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.
( * ABC News)