Ooty! Oo La La...

TRAVEL MEMOIRS Part 3 of 5

Date of travel: 23-12-2008 (Tuesday)

(After Part 1: Journey Bhubaneswar to Bangalore to Mysore and Part 2: Mystique Mysore, this is Part 3 of this series of 5 memoirs.)

The tour had only begun. After a thrilling Mysore experience the previous day, it was time to get high and go high...onto the highlands of Ooty, the queen of hill stations. Wow!

We set off from Mysore at around 6:30 am.

'Bandh?'ipur National Park
On the Mysore-Ooty highway was located Bandipur National Park, famous for Project Tiger; it's one of the 30-odd Project Tiger Reserves in India.



We went on a tour of the reserve in a Departmental Bus Safari. During the ride, I was very amazed to see my co-passengers getting frenzied at the sight of an occasional deer here and there, counting them on their fingers. I quipped, "Mates! If you desire to do this sort of counting at IIT Madras, make sure that you bring lots of spare fingers with you!". But those deer, surviving in a perfectly natural habitat, looked much healthier than their IIT Madras's counterparts.

Except for a few deer and monkeys (which, I bet, can be found in much greater abundance in the campus of IIT Madras), we couldn't spot anything dramatic. The only consolation was a distant maned head of a crouching lion which was so still and far that it could actually have been a statue or a living creature with equal probabilities! Barring these, it was just vast stretches of trees all throughout the Safari. I could only feel for the state of Project Tiger in India.

In the end, all we passengers shared the common realization that the Bus Safari had only made each of us poorer by Rs.95! It, certainly, had "taken us all on a ride"!

We resumed our journey to Ooty in our Chevrolet Tavera. Our driver, Mr. Nayaz Khan, kept us occupied with stories of his previous experience on that particular road through the forest, including an instance when a couple of elephants blocked the road and refused to budge from their positions, thus making him wait for about half-an-hour to get clearance. I told him that I see couples of elephants every now and then at IIT Madras (at the Gajendra Circle, of course!) What a PJ that was! :)

Bend it like hair-pins
As we moved onto the ghats of the enchanting Nilgiris, travel became more adventurous. Thirty-six hair-pin bends now separated us from Ooty. These bends, dangerously sloping up,
apparently over 45 degrees, posed a challenge to any driver. And if you did not note my previous statement, there were 36 of them! Nayaz Saheb narrated a recent incident of an Indica, traveling down the slope on 5th gear, that skidded off a bend and fell down the ghats. Our Tavera crawled up and around the bends on 2nd gear.

(Unfortunately, I do not have any image of those hair-pin bends. I have obtained the picture on the right from Flickr to show how a hair-pin bend looks like.)




Welcome to Ooty!
We reached Ooty at the stroke of noon. There was a touch of chill in the weather. We headed straight to the pre-booked ACC Guest House on Sheddon Road.

A team of three care-takers welcomed us upon our arrival. at that beautiful guest-house It was a pleasant surprise to discover that all three of them were Oriyas! And the lunch, comprising of the evergreen Oriya combo of bhaata-daali-bhaja-tarkari, made the place feel like home. We rested for an hour in our rooms. Gautam Gambhir and Yuvraj Singh were blasting the English bowlers away on the final day of the 2nd India-England Test Match at Mohali as India was pushing for an improbable victory. Both of them, though, were dismissed agonizingly short of their centuries. The match ended in a draw.

We set-off for sight-seeing at around 14:00 hours.

Ooty Boating House
We opted for two 4-seater pedal boats and went boating into the gleaming Ooty Lake. After some initial confusion regarding the steering mechanism of the boat, we pedaled hard and sailed smoothly through the shining water. It was real fun!

Aanoo, Linu and me then decided to play Striking Cars (a fun-game in which players drive mini electric cars in an arena for a given period of time. Theoretically one should try to avoid making contact with other cars but practically, there couldn't be any more fun than hitting someone's car from behind! :)).

I and Linu sat together in a car while Aanoo decided to drive another himself alone. To make things look funny, I intentionally banged Aanoo's car from behind and quickly fled away from the scene before he could retaliate :D. A few seconds later, three other cars jammed into him from all directions and he was caught up in a traffic mess. In the end, he realized that driving a car at his age is not a cup of tea!

The pristine Botanical Garden
A true photographers' paradise! You stand anywhere and take a snap, you can be assured that there's a verdant natural background adding beauty to your photo. I needn't write any more about this place; enjoy its beauty (and mine too :) ) in the images below.





Dodabetta peak
Another wonderful location, it's the highest peak of the Nilgiris. It has a Telescope House from where one could enjoy a panoramic view of the whole district of Nilgiris. One could also view the Chamundi Hills (remember my last post, Mystique Mysore?) from this peak.





Home-made Tea Factory
After having seen innumerable banners proclaiming "Home-made chocolates available here" and "Home-made tea available here", we realized only upon reaching this tea-factory that "Home-made" is in fact a brand name and its products are certainly not "made at home". An official took us around the factory, showing and explaining to us the various steps involved in the process of tea-manufacture, right from bringing in the leaves up to the packaging of the final product. It was a good learning experience.

It was already 19:00 hours and the cold was becoming terrible. There were still a couple of places we could have gone to but we decided to return back to our rooms. It had been a satisfying day, nevertheless.

The chilly weather got still worse as night crept in. In spite of the presence of a room-heater, I had to seek the help of two bed-sheets and two blankets for keeping myself warm. Another unique experience! Deep inside these 4-layers of defence, as pleasant images of the day flashed across my mind, my lips smiled and heart just kept singing, "Ooty! Oo La La Ole Yo...".

Next day, we would return to Bangalore. Stay tuned for Part 4 of this series of memoirs. Before concluding, here are some memorable snaps upon the breath-taking Nilgiris en route to Ooty.