“Wellington, madam! Wellington!

Liz Light

The bus stops and the driver shouts: “Wellington, madam! Wellington! Get down here.” I follow his command and the bus roars away leaving me on the roadside in the dark. There is no sign of any town, let alone one called Wellington. No wind, no harbour, no Cake Tin.
I had planned to arrive during daylight, but the bus left late and then spent two hours in a greasy mechanic’s yard on the plains, as the connection was re-established between the engine and the exhaust pipe.
An old British motorbike roars into life and slides to a halt near me. The driver is swathed in woollen shawls, his eyes barely visible. I tell him the name of my hotel and he nods to the rickshaw attached to the back. We drive on dark dirt roads that seem to lead nowhere. He doesn’t speak English and I can’t speak Tamil. I have no idea where we’re going and why there is no town and I’m terrified. Over and over I repeat to myself, “Please God, don’t let me be murdered tonight.”
At last there is light ahead and, outside my hotel, I give the auto-rickshaw driver a huge tip for not murdering me.
In the morning, I’m woken by the beautiful, full-throated sound of a man in a mosque calling the faithful to prayer. It’s a soft dawn when I open my curtains and first see Wellington, India – absolutely cute, huddled on the edge of a wide green valley far below my hilltop hotel. A stream cuts through and where it stream exits a railway line enters the valley. It curves up the eastern flank, crosses a tall viaduct and zigzags up the northern hillside.
The town, in Tamil Nadu in the southeastern corner of the Indian subcontinent, is built in a huddle along the road in the west of the valley. It looks like a painting of an old Tuscan village, with tiled roofs jigsawed together and its stone-and-mudbrick houses faded to shades of pastel where successive coats of lime-wash have been diluted by mountain weather. Tea bushes, plucked trim, cover the higher hills and form a blanket of green stretching down and squeezing the houses into place by the road.
I follow a footpath down the hill, through the station, deserted but for a herd of goats, and cross the stream where women wash laundry, beating clothes on boulders and drying them on shrubs. Elderly men, not entirely put out to pasture, cogitate while supervising small herds of cows.
An aged herder, who speaks excellent English, proves a marvellous source of information. He’s proudly retired from a supervisory position in the tea industry and explains that leaves must be taken to the factory, treated with steam, withered and oxidised before they end up in a cup. While we talk, we wander uphill behind the cows. From the top, he points out a factory in the distance beyond the carpet of tea bushes. It’s one of many in the Nilgiri Hills, where tea begins its transformation from something that looks like camellia leaves to the beverage we love.
The tea gardens are a lasting legacy of the Raj. British plantation owners sold their properties to Indian companies in the early 1940s when they saw independence’s writing on the wall. Not much changed except the nationality of the owners: the plantations are still called Glendale, Sunnybrook and Pencarrow, the managers still live in British-style cottages and speak English with plummy accents.
The next day I wait for an hour for the train to Ooty, 21km away, before someone tells me it doesn’t run on Sundays. But the wait is lovely. I sit in the sun on the grass and watch monkeys frolicking on the station roof and children playing cricket on the green near the stream. I study the wildflowers that, because we are at high altitude but in the tropics, are a strange assortment: magnolias, gladioli and daisies bloom together.
On Monday, the train arrives as scheduled. I see it puffing up the valley, belching smoke, and feel a fizz of excitement about a steam-train journey, but, alas, it’s only an old diesel engine in bad need of maintenance. The train ambles, whistling volubly, through neat tea gardens and forests, and around the edges of wide valleys with hamlets as cute as Wellington. We pull in at Lovedale and Ketty, where I could stay at the railway station retiring rooms for 30 rupees – $1.50 – per night.
Ooty has a long name – Uthagamandalam – but no one ever calls it that. Ooty is Ooty and was, in its day, the queen of the southern hill stations, where the British migrated for months to escape the heat. It was referred to as “Snooty Ooty” because big-noters went there and race day was as fancy as the Derby at Epsom. The racecourse still dominates the town and old stone cottages with yellow roses climbing over front porches give glimpses of previous prettiness.
During the return journey, the dusk settles. Mist eases up the valleys and mountain people, wrapped in shawls, wait with their goats and cows while the train crosses their homeward path. I alight in the dark and walk up the hill to the hotel, fully in love with this sweet Wellington and not even slightly afraid of being murdered.