By Juliet Clough - Destinasian

Whether touring ancient Hindu temples or relics of the Raj, it's best to go with the flow on the teeming roads of Karnataka's coffee country.

Sweaty, "baggy," scorched," even a bit "skunky." The adjectives spiral off a chart hanging in the coffee curing works, the worst insults a taster can level at a row of beans. And pretty apt for me too, I reckon, five minibus-hours out of Bangalore, on the mad March roads of Karnataka. Here in coffee country, near Chikmagalur, Shaji Philip's garbling sheds and cool laboratory seem monuments to order and sobriety. The sobering bit involves the realities of garbling. Coffee acquires a whole new flavor when you realize that every mouthful requires an army of women to sit cross-legged on a warehouse floor and sort a zillion beans by hand for pennies a day. ? Karnataka's tourist highlights are scattered across the Deccan plains in southwest India, and visiting them entails seemingly interminable drives. When yet another truck painted with gods and lotus flowers bears down on us, each vehicle honking frantically in a ritual attempt to bluster the other into last-ditch capitulation, I realize that resignation rather than rage rules the road. If several tons of Birla cement are as determined as you are not to recognize the opposition's God-given right of way, then hey, that's karma.

We trundle over seas of rice husks, spread under passing traffic wheels for a last threshing. As I watch the schoolboys playing cricket under the dusty mangoes, the tailor working beneath his umbrella, the bicycle wobbling under its load of water pots, the crowd milling about a circus tent, I am reminded of Kim, Rudyard Kipling's love letter to the roads of India: "Such a river of life as nowhere else exits in the world.

A loaded elephant, his tusks handsomely bound with brass, sways along the verge behind five old men in saffron robes, their ash-striped foreheads proclaiming them to be devotees of Shiva. Already a three-months' march from their monastery near Mumbai, the swamis are touring the holy places of southern India, sleeping in pilgrim hostels, relying on the hospitality of the villages to sustain them on the long road to Cape Cormorin. Accepting our donation, their leader proffers a neatly receipted account book. And the bundled elephant? "That is the luggage of the saints," explains the swami with dignity.

Would the saints make it to the superb Hoysala temples, near Hassan, on the edge of the Western Ghats? March is an auspicious time for the worship of Surya, the sun god, and the star-shaped temples at both Halebid and Belur are thronged with holiday crowds: scrubbed schoolchildren, a boy with a wicker fish trap, the family of a woman with a shaved head and gold jewelry who has come to ask a blessing from the goddess Parvati. The air within the shrines comes thickened with incense and the scent of clarified butter on hot stone.

In Belur, our guide tells us that the 12th-century Chenakeshava Temple was build to commemorate the victories of King Vishnuvardhana, a warrior so fierce that in his presence even Yama, the god of death, was afraid to straighten his moustache. Almost nine centuries on, both it and the Hoysaleshvara Temple at Halebid still hum with a vigor that has as much to do with the holiday crowds as with the extraordinary beauty and exuberance of their sculptures. Most mesmerizing of all are Chennakeshava's celestial nymphs, their flirtatiousness perfected by all those decades spent glancing into mirrors, securing their silver anklets, and wringing drops of water from their hair.

The mirage at the end or the road is the Taj Garden Retreat, a country haven near Chikmagalur that is run in a relaxed, professional style. Say you like the food (we do) and the chef whips up a demonstration. Say you are tired (I am) and Ayurvedic masseuse appears at your door.

Rajeswari pushes up her bangles to oil away my fatigue with what feels like at least four pairs of hands. Sleepily, I identify the scents of lemongrass, eucalyptus, and sandal-wood. Raji is 28 and despite her steady job and good grasp of English, she is, she tells me matter-of-factly, unlikely to marry. Her father is a drunk and out of work; the dowry needed before a Nair girl's family can look for a good husband is an impossible dream.

In the evening a traditional theater troupe assembles on the lawn. I tend to avoid tourist shows, but this Yakshagana performance - bombastic song-and-dance treatment of episodes from the life of Krishna - proves irresistible, mainly for its Midsummer Night's Dream qualities. The players, all trades-men during the day, include a carpenter and a flower seller. They take their religious epics from village to village, our host explains, sotto voce, as Krishna, an electrician, makes short work of his wicked uncle, a clerk in the nearby college of education.

Much of my time at Chikmagalur is spent trying to avoid the reproachful gaze of Sayed Abdul Babu, the hotel's resident magician whose show I have unaccountably missed. He produces certificates to prove his skills. How could I have ignored his start turn, the extraction from his mouth of 150 rusty nails?

I have instead been playing darts until midnight in the snug of an English pub. Shaji Philip, the coffee king, has invite me for whiskey at the planters' hangout. The Kadur Club has stood its ground in Chikmagalur for more than a century, originally as a homey escape for expatriate plantation managers. Despite the fact that the club had its first Indian president only in 1969, today's local membership loyally continues to favor clear soup, roast chicken, and bread-and-butter pudding, and to stock the glass-fronted cabinets of the storeroom with tinned salmon and Angostura Bitters.

Shaji wakes the manager to demand the club's original Complaints Book, a surreally British compilation of gripes. "Is there no chance of getting a decent cup of tea in the early morning?" fulminates and entry of 1896. there are weevils in the horse straw, holes in the mosquito netting, a dead cockroach in the Monaco biscuit tin. The servants steal the dog food and mix limewash in bathtubs. Peppery asides on "putrid champagne" and a lack of quill pens run drunkenly off the margins.

Worm-eaten sporting prints and photographs of long-dead revelers in fancy dress hang among the stuffed buffalo heads and tiger skins. Shaji says that still, according to time-honored custom, a wooden coffin is kept for any member meeting an untimely end.

In Chikmagalur, it seems, the river of life flows on for eternity.

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