Back to Home Page       Coonoor 18 June 05

Well after an 8 hour chaffeur driven ride from Bangalore we finally arrived at The Holiday Inn in the Hill Station town of OOTY, orignally known as OOTACOMUND.  It was only 300kms away but took so long as the roads took us through Bandipur National Park which is basically a jungle with a road running through it where we saw several herds of elephants right alongside the road, pretty spooky in the dark!  In addition the final hill road to get to Ooty is made up of 36 hairpin bends and virtually single track all the way, add to this the awful state of the Bangalore - Mysore road plus umpteen checkpoints and jungle gates, this explains the journey time.

The first thing we noticed about Ooty was how cold it is compared to anywhere in India that we've been so far and we were pretty glad we packed a couple of jumpers.  After our poorly presented and even worse tasting breakfast we found our driver and were taken to the Botanical Gardens.  This had to be the best kept public gardens we have seen anywhere in India and beautifully green due probably to the typically British weather here, so much nicer than the so called superb Lal Bagh botanical gardens in Bangalore, here they have rules against dropping litter!!!!

After a stroll around here we went off to the massive lake which is man made and built by the founder of Ooty, Sir John Sullivan way back in 1824.  We hired out a ridiculous looking pedallo boat and set out on the lake pedalling with the current only to find we had to turn round again and pedal against it which kinda showed us how seriously unfit we both are, definitely needed a rest after this.  We bought the local tourism DVD from a street seller to watch later in our hotel room, most awfully filmed, diabolically edited film we've ever seen and so typically Indian.

From here it was up to Doddabetta Peak which is the highest point in South India, from here we got a stunning view of the surrounding hill towns and valleys and in particular the wonderful terraced vegetable and tea plantations as can be seen on the pictures below, this reminded us a lot of Sri Lanka.  The clouds suddenly came in so we had to dash for the car.

Back to Ooty for a wander around the famous Centenary Rose Gardens where they have seemingly every type of rose, hundreds of them named after all kinds of things including Margaret Thatcher of all people, it looked to me that we'd missed the season as most of the roses were pretty withered, nice all the same though with sweet smells and quiet which makes a change from the pollution and noise of Bangalore.  This finished us off so after a quick pit stop at Cafe Coffee Day for a decent cup of coffee instead of the putrid mud at Holiday Inn we were back at the hotel to unwind and see if we have improved our knowledge of the new camera, it appears we have!!