Where on earth can you wit­ness hefty buf­fa­los run­ning 100 metres through mud and slush in under 14 sec­onds? The answer folks is a few hun­dred kilo­me­ters away from the city in Man­ga­lore dur­ing the Kadri Kam­bala fes­ti­val! And that’s where three of us — Venkatesh, Sandeep and I headed on the Dec 10–11 weekend.

Bekal Fort was on my list of places to see — I’d missed it dur­ing my ear­lier visit, so we hired a cab on Sat­ur­day and drove down to the fort. It’s about one and a half hours away from Man­ga­lore and we reached around 3 in the after­noon. From the fort, you get a sweep­ing view of the sea and Bekal beach, which seemed quite deserted. Of course, it was the mid­dle of the after­noon and though it was win­ter, we were still get­ting suf­fi­ciently roasted.

The only objects on the beach were a whole load of fish­ing boats. After walk­ing around the ram­parts, we spent some time watch­ing the going-ons of peo­ple on the beach below the fort. At around 6 pm, with the sun about to set, the police­men start­ing blow­ing on their whis­tles. It was clos­ing time.
We left the fort and stopped at a fish­ing vil­lage by the road and watched the sun­set. A gag­gle of kids spot­ted us and sur­rounded us and demanded that their pics be taken. Even they seem to know that the world has gone dig­i­tal and wanted to imme­di­ately see them just after we took the pictures!

The sun turned into a pink­ish ball and quickly set against the fish­ing boats sway­ing gen­tly in the waters.

~~

Sun­day morn­ing, it was time to head for the Kadri Kam­bala race, which turned out to be just a few kms from the hotel we were stay­ing in. We landed at the venue at 8 am. Way too early we realised, as they were just begin­ning to put up the ban­ners. We walked around the venue and tried to find the best place we could stand to get a view of the races. The buf­falo rac­ing event was only in the after­noon. The rest of the morn­ing there would be races for kids, women, men and then fol­lowed by tug-of-war : all of these con­ducted in the slushy field pre­pared for this pur­pose. It was fun too watch as they fell all over the slush try­ing their best to outdo each other.

After a few hours, we headed for lunch at a place called Abhi­maan nearby. The culi­nary theme of our trip was fish, so we ordered rounds of fried fish and curry and Venky and Sandeep ordered gar­lic naan, which for some rea­son seemed par­tic­u­lar deli­cious in Mangalore!

After wit­ness­ing a round of events, we took respite in the shade. The two boys tried to catch a quick nap before the actual races. I was busy watch­ing the going-ons of all the dif­fer­ent groups prepar­ing the buf­fa­los. It all seemed really time-consuming and com­pli­cated. One of the buf­fa­los had gone wild and was run­ning out of con­trol till they man­aged to tame him down. Finally, the races started and we stood at the fin­ish line to get pic­tures of the buf­fa­los charg­ing in.

Rajesh, who had ear­lier sent me all the infor­ma­tion on the races landed up at the field to say hello. The inau­gu­ra­tions to each race was long and rather painful (for so for me, as I didn’t under­stand much of what was being said!). The com­men­tary was non-stop, each speaker going on and on about… buf­falo rac­ing, I presume!

Every time the buf­fa­los would come rac­ing in, we’d quickly step out of the way at the last moment. I didn’t quite like the idea of being tram­pled by these big heavy crea­tures so I would take a pic­ture and then scam­per for safety. One set nearly ran into the crowd, but besides that they seemed to have good brakes and stopped just before they could inflict any great damage.

By 6 pm we were as tired as the rac­ing ani­mals who were heav­ing and pant­ing, after what obvi­ously doesn’t come nat­u­rally to them!

We headed back to the hotel, fresh­ened up and then went to the Liq­uid Lounge (which I had dis­cov­ered on my last visit to Man­ga­lore!). From there, we headed to the bus stop at 8.30 pm, head­ing back home to Ban­ga­lore after a hec­tic, but enjoy­able weekend!

Links:
– The Man­ga­lore Album
– More about Kam­bala, here and here.