From Ujire

I’m writing this in my apartment in Ujire. The ceiling fan is circulating the warm, humid air around the room and I can hear crickets singing in the dense forest across the road. Sitting nervously at the Indian visa application centre in Edinburgh almost two weeks ago feels like a different world.

                                    

I spent my first weekend in Mysore, visiting a school teacher friend from Oman. 

Kamakshi and her husband Mohan cooked up some fantastic meals and introduced me to many local foods; ranging from various sweet and savoury breakfast dishes to “thali” set lunches and Indian sweets. I spent two very interesting afternoons with Mohan’s brother-in-law who has 30 years of experience working with appropriate technology in India.

After three days in Mysore, I travelled to Ujire (pronounced Ooo-jee-ray), where I will be spending the duration of my internship. This is a small down in central Karnataka, about 2hrs bus ride from the city of Mangalore. 

Travelling from Mysore to Ujire, approaching the Ghats

As far as I know I’m the only Western guy in the area and because of this get stared at quite a lot (especially when I picked up some groceries in town while out for a run and jogged home holding a bag of bananas).                                     

The Selco Foundation is working on a range of agricultural projects with local farmers. Here I went along to visit a farmer who transplanted half of his rice field with a transplanting machine being tested by Selco. We will be doing a yield test to compare the rice growth when he harvests this crop next week.

                                     

This is the view from the office window looking out towards the Western Ghats which are shrouded in the end of monsoon season clouds. The green lowlands look like jungle but are in fact farms growing rice, coconuts, bananas, rubber trees and much more. Most of the farms are less than 10 acres in size and are accessed down small bumpy tracks. One of my main tasks over the next few weeks will be testing small scale threshing machines with some of these farmers. I will be writing more about this soon!

                                               

  

                                             

I arrived in Ujire at the end of the monsoon season, however there are still heavy downpours of rain several times a day, so having an umbrella is essential!

                                       

                                       

Last weekend we went out to visit the farm of Anand, who is the head of the Selco foundation. The small farm and also serves as a test ground for some of Selco’s projets – for example a solar powered electric fence to keep out elephants (and more rarely tigers!). We caught a jeep along the main road and then walked for 30min to reach the farm.

                                       

This is the group of us at Anand’s farm. The five of us in the middle are all working at Selco and the two guys on either side were just visiting for the weekend. The blond girl is an Engineers Without Borders summer intern and will be returning to the UK next week.

The farm is in the foothills of the Ghats.

On Sunday we hiked to some waterfalls near the farm. Apparently tigers are occasionally spotted in the area. 

                                      

There were loads of leaches on the hike, however one of Anand’s farm works gave us a stick with a cloth ball on the end containing salt and some herbs. The leeches would fall off as soon as you touched them with the cloth. The falls were very impressive and we swam a bit in the water. I hope we will do some more exploring in the area over the coming weeks.