Away from the concrete jungle

Six reasons why I thought this particular trip should come in here.

1. Until the last few minutes, we didn’t know where exactly we are going to travel during the weekend. All we knew is we are going to visit some place. Ooty was one of the last options.

2. It was a sleepless Friday night and we didn’t like the idea of taking rest and leaving. Decided to pick our bags (and cam esp.) and leave straight. Our bags were really not that important but the cam definitely was.

3. There were at least 5 accidents on our way to Ooty that day with 2 of those accidents on cars that overtook us a few minutes back.

4. We didn’t know the temperature in our destination could go up to -3 decrees C during this season until we reached the foot of the hill. This made things a lot more interesting though.

5. The 2 month old car that we travelled already suffered a lot of injury. Thanks to its owner’s frequent Bangalore-Trichy trips :-)

6. The breakdown.


Okay paying due respects to Section 2 - Renovation, I am planning to split this one into few parts, how many parts and how long each part is I have no idea. Anyways.


The Plan

It all started with a plan to visit Pondicherry as a company sponsored trip for Christmas holidays. This flopped due to various reasons. I would still say this got postponed and not cancelled. A plan to travel along the E.C.R is something that you can never ditch. Then explored hell a lot of options and settled on Yercaud. Plan to Yercaud looked good, it’s closer to Bangalore and it is not expected to be crowded during this time. Pondicherry was over-crowded and all rates hiked up, a lot of carnivals should be the reason is what one of my friends guessed. Well scrapping out the Pondi trip had nothing to do with the crowd or the hiked-up rates. And not the carnivals for sure!. For some reason, Ooty came up in between but was rejected many times considering a few extra kilometers that we might have to travel (over a hundred and fifty extra approx). But what the hell, got a car and five guys all charged up for the trip, so why not Ooty.

Plan was simple. I don’t like planning in the first case and things have always worked better unplanned. We happened to do a lil of planning for the Pondi trip just coz there was a 3 month old kid which was supposed to accompany us. Now that Pondi trip is scrapped out, it was just five of us. Ram woke his car up from the shed and in a few mins, we were all together sitting in the car, me, Shekhar, Ram, Priyatham and Venkat, all set to leave.


The Begining

Me and Ram were supposed to drive through the highway which was the most interesting part. We started somewhere during the morning and crossing the city limits was a challenge in its own ways. We hit the highway a couple of minutes later, something that we had been waiting for a long time. Considering the fact that we had taken close to 600 snaps during this trip, I guess these pics can describe the trip better than what I can with words.

The Long ride

Green Field

Lunch on the (High)way

Old car

A good lunch would mean a lot of energy; a long highway would mean a lot of speed. Both together would mean a lot of fun.

With five buffaloes and fan turned on in the car (Photo courtesy - Shekhar)

Forest check post - Tamil Nadu border (Getting closer to Ooty!)

Accident on the way (One of 'em)

Peacock

This was the last good thing that I can talk about in the rest of the trip towards Ooty. Roads were messed up and it was a real roller-coaster ride. The car could not literally move at any speed greater than 5 Km/hr in most of the parts of the road going forward. Travelling up-hill was kewl in it's own ways, with around 36 sexy hair-pin bends and place getting colder and colder as we moved up. It was just before climbing up that we heard that the temperature could go less than 0 degrees which made things really exciting. Being in South India most of my life, and considering how 'cool' the weather is in Chennai all through the year, this was something that I had never imagined would happen anytime soon. Would we really get to see frozen water? Well anyways...

Ooty

It took close to an hour is my guess to climb the hill and hey, we had reached what everyone in the car had been waiting for, we had reached Ooty! It should have been night, I guess, but it gets darker sooner is what we heard later. The fountain during the night was a great welcome.

The Fountain

Place was super kewl and what was left was, oops we realized, find a place to stay that night. Finding a guy on the road (a broker probably) didn't take time though. He took us to a couple of places (imagine 6 in the car now) and we happened to like the first place we saw the best. A peaceful cottage somewhere inside. The third and fourth room in the cottage might be given to other tourists, the owner warned. But who cares. Got into a little of negotiations and stuff, formality sake since the rates he quoted anyway sounded OK. A cook who could take orders and make stuff for us made the place even more interesting. Ordered a lot of food, dumped the bags into the room, and set out for a short walk. A real peaceful place, I should say. At least during this time, which was not supposed to be 'season-time' there. Found an ATM on the way, none of us had a penny mind you. ATM was not crowded at all and no Q to get the money. It is good to take your own money without standing in Q, I realized.

Not much of shopping at this time since all the shops close 'early' during this season. Climate was superb, it should be close to 3 degrees is what we heard. 'It can go further down as mid-night approaches' the localities claimed. Got some local 'platform' shop selling some monkey-caps. Not that it was great but it seemed to be a fashion there. For 10 bucks, you don't expect some woolen cap anyway. Each one of us got one, and walked our way back to our cottage.

Food was ready by then, parked the car in a better place, it was a whole different experience trying to stuff the car into the so-called shed in a hill, really. Anyway that was done and food was great. But it was a long day, a sleepless previous night, long hours of drive, bad roads during the second half of the journey, and we were all dead tired. That doesn't mean we should sleep but we were more interested in the early-morning Ooty to catch the sunrise and decided to hit the sack.

Thick woolen blankets, warm inside the cottage, bloody tired we were, what more do you need. Off we went to sleep.

To be continued...