The Second Leg of the Ten Day Trip-within- a- Trip

(Wild elephant footprints in Kishorinagar)

(Pic is of Arial Bay Jetty)

After ten days on the road visiting Rangat, Mayabunder and Diglipur, I was more than eager to get back to my Port Blair guest house where my friends were anxiously waiting. It was a wonderful trip and I was glad I took the decision to make this journey. If the decision about going to the Andamans in the middle of the monsoon season was a crazy one, then the one about the ten day road trip was an ever more crazier one. But then, I have never been very normal.

In one of the previous posts I had written about my stay at Rangat where I stayed for three days and visited Panchvati, Yeretta, Bakultala, Kadamtala and also Amkunj beach, a desolate beach. I had met the Pradhan of Kadamtala, Ravi Kirtania who told me about the areca nut cultivation in the Andamans. After three days in Rangat I took off for Diglipur early in the morning.

Mayabunder falls in between Rangat and Diglipur but I decided to visit it on the return trip. The bus to Diglipur was at seven a.m., so I was at the bus stand waiting for the bus and wondering whatever made me make this trip. I had a young Tamilian teacher for company and he told me of the horrors of working in the Andamans. He told me about a teacher in a school on a small island which is connected to Rangat or someplace only by a donghi which takes four hours to reach. He added that the frequency of the donghie is fortnightly!

We got to Diglipur via Mayabunder where we had breakfast in a canteen at the jetty. It was one by the time we reached Diglipur and the Tamilian teacher helped me get a room in a hotel, Lakshmi Lodge. Someone back at Port Blair had told me that Naandi Foundation was propagating organic farming in Diglipur so I wanted to check them out. But the first day I stayed put at Diglipur and wandered around the ridiculously small town. I visited the vegetable market where the only sound was of the areca nut cutters. One shop had air rifles and when I asked the owner he told me the farmers used them to scare off the monkeys and birds which damage their crops.

I learnt Naandi had their office at Keralapuram which the locals told me was entirely populated by Malayalis. I went to Keralapuram the next day morning by bus. Daniel Antony, an agriculture department staffer took me on his bike to Naandi which had their office a little away from Keralapuram. There I met Arun Naik and Dharma Rao who was a Telugu. Naik was from Karnataka, and I spent half the day with them visiting a farmer who was practicing organic farming. I was touched when Arun Naik invited me home for lunch. It was my first home made meal during the three month stay at Andamans and I really had tears in my eyes as his family members urged me to take more and more of their wonderful preparations. It was a small, charming family and I wondered how they spent their time in this far off place. Naik told me the government employees, doctors and others were buying the organic produce.

I left them and went to Arial Bay where I spent some time wandering the small village. There is some kind of a naval station there and also a small airstrip. I went back to Diglipur in the evening and again wandered around, feeling like a lost stranger amidst all those people who went about their lives as if I did not exist for them. For the first time I felt lonely and far away from home. Thoughts of my son crowded my mind and it was then that I felt I had to go back home. I had only two weeks left for my media fellowship to end and I was eager to return home.

The next day Arun Naik took me to another village, Kishorinagar in a Maruti Omni van along with three of their field workers. One of them told me about an elephant that had attacked an excavator. He told us elephants were a problem on that particular stretch and two wheeler riders dared not drive on that road. Later when we reached Kishorinagar, the guys showed me deep pits which they told me were elephant footsteps! We were back by evening after meeting a couple of farmers practising organic cultivation.

I was back in my room and then all of a sudden I reemembered a friend telling me about a resort at Kalipur. I decided to spend a couple of days at the tourism resort at Kalipur before setting off to Mayabunder, the final destination on the last leg of my ten day trip. I took off hurriedly by bus and got to the ‘Turtle Resort’, set on a small hillock with a steep climb.

More details about my stay at Kalipur's 'Turtle Resort' in the next post, tomorrow.