My shoes were white once but then coorg happened.
Coffee plantation walk was nice. As a result, I can now identify a few more trees and plants. I’m still not very confident in my knowledge about Arabica and Robusta coffee plants. I believe coffee is a hobby for more sophisticated people. I don’t identify myself as one, so that should be fine.
I knew beforehand that this whole plantation walk would be torturous for my white shoes. But then, I’ve walked 100K steps in a day with them, and they have accompanied me on every single 5, 10, 15, and 16 KM run since last year—so again, that should be fine. Though I’m not rock-solid in my understanding of different coffee beans, I can at least identify coffee flowers. They are small, white, and star-shaped, resembling jasmine. Both have a similar sweet, pleasant, and mildly floral fragrance—though jasmine’s is stronger. The coffee flowers looked so pretty that I added them to my collection.
I like collecting leaves and flowers. It’s not just about them being pretty; it’s also because I can use them as souvenirs of moments that have passed—in this case, of the coffee plantation walk. The good part about this collection habit is that it keeps me (genuinely) occupied and excited about what’s coming next. Otherwise, it’s so easy to drift into some other moment or worry about some petty thing. As you might have guessed, they start decaying with time. Each one decays at its own rate. I’m getting used to it now. I might consider using resin in the future—let’s see.
We started our plantation walk around 6:15 AM. My shoes were still visibly white. I knew they’d get dirty, so I decided to take a before-and-after picture. Long before reaching Coorg, while still standing in a long queue with my friends to board our bus from the office, I clicked a picture of my shoes. I made a mental note to capture another one on my return trip.
I liked the bus ride. I really like long rides in general—they are so soothing. And old songs alongside are like cherries on top. By 8:15 AM, we were back at the hotel. During our plantation walk, the guide told us a lot of interesting things. I would have preferred staying close to him the entire time—then I could have asked for the names of all the trees we passed. But only towards the end did I come to my senses and start asking. Now, I know a bit better. There’s this one tree I’ve greeted so many times, but only during the walk did I learn that it’s called a silver oak. Throughout my trip back to the office, I kept pointing and saying—“Look, another silver oak!” My friend thinks I’m just pointing at random trees and calling them silver oaks. But even she agrees that I’m really accurate in identifying jackfruit and mango trees. It took some time, but I had the whole bus ride to convince her—so again, that was fine.
Midway through our walk, I saw an unripe fruit on the ground. Confidently, I claimed there was a guava tree nearby. We were looking around when the guide corrected us—it was an avocado. I can’t blame her for doubting my skills.
The path was rugged, as it should have been. I was focused on placing my foot right when the guide pointed to a distant tree and introduced it as a Rudraksha tree. From that distance, it was hard to capture its features. However, I’m glad I now know there’s a Rudraksha tree. I never really thought about Rudraksha much and had no clue that it came from the seeds of a tree.
He pointed out many other interesting things—the cotton silk tree, insulin plant, mandarin orange plant, pepper vines, betel nut tree, fishtail palm tree, sleeping hibiscus flower, morning glory flower, kandhari chili plant, yellow Jacobinia, wolf spider, and a few more that I can’t recall at the moment.
Overall, this whole walk was beautiful. My shoes? They were white once.
