the reason was immediately evident. Twin columns of vapor rocketed up from it, one a white pillar of steam, and the other was a black smear of coal smoke that smothered the sky behind us. The smoke was coming out of the engine so quickly that it was like watching a movie with every other frame removed. There were thatched houses that looked like ones I had seen in the backwaters of Kerala. As we pulled through a train crossing in a town, a small crowd of vehicles waited for us to pass: two motorcycles, twenty people on bicycles, and a cart pulled by a Brahma bull with one horn painted blue and the other red. There were no cars, trucks, busses, or autorickshaws. The train went over a bridge, and below it was possible to see dhobi-wallahs, clothes washers, pounding the living hell out of shirts and sheets against rocks next to a narrow river. Traveling with a limited wardrobe was easy in India; at every hotel, right after checking in, I would drop my dirty laundry at the front desk, and the next evening it would show up thoroughly cleaned, if somewhat faded, and neatly folded.

I greeted the French couple in their own language, and was delighted to learn that they didn’t speak English better than I spoke French. After five years of study and two six-week stints in France, I had a good accent and passable vocabulary, but at least half the time traveling French people speak very good English and will switch to it after they have complimented me on how good my accent is. His name was Hervé, hers Catherine; they were a doctor and pharmacist respectively, and lived in Bretagne. Catherine was taciturn, and I never heard her utter a word of English, but throughout the train ride Hervé and I would swap between the two languages available to us. This suited me, because I was often jealous of Indians, who would frequently have several languages to choose from when speaking to each other, and would intermingle them; now I had my chance to do the same. Hervé had an outrageous French accent, which kept making me think of John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail calling down to King Arthur: “I’m Franch! Why do you think I have this outraaageous accent, you silly king-a?” Fortunately I managed not to laugh, and Hervé, who was quite well traveled, began to tell me of his favorite places in the world. One of the best events in Bretagne was to visit the Festival Interceltique de Lorient, which happened during the beginning of August.

Woman drawing a Kolam outside of her business, Madurai.

“There is music performances of many kinds, and they get many international names as well. Lots of Celtic music and performances. There are usually like 25,000 people who are camping in tents right there. It’s really cool.”

He had an aversion to other tourists. I told him about my tentative plans for the next eight months.

“Myanmar is very cool, it is good that you are thinking of going there,” said Hervé. “It was very easy traveling around there, and the people are very friendly, but there were not so many other tourists around. You can see most of the country going north to south, from Rangoon to Mandalay.”

We had been climbing for a half an hour now, and the landscape was starting to change. The train passed through a gorge; all of the Indians hollered and screamed, and one gave a deafening whistle. For the next five or six tunnels and gorges, it was necessary to stop talking; after the third I started covering my ears. During one tunnel, the frat boys starting singing something that might have been a fight song, and then they picked up in ferocity and volume, and it was a fight song.

Herve yet again looking out the window of the Ooty train.

The train slowed to a halt in front of a tunnel, and the passengers all walked out onto the grass by the track. There was a small shelter, a set of bathrooms, and a water tank next to the track. The train workers hitched a hose from the water tank to the top of the locomotive and began to refill it. It hadn’t really occurred to me that a steam train would need to be refilled with water, but it seemed obvious now that it was happening. The hose leaked a prodigious amount of water along its length; it was amazing that anything was getting into the train. The man with the tortoiseshell glasses was now clearly not Paul Theroux, who was New England professor: he was wearing wildly patterened pants, a striped shirt, and a white kercheif around his neck. He smoked a bidi, and seemed very agitated and twitchy; I asked him his nationality — German — and then, as he didn’t seem terribly interested in conversing, I left him. Germans are usually conservative, industrial dressers: black suits, leather jackets, squinty rimless glasses. But when they decide to break out of the mold, they do it whole hog.

The steam whistle blew, a proper high-pitched steam whistle that unmistakably belonged to a train, unlike the deep bellowing foghorns of the broad gauge lines. The passengers flooded back into the train quickly, as if each of the doors was a vacuum. The train went from quaint lurch to seasickness lurch to da-da-da-da-daaaaa in a period of five minutes. The Indians thankfully started to lose interest in yelling in tunnels, and Hervé kept going on his highlights of the world.

I told him about my travel overland from Istanbul to Cairo, and after that I ran out of ammunition to counter his onslaught of destinations.

“Sweden was amazing. As Myanmar is to Asia, Sweden is to Europe. There is a boat you can take from Bretagne to the UK, and from there to Sweden. Once we were there, we drove around and stayed in these cabins; it’s hard to describe a glacier or a fjord until you’ve seen one.”

The locomotive of the Ooty miniature train.

We had been in clouds for a while, and then the train brought us above the cloud level after we passed through another tunnel. The guidebook had recommended the left hand side of the train, and little wonder: there was an enormous waterfall cascading down a brown rock face. The train passed over a bridge, and it was suddenly like being in flight: the ground was gone, and it was all train and waterfall. Looking back out the window, I could see the Romanesque arches that supported the span.

Hervé moved on to islands. He liked walking around islands. It was like having a Conde Nast Traveler magazine, but as personal narrative, and in French. He had perambulated the perimeter of San Antao in the Cape Verde Islands, and Reunion Island in Mauritius.

“Reunion Island was the only place I have seen active volcanoes — well, except Indonesia, but that was different. Walking around that island you can see so many climates. There is tropical sub-Saharan, and parts like Europe, depending on which side of the mountain you were on and the altitude.”

Did he camp?

People waiting outside of the Ooty train at a watering stop.

“No, there are small villages, and you stay there at night. Reunion Island you can walk around in eight days, San Antao takes maybe eleven days.”

There were more bridges, and I was always thrilled by the sensation of flying. Several hundred feet below us, there was lush greenery: palm trees, bushes, plants with huge leaves like banana plants.

On steeper inclines, the train would slow, and the pulse of the steam became more palpable. Bushes went by, studded with little bursts of color like fireworks, flowers the size of a quarter that were actually comprised of many little tiny flowers, always two-toned, with the light color in the middle, dark on the outside. Sometimes it was pink and yellow, sometimes purple and orange. Hervé said they were called “vellipeuse” in French, but I couldn’t find any references or translations to English on the Internet. An Indian arm reached out of a window further up in the train and pulled one from a bush, and a flurry of little colored petals burst from the bush like confetti.

Hervé also pointed out a tree with long white flowers, that he said was Datura. The first two times he saw one, I missed it, but on the third try, there were several, in one of the passing valleys: a large, solid tree with the white flowers cascading down all throughout its leaves. Each flower was well over a foot long.

“Datura has alkaloids, it will stop your heart. Don’t eat those flowers.”

I told him I would make a point of not doing so. For Datura I was able to find a reference: it’s a close cousin of belladonna, and in the same genus as Datura inoxia, a hallucinogen used by Native Americans which was made famous by Carlos Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan.

A railway worker was standing beside the track, holding out a red flag. At this point I noticed that there was a man working at the back of each bogie, and they all held out red flags, and as the train ground almost to a halt, the man swung up onto one of the cars further forward. The train slowly picked back up to normal speed.

Conoor is the first of the hill stations on this train line. The town itself looked grubby, but the station was small, cute, and clean. There was a sign advertising for the “Hotel Beach”, which seemed a little misplaced at six thousand feet above sea level. A big Holstein cow with bloated udders nibbled at the grass on the far side of the track from the station.

Many people got on and off at Conoor, but at the next staton, Wellington, no one did so. Wellington had a cemetary next to the station, and it was a spectacular place to spend eternity: it faced a rocky mountain stream, and there was a broad valley below it, with a little village, consisting primarily of white houses and tile roofs, perched on one of the ridges, and a red-and-white striped Hindu temple. After Wellington was Aravankadu, another tiny place with a tea processing plant opposite the station, where we remained halted for ten minutes. After that, I started to fall asleep: the excitement of toy train travel had worn off, and the effects of getting up at the unnatural hour of four in the morning hit me.

When I woke up, I noticed that we were now being pushed by a larger, more modern diesel locomotive. It didn’t lurch, but it lacked the romantic appeal of the little huffing steam engine. I missed where the switch happened, although the lengthy stop at Aravankadu was a possibility, as was Arnak, where the train did a strange forward-and-back operation, switching tracks and possibly engines.

Ooty was the terminal station; everybody left the train. As I was slowly winning a game of tug-of-war with my pack, to get it out from under the seat, Hervé came back to say that it wasn’t actually Ooty. Then someone else outside the train said it was, and then it wasn’t. Outside, I could see the “Udhagamandalam” sign — which, understandably, was truncated to “Ooty” for convenience. I kept pulling, and eventually made my way out.

I stayed at the YWCA. Haunted by the lyrics of The Village People and my own memories of visiting the YMCA as a child — smell of chlorine, swimming lessons, weight rooms I wasn’t yet big enough to use — I was stunned by the Ooty YWCA. It had magnificent gardens, good food, and a quiet reading room with old Victorian furniture. I met two women on the way down who, staying in the “dormitory” (three beds to a room) had experienced a rat problem and attemped, unsuccessfully, to get a rat discount, but I went a little upscale and got my own cabin for all of four dollars a night.

Ooty town was unremarkable, except perhaps that, although a big tourist destination, it didn’t seem to have very many people pushing accomodation or trinkets. It was cold, and I was happy to sleep under my down sleeping bag. The men wrapped wool scarves around their heads, like miniature turbans, to keep their ears warm, and many had another scarf wrapped around their neck. There was a preponderance of liquor stores compared to the rest of India, and they were invariably called by some other name: “Brandy Shop” and “Wine Shop” were the most common, although they dealt primarily gin, whiskey, and vodka. But I wasn’t here for the gin or anything else in the town: I meant to head for the surrounding hills as soon as possible.son for his reaction was clear upon his return: the train had just left, and the next one was in twenty-three and a half hours. I got a hotel room; I napped.

Coimbatore was a university town and although it had no temples or any attractions whatsoever, my stay was very enjoyable. No one tried to sell me anything. The streets were clean for India. Since there was nothing to see, I ran errands. I got a haircut that I was quite happy with (sometimes in Berkeley I can’t get that for eighteen dollars, and here it was fifty cents), bought miconozole for what was looking like it might be athlete’s foot (seventy cents — and it worked, so all mothers, and doctor’s daughters, on the mailing list can remain calm), got four passport photographs for the next visa or permit (a dollar), got a tailor to sew more velcro on the side pockets of the new pants (another dollar) and wrote up a story on what was, for India, a blindingly fast connection (fifty cents an hour). At lunch at a thali place (fifty cents), a standard south Indian institution that is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, the man who served me took an interest in showing me a few nuances of how to eat: put the yogurt into the really spicy curries and they taste better.

In the predawn darkness of the next morning, I walked to the station and bought a ticket to Ooty at quarter before five. I walked to the platform the ticket agent had indicated and paused: this was not a narrow gauge train. It had twenty cars, and they were big. Walking down the length of the train, I kept saying “Ooty?” to anyone in a uniform, and they kept pointing towards the front of the train, until the next to last car, when a chai-wallah (chai is “tea” — actually in India it means “cheap tea with loads of sugar and milk” — and wallah is a suffix added to nouns to indicate a person who works with respect to that item. Hence, a chai-wallah is a tea-seller. An auto driver is an auto-wallah. Et cetera. It is also used to denote a resident; a Delhi-wallah is a person living in Delhi) told me to get on. I confirmed this with a more official looking man. Inside the car, I broke out the guidebook, and read the section on the Ooty train again: the narrow-gauge line started in Mettupalayam, and it was from there that the train left at seven-thirty. Oops. Had I known, I might have had a chance to sprint for this train the day before; but I was happy to have stayed in Coimbatore for a day.

The train I was on was one of two second-class cars from The Nilgiri Express, from Chennai, that continued from Coimbatore. The man across from me was sleeping and didn’t budge for the entire two-hour ride. Two women, flat-nosed and tribal looking, sat on the other side of the aisle; one wore a red scarf around her head and the other with a four year old sleeping boy in her arms. The Nilgiri hills are home to various cultures that, historically, have been fairly disconnected from Indian society as a whole. Indians regard them as being below the lowest of the castes, and refer to them as “tribals”. Don and Betchen’s daughter, who lives in the United States, had adopted a tribal girl, and Betchen had brought the girl from India to Minnesota; in the process, they had opportunity to run into some of those prejudices, although as foreigners they had little import for them. The train station in Mettupalayam had one broad-gauge track, which I arrived on, and on the other side of the station there was one narrow-gauge track, where the train to Ooty waited, the engine puffing little white bursts of steam.

I bought a ticket for second class, fought like mad to get my pack to fit in the space below one of the benches for five minutes, and then took a look around. There were three other caucasians on the train; a middle-aged but ruggedly attractive French couple and a blond man wearing grubby clothes and tortoise shell glasses who looked a lot like the picture of Theroux on the back cover of my copy of The Old Patagonian Express. There were two big groups of Indians who had each colonized one end of the train: behind me was a group of two or three families, and in front of me a group of what appeared to be Indian frat boys. The frat boys all wore baseball caps, seemed to have gotten a haircut in the last week, and they talked and joked loudly in Tamil. Ten minutes later the train lurched out of the station, and for several miles it kept lurching until it started to gather speed. At five miles per hour, it was quaint; at fifteen, I began to wonder if I might get seasick; but then again at thirty it smoothed out to a gentle pulse that seemed to come in groups of five: da-da-da-da-daaaah, da-da-da-da-daaaah. All of the windows were open, and many people were hanging their heads out of them and gawking at the train and the land passing by. In The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux describes a black Costa Rican woman who was riding in a train with him, who suddenly switches from Spanish to English to yell at her son: “Get yo’ haid otta de winda! Tree gonna lop it off!”, and every time I saw somebody doing that I resisted the urge to say that to them. But I did it too; I was facing the back of the train, so I always glanced over my shoulder first to make sure a tree wasn’t gonna lop my head off, and then looked at the engine.

The locomotive was at the back of the train, pushing us rather than pulling, and the reason was immediately evident. Twin columns of vapor rocketed up from it, one a white pillar of steam, and the other was a black smear of coal smoke that smothered the sky behind us. The smoke was coming out of the engine so quickly that it was like watching a movie with every other frame removed. There were thatched houses that looked like ones I had seen in the backwaters of Kerala. As we pulled through a train crossing in a town, a small crowd of vehicles waited for us to pass: two motorcycles, twenty people on bicycles, and a cart pulled by a Brahma bull with one horn painted blue and the other red. There were no cars, trucks, busses, or autorickshaws. The train went over a bridge, and below it was possible to see dhobi-wallahs, clothes washers, pounding the living hell out of shirts and sheets against rocks next to a narrow river. Traveling with a limited wardrobe was easy in India; at every hotel, right after checking in, I would drop my dirty laundry at the front desk, and the next evening it would show up thoroughly cleaned, if somewhat faded, and neatly folded.

I greeted the French couple in their own language, and was delighted to learn that they didn’t speak English better than I spoke French. After five years of study and two six-week stints in France, I had a good accent and passable vocabulary, but at least half the time traveling French people speak very good English and will switch to it after they have complimented me on how good my accent is. His name was Hervé, hers Catherine; they were a doctor and pharmacist respectively, and lived in Bretagne. Catherine was taciturn, and I never heard her utter a word of English, but throughout the train ride Hervé and I would swap between the two languages available to us. This suited me, because I was often jealous of Indians, who would frequently have several languages to choose from when speaking to each other, and would intermingle them; now I had my chance to do the same. Hervé had an outrageous French accent, which kept making me think of John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail calling down to King Arthur: “I’m Franch! Why do you think I have this outraaageous accent, you silly king-a?” Fortunately I managed not to laugh, and Hervé, who was quite well traveled, began to tell me of his favorite places in the world. One of the best events in Bretagne was to visit the Festival Interceltique de Lorient, which happened during the beginning of August.

“There is music performances of many kinds, and they get many international names as well. Lots of Celtic music and performances. There are usually like 25,000 people who are camping in tents right there. It’s really cool.”

He had an aversion to other tourists. I told him about my tentative plans for the next eight months.

“Myanmar is very cool, it is good that you are thinking of going there,” said Hervé. “It was very easy traveling around there, and the people are very friendly, but there were not so many other tourists around. You can see most of the country going north to south, from Rangoon to Mandalay.”

We had been climbing for a half an hour now, and the landscape was starting to change. The train passed through a gorge; all of the Indians hollered and screamed, and one gave a deafening whistle. For the next five or six tunnels and gorges, it was necessary to stop talking; after the third I started covering my ears. During one tunnel, the frat boys starting singing something that might have been a fight song, and then they picked up in ferocity and volume, and it was a fight song.

The train slowed to a halt in front of a tunnel, and the passengers all walked out onto the grass by the track. There was a small shelter, a set of bathrooms, and a water tank next to the track. The train workers hitched a hose from the water tank to the top of the locomotive and began to refill it. It hadn’t really occurred to me that a steam train would need to be refilled with water, but it seemed obvious now that it was happening. The hose leaked a prodigious amount of water along its length; it was amazing that anything was getting into the train. The man with the tortoiseshell glasses was now clearly not Paul Theroux, who was New England professor: he was wearing wildly patterened pants, a striped shirt, and a white kercheif around his neck. He smoked a bidi, and seemed very agitated and twitchy; I asked him his nationality — German — and then, as he didn’t seem terribly interested in conversing, I left him. Germans are usually conservative, industrial dressers: black suits, leather jackets, squinty rimless glasses. But when they decide to break out of the mold, they do it whole hog.

The steam whistle blew, a proper high-pitched steam whistle that unmistakably belonged to a train, unlike the deep bellowing foghorns of the broad gauge lines. The passengers flooded back into the train quickly, as if each of the doors was a vacuum. The train went from quaint lurch to seasickness lurch to da-da-da-da-daaaaa in a period of five minutes. The Indians thankfully started to lose interest in yelling in tunnels, and Hervé kept going on his highlights of the world.

I told him about my travel overland from Istanbul to Cairo, and after that I ran out of ammunition to counter his onslaught of destinations.

“Sweden was amazing. As Myanmar is to Asia, Sweden is to Europe. There is a boat you can take from Bretagne to the UK, and from there to Sweden. Once we were there, we drove around and stayed in these cabins; it’s hard to describe a glacier or a fjord until you’ve seen one.”

We had been in clouds for a while, and then the train brought us above the cloud level after we passed through another tunnel. The guidebook had recommended the left hand side of the train, and little wonder: there was an enormous waterfall cascading down a brown rock face. The train passed over a bridge, and it was suddenly like being in flight: the ground was gone, and it was all train and waterfall. Looking back out the window, I could see the Romanesque arches that supported the span.

Hervé moved on to islands. He liked walking around islands. It was like having a Conde Nast Traveler magazine, but as personal narrative, and in French. He had perambulated the perimeter of San Antao in the Cape Verde Islands, and Reunion Island in Mauritius.

“Reunion Island was the only place I have seen active volcanoes — well, except Indonesia, but that was different. Walking around that island you can see so many climates. There is tropical sub-Saharan, and parts like Europe, depending on which side of the mountain you were on and the altitude.”

Did he camp?

“No, there are small villages, and you stay there at night. Reunion Island you can walk around in eight days, San Antao takes maybe eleven days.”

There were more bridges, and I was always thrilled by the sensation of flying. Several hundred feet below us, there was lush greenery: palm trees, bushes, plants with huge leaves like banana plants.

On steeper inclines, the train would slow, and the pulse of the steam became more palpable. Bushes went by, studded with little bursts of color like fireworks, flowers the size of a quarter that were actually comprised of many little tiny flowers, always two-toned, with the light color in the middle, dark on the outside. Sometimes it was pink and yellow, sometimes purple and orange. Hervé said they were called “vellipeuse” in French, but I couldn’t find any references or translations to English on the Internet. An Indian arm reached out of a window further up in the train and pulled one from a bush, and a flurry of little colored petals burst from the bush like confetti.

Hervé also pointed out a tree with long white flowers, that he said was Datura. The first two times he saw one, I missed it, but on the third try, there were several, in one of the passing valleys: a large, solid tree with the white flowers cascading down all throughout its leaves. Each flower was well over a foot long.

“Datura has alkaloids, it will stop your heart. Don’t eat those flowers.”

I told him I would make a point of not doing so. For Datura I was able to find a reference: it’s a close cousin of belladonna, and in the same genus as Datura inoxia, a hallucinogen used by Native Americans which was made famous by Carlos Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan.

A railway worker was standing beside the track, holding out a red flag. At this point I noticed that there was a man working at the back of each bogie, and they all held out red flags, and as the train ground almost to a halt, the man swung up onto one of the cars further forward. The train slowly picked back up to normal speed.

Conoor is the first of the hill stations on this train line. The town itself looked grubby, but the station was small, cute, and clean. There was a sign advertising for the “Hotel Beach”, which seemed a little misplaced at six thousand feet above sea level. A big Holstein cow with bloated udders nibbled at the grass on the far side of the track from the station.

Many people got on and off at Conoor, but at the next staton, Wellington, no one did so. Wellington had a cemetary next to the station, and it was a spectacular place to spend eternity: it faced a rocky mountain stream, and there was a broad valley below it, with a little village, consisting primarily of white houses and tile roofs, perched on one of the ridges, and a red-and-white striped Hindu temple. After Wellington was Aravankadu, another tiny place with a tea processing plant opposite the station, where we remained halted for ten minutes. After that, I started to fall asleep: the excitement of toy train travel had worn off, and the effects of getting up at the unnatural hour of four in the morning hit me.

When I woke up, I noticed that we were now being pushed by a larger, more modern diesel locomotive. It didn’t lurch, but it lacked the romantic appeal of the little huffing steam engine. I missed where the switch happened, although the lengthy stop at Aravankadu was a possibility, as was Arnak, where the train did a strange forward-and-back operation, switching tracks and possibly engines.

Ooty was the terminal station; everybody left the train. As I was slowly winning a game of tug-of-war with my pack, to get it out from under the seat, Hervé came back to say that it wasn’t actually Ooty. Then someone else outside the train said it was, and then it wasn’t. Outside, I could see the “Udhagamandalam” sign — which, understandably, was truncated to “Ooty” for convenience. I kept pulling, and eventually made my way out.

I stayed at the YWCA. Haunted by the lyrics of The Village People and my own memories of visiting the YMCA as a child — smell of chlorine, swimming lessons, weight rooms I wasn’t yet big enough to use — I was stunned by the Ooty YWCA. It had magnificent gardens, good food, and a quiet reading room with old Victorian furniture. I met two women on the way down who, staying in the “dormitory” (three beds to a room) had experienced a rat problem and attemped, unsuccessfully, to get a rat discount, but I went a little upscale and got my own cabin for all of four dollars a night.

Ooty town was unremarkable, except perhaps that, although a big tourist destination, it didn’t seem to have very many people pushing accomodation or trinkets. It was cold, and I was happy to sleep under my down sleeping bag. The men wrapped wool scarves around their heads, like miniature turbans, to keep their ears warm, and many had another scarf wrapped around their neck. There was a preponderance of liquor stores compared to the rest of India, and they were invariably called by some other name: “Brandy Shop” and “Wine Shop” were the most common, although they dealt primarily gin, whiskey, and vodka. But I wasn’t here for the gin or anything else in the town: I meant to head for the surrounding hills as soon as possible.