Home on the Strange

(20 May) After the arduous trek from Delhi to Wellington, I awoke on a Monday morning to explore my new surroundings in the daylight. I quickly met my new neighbors, the many macaque monkeys that roam the hills of Wellington. These monkeys were the inspiration for this blog and the pictures above and around the blog are of the monkeys which I see daily.

My new home is a three-bedroom house on the ground floor of a six-house apartment block. Being on the ground floor, I have the luxury of both a front and back yard, which are looked after by my faithful driver/gardener Pinto. He does a decent job for his lack of formal horticultural training, though sometimes his choices are a little puzzling. One day I came home to find that not only had he put a fresh coat of white paint on the front fence and bricks in the garden, he'd also thrown a coat on the bottom half of my tree. This is apparently a very British thing to do, and he seemed quite confused that I might not want a half-white tree...

Anyway, the house sits among many other student houses on Gorkha Hill, which is part of Wellington Cantonment. Wellington is nominally a military-only area, though there appear to be no actual fences and the wildlife and locals come and go as they please. Further down the hill is the village of Coonoor. Coonoor seems to be a typical Indian village with a bustling downtown market area and highly suspect sanitation standards.

All of this is set into the beautiful Nilgiri Hills of southern India in the state of Tamil Nadu. After the wretched heat of Delhi, I felt lucky to be spending my year in the cool climate and relative serenity of the Nilgiris. Welcome home.