Trip To Ooty

January 5, 6: On this, the very first weekend of 2008, Abhi, Sudhi, Ketan and I went on a trip to Ooty, which is a hill station somewhere north of the Pacific Ocean. (Don’t listen to me; I have as much direction sense as a stuffed tiger.) Speaking of directions, our first destination was Mysore, the famous city west of Bangalore, given that you take a left turn at that point before Mysore road where people can turn left or right.

MYSORE:
This city is kind of like Bangalore, (it belongs to the same state) but has maintained its ethnicity very well as its infrastructure developed. In other words, “we saw no babes”. We went past the famous Mysore palace very quickly, deciding to get back to it later and went ahead to a great little hotel called Mylari, somewhere northwards, I remember the left turn. This is one of those tiny little places that makes the greatest-ever dosas, much like Bangalore’s Vidyarthi Bhavan, Janata hotel and Domino’s. After the awesome breakfast of butter dosas we went back to that big green circle and continued west, towards:

GUDLUR:
It’s not much of a town; its raison-de-erte is to simply connect Mysore to Ooty. It does have a few shops, where we grabbed some chocolates and banana chips and continued east or something. In a couple of hours, noon, we reached:

DECISION POINT:
There was a good road and a bad road both leading to Ooty. The bad one had great sceneries while the good road would get you to the destination fast. This is when we remembered the instructions that were passed on from our wise forefathers “ALWAYS PICK THE BAD ROAD”. This took us west, till we reached that beautiful place:

THE SMALL HILL WHOSE NAME PAVAN WILL KNOW:
This spot is very beautiful and scenic. I suppose one famous scene of a Kannada movie, “Mungaru Male” was shot here. According to Abhi, so was Ananth Nag. Yeah, we’re still talking about the movie. And then that Kannada hero sang in Sonu Nigam’s voice, Kunal Ganjawala’s voice AND Udit Narayan’s voice till the heroine (who held her own with Shreya Goshal’s voice), shot him on the forehead. It all happened in the backdrop of THIS hill, which we will repeat because it’s true, is very very beautiful. After spending two hours here, we went forth till we hit:

A VERY LARGE TREE:
Not really.

FROG HILL:
A series of hairpin bends and blind curves amidst the beautiful, natural background led us to a high viewpoint on top of a hill, where finally, there were babes. The view was beautiful, and Ketan had the time of his life shooting photos with that new camera of his. We’re talking about nature now, not the babes. After a while of making “king of the world” noises from the viewpoint, we headed further up and reached the actual destination:

OOTY:
It’s called so because “Udhagamandalam” is quite a mouthful. It’s a very low temperature town in Tamilnadu, which is famous for tea (OOH, tea!), home made chocolates and carrots. We ate lunch at a restaurant there and went to the Ooty lake. It’s a nice little lake that offers boating (the pedal boats are incredibly painful) and a mini train. What the hell, if we’re going to go to a hill station in the middle of winter, we might as well climb onto a kids’ train. After some miscellaneous sauntering and dinner, we ended up in:

GARDEN VIEW HOTEL:
Some room somewhere on some floor has a view of some garden. It was a decent hotel room with good service, albeit overpriced. After a good night’s sleep, we left and headed right towards:

DODDABETTA:
That’s a big mountain, which offers great views and charges hefty parking fees. It even offers a telescope around which so many tourists gather and fight that nobody gets to look through it. Along the way up, or the way down, you can visit:

THE TEA FACTORY:
That’s the name of a factory. Yup, “We went to a tea factory called the tea factory”. As the name suggests, it’s a very small factory that’s also a museum, a place where you can take kids for a field trip. They offer you a great cup of tea at the end, very good taste. Having enjoyed the tea and bought some packets, we headed south to:

THE OOTY BOTANICAL GARDEN:
A totally “DUH!” kind of garden that has a lot of grass and some occasional “DUH!” flowers here and there. And then we went to a place that DOES NOT HAVE BLACK ROSES:

THE ROSE GARDEN:
DUH! Red and Orange roses. Flabbergasted, we went:

BACK HOME:
On the way back, we encountered some wild elephants, tame elephants, wild boars, black-and-white-monkeys AND stuffed tigers across the Bandipur forest area. Free. Didn’t even have to pay for a safari! Then we came across Gudlur again (stopped for lunch), Maddur (vadas for dinner), Mysore palace again till we got to R.V. College, the place where we all studied. Driving past it at 90 kmph gives me an inexplicable sense of pleasure. Education is over for good, for the rest of my life.

We were finally at Ketan’s place, we parted after going “WHOA!” at the amounts we’d each spent for this trip. But it was totally worth it.