Hiking & the Tahr Pin

One of the great joys of life at Kodaikanal International School is the weekend hiking program. Headed by BB, a Canadian woman who teaches middle-school art, the hiking program is a requirement for every student. More specifically: hikes are sorted by length and difficulty into A, B, C, and D hikes. Every student must complete two hikes of any difficulty. If students wish to participate in the yearly “wilderness” camping trip they must earn their “Tahr Pin” by completing a certain number of hikes in each category, with the specific requirement depending on age. The wilderness camping trip is a full backpacking trip for the older children, and I’m aiming to get my own Tahr Pin and join them as a chaperone. A tahr is an Indian mountain goat; hence receiving a Tahr Pin means that, like the mountain goat, you are ready to explore the most remote peaks and most precarious mountain paths.

Mountain paths… Or severe lack thereof. Before the hiking season started, BB told the new teachers that if we wanted to lead a hike, we should go along with an experienced guide once or twice, and then if we felt confident, we could lead the group. As a foolish Westerner used to the Canadian park system, I thought, “I can do that! How hard can it be? I’m an experienced hiker and I’d love to lead a hike, so I’ll just go on it once and then I’ll be able to lead.” However, I was imagining something comparable to the organized system of national parks or provincial parks in Canada - clearly marked trails that have a beginning and an end, that usually provide a map at the beginning to show your route, and – if it’s really overgrown - have some fluorescent tape tied to trees at intervals to help you find your way. I was not prepared for an initial trek through the twisting, rollercoaster-steep alleyways of Kodaikanal, nor was I prepared for the all-important and all-too-frequent moment of decision: which cow path looks more recently used?

In the past, hikes have gotten badly lost and taken over 6 hours of extra time to return to camp; I suspect that they could have been lost for even longer, but cow paths lead eventually to one of the villages scattered throughout the Panil hills, where the curious inhabitants will direct you back to Kodai. It’s a beautiful landscape to hike through. There’s something deeply satisfying about starting out perched on a hillside, looking across a deep valley to another hillside, and saying, “that’s where we’re going. I can see it, I can see the forest in between, I can see the mist rising up in the distance, and I’m going to be over there in a few hours.” After living at sea level for so long, it’s amazing to have a completely unobstructed view for a kilometer or more, across an aching gap of thin, thin, high-altitude air. Sometimes you can see right into little villages, if you have binoculars. (Which I do! Thank you, EEB department and the Kenya trip… I now carry binoculars with me everywhere.)

At first I thought I would be disappointed by the amount of civilization in our hikes, but it’s become one of my favorite parts. “Roads” quickly turn into rutted, rocky tracks that only foot traffic and donkeys or horses can traverse, and though the townspeople of central Kodai are completely used to the white faces of the tourists and schoolchildren, it’s a different place entirely after walking only half an hour out of town. The village children come shrieking and running out to see the visitors, clamoring to have their pictures taken with our digital cameras and greedily looking at their images on the screen; they want to play football and chase after the hikers asking for more pictures or more play. Women stare from beneath baskets of washing or huge urns of water balanced on their heads, or peer out from behind waving lines of brightly colored laundry. Everything is so COLORFUL, and I hear that it’s twice as colorful up in the North – I can’t even imagine! India is rich in textiles, and many of the things that we in North America would use paper for, Indians use cloth. It’s all brilliantly dyed, bright and patterned and embellished and absolutely gorgeous. The houses are all painted colors that would earn them the reputation of “that one gaudy orange and purple house down on ____ street,” back at home. Here, they're all that bright and entirely it’s appropriate and perfectly beautiful.

I can't wait to get to the longer C and D hikes - you have to work your way up, but eventually they last up to 12 hours, leaving at 6AM and getting back just in time for dinner, and traverse valleys where you have the chance of seeing elephants, bison, and even panthers - well, that was only one group in the past 5 years, but it's possible. Monkeys, of course, are everywhere. The hikes are HARD, though; we're in the hills, you can't really go anywhere on a level stretch. It's the difference between deathly-mountain-climbing steep, and not-SO-steep-but-still-pretty-damn-steep. Oh well. Muscular legs, here I come.