The Road to Peryar

The bus ride from Munnar to Kumily in Peryar is famous for being a long and unpleasant, but stunningly beautiful, journey.
It descends through the tea estates from about 2200m to about 1400 over the course of 180km and, if you're lucky, will only take you 5 hours.
I got on the bus early to get a window seat (meaning a seat next to a big hole in the wall into which someone could fix a pane of glass if they so chose). I'd just finished reading Are You Experienced?, a novel by William Sutcliffe based on his gap year travels around India. He'd evidently had a pretty shit time and had hated most of the people he met on the way, so the book comes accross as a very funny, but very scathing indicment of the British middleclass traveller ideology. I recommend. Anyway, at one point, his main character is on a train watching the countryside whizz by and listening to Pink Floyd on his walkman. He decides that Comfortably Numb must have been written with the Indian landscape in mind as a visual metaphor.
I decided to check it out and for the first time since i got here, pulled out my Ipod. Cassettes are all very well and good, but here i had over 400 albums at my fingertips. I must be able to find something a little better and more appropriate than prog-rock.
I started off with The Wall, just as a refernce point, to try and understand what he was trying to say, but decided that rock just wasn't working for me.
Something more ambient and atmospheric perhaps...
Orbital's Insides album was great for about 15 minutes before it got a bit too hectic.
I tried some Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawney, as they seemed like obvious choices, and they did work, but i felt that that was maybe a little too easy and a bit of a cop-out.
The Orb were great, but a bit too weird a little too often.
I tried some Chopin, Mozart and even some Opera and they were all okay, but i could definitely feel myself tending towards electronica.
Kinobe was sunny and bouncy and seemed to work well with all the scenery whizzing past, but i decided to put it on shuffle and stop thinking about it. Something would come, and i'd keep my finger on the "next" button just in case any gansta rap or thrash metal cropped up. Both of which i could tell wouldn't work without even trying.
Depressingly enough, after several hours of this - and I am reluctant to admit this - the one name that reoccurred a number of times and without fail matched and complimented the landscape, speed of the vehicle, road type, cloud formation, and even the colour of saris worn by women at passing bus-stops, was Moby. Literally anything by him provoked the sensation of being in a highly choreographed, mega-budget ethno-conscious bank advert, or a joyous journey montage from a beautifully shot and emotionally rendered road movie. No wonder his stuff is played so much on TV and in Starbucks. As uplifting background music goes, it's damn near perfect. Like aural bubblegum with a series of slowly shifting flavours.
Disgusted with myself, I put my headphones away, not wanting any of the locals to overhear my evident lack of any kind of discernible taste.
It was starting to get dark anyway, and the view was diminishing.