Follow the dirt road all the way: you’ll come to two gates,” Janaki writes in her precise and detailed ‘Directions to get to Rom and Janaki’s’. “We are the people behind the red gate on your right with a snake engraved on the gate post. If you overshoot this turnoff, you’ll come to a village. If you ask anybody here for ‘Muthalai Pannai Veedu’ or ‘Pambu-kudivanam’ or ‘Vellakaran Veedu’, they’ll point you in the right direction.” Translated, that’s the ‘crocodile farm house’ or ‘the forest where snakes live’ or, simply, ‘the white man’s house’.
Romulus Whitaker is a legend, of course, his work in herpetology and reptilian conservation spanning nearly five decades of pioneering work, not that you would ever guess from his deadpan humour and humbling humility. Columnist and writer Janaki Lenin is equally diffident. She isn’t quite sure what to do — her phone has been ringing off the hook since the morning (a leading paper had just carried a story on the Karadi Malai Camp). Someone wants to know if they can come to see leopards. No? Well, maybe a tiger? Not even that? Twenty colleagues want to make a group trip of it. She tries to explain they have only three cottages. They’re willing to share!
And so on, over a simple meal at a thatched-roof dining room adjacent to the open kitchen, the counter secured with a wire mesh after the meal is had — the monkeys here are pretty inventive, Rom says. They are gracious hosts, and it couldn’t have been easy to let visitors into their utterly sylvan home (the cottages are at a distance of five minutes from the main homestead). The eleven-acre sprawl of jungle that Rom and Janaki call their ‘farm’ hasn’t been cultivated so much as it has been thoughtfully nurtured — except for the Australian acacia, a fast-growing species that provided all the timber for the guest areas, a diverse variety of indigenous trees have been planted — so it’s hard to believe this place used to be a paddy field like the property adjacent to it.
Rom says the forest seems to be claiming the land back and leopards, which weren’t around when they first moved here in 1996, are now sighted with some regularity in their heat-sensitive night cameras. He still hasn’t seen one of those stealthy cats yet, however, so a leopard sighting is a long way from a reason for visiting Karadi Malai Camp. There aren’t any karadis (sloth bears) either — Karadi was the name of the first dog Rom and Janaki lost to a leopard, his mauled body left on the hill they gave his name.
We went on a guided climb up this malai (hill), part of the 950-hectare Vallam reserve forest, with a young volunteer, Riya Sequeira. We were drenched in sweat halfway up, chasing butterflies, garden lizards and, umm, scats, learning to identify the indigenous Euphorbia, which is not a cactus although it looks like it, and the red wattled lapwing, which squawked warnings of our presence. Our bottled water tasted sweet and the cloud-fed breeze was heavenly as we took in lovely views of the countryside and rested on flattened boulders.
Earlier that day, we had stopped by the Irula Tribal Women’s Welfare Society (ITWWS), another huge patch of verdure so lush that it’s difficult to believe this is a drought-prone region. The respect Rom commands is easy to see in his interactions with the people he calls his peers, and he says they are his reason for settling here. The ITWWS’ nursery grows some of the most potent medicinal herbs; we touch, smell and try to memorise them (unsuccessfully). After all that hard work, we are treated to a superb hibiscus tea flavoured with dry ginger and palm jaggery.
It was an Irula tracker who took us on another walk, this time early in the morning. The forest floor was astonishingly alive and Maasi read it expertly. He waved us to a halt silently and a pair of fighting bulbuls appeared from the foliage to the left, as if on cue. He dropped a stick of hay into a hole and it did a wobbly jig — and there’s your crab, Maasi smiled: “Would you like it caught?” By the end of an hour-long walk, we had probably trampled on dozens of valuable herbs (the Irula elder spoke of cures for everything from ulcers, arthritis and oedemas to spider bites), discovered the grass that makes the best broomsticks, followed porcupine tracks and picked ripe lemons off the ground. I don’t recall missing the leopard.
Creature comforts were a different matter. Karadi Malai Camp is about as close to nature as you can get without camping. The cottages stand on moated stilts, which keeps scorpions and ants out but geckos and flying insects are regular visitors (nothing to worry about, a helpful notice told us). The walls are woven bamboo shipped in from the Andamans, the roughly hewn flooring is just hammered planks of wood, the lone fan is wall-mounted and there’s no hot water or health faucet. By the way, sleeping under a mosquito net on a naturally cool night (it rained) was remarkably pleasant.
However, there were unexpected difficulties. We found a frog in the washbasin. He was an interesting shade of mottled yellow, this fellow, and really quite small, and it didn’t seem polite to wash our hands over him. By morning, there were three of them, one peering anxiously over the shower curtain, two more at home in the aforementioned washbasin. Hello, I said, do you mind scooting over a bit? Water didn’t work (naturally) but a little prodding with the end of a toothpaste tube did the trick. It was all perfectly civilised.
The information
Where: Karadi Malai Camp is 47km from Chennai airport and 69km from Chennai Central rail station; many south-bound trains from Chennai Egmore Station and buses from Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus (CMBT) stop at Chengalpattu (7km), from where you have to take an auto to Karadi Malai.
Accommodation: Three basic cottages
Contact: janaki@gmail.com, draco-india.com/karadi_malai_camp.html