We arrived in Mysore on Wednesday afternoon and
settled into the Hotel Palace Plaza near the Mysore Palace. Rita shopped at the
Handicraft Emporium while I visited a barbershop and then walked around town.
On the next morning (Thursday Thanksgiving), we
took a local bus to the top of Chamundi Hill to visit the Sri Chamundeswari Temple,
the Godly Museum, and to enjoy the view from the hill. Rita returned to town for more
shopping while I walked down, then back up, the 1100 or so stairs to the bottom of the
hill, visiting the carved stone statue of Nandi, Shiva's bull, on the way. The rest
of the day was spent on report writing and Internet cafe visiting for me, window shopping
and resting for Rita.
On Friday morning, we boarded a tour bus headed
for Ooty. The tour was to be a round trip from and to Mysore, but we took all of our
baggage with the plan of leaving the tour in Ooty. We were picked up at 7:30AM, and
then driven from hotel to hotel as the tour picked up other customers. Many of them
were not ready, so the bus returned to some hotels a second and third time. In one case,
we returned a third time and then waited an additional twenty minutes for the family to
get ready, with a good deal of grumbling from some of the on-time passengers. We
finally left the city after 9AM. We had a similar experience with the Goa beach
tour—at least an hour on the bus running here and there before the actual tour
started. I guess this may be the norm, to be treated as an opportunity to see more of
the city.
Anyway, the bus headed south on some pretty
rough roads. At one point, for some distance, the pavement consisted of a one-lane
ribbon of battered concrete with pot-holed asphalt shoulders. Buses and trucks zipped
down the center of the road toward oncoming vehicles, moving aside at the last minute to
pass oncoming traffic.
We drove through Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary
but stuck to the main road (as all vehicles except special park vans were required to do),
and I'm sure that the tigers, panthers, and other exotic animals stay well away from the
traffic. We did see some monkeys and some chital (spotted deer) who waited to be fed near
the side of the road.
As we approached Udhagamandalam (known as
Ooty), we began to climb through a series of switchbacks on the side of the mountains
known as the Niligiri Hills. The road was often very narrow, and at one point we
maneuvered past a truck with less than an inch to spare. We passed what looked like an
outing of the Enfield Motorcycle Club stopped beside the road, but they soon overtook us,
passing us in ones and twos. We reached the town of Ooty, 2200m in elevation, at around
1PM and were dropped off at the Nilgiri Woodlands Hotel.
Ooty has some of the most beautiful scenery I
have seen in India—bright green terraced hillsides planted in various crops,
including a lot of tea. My experience has been that landscape pictures never do justice to
the real thing, but I have taken and included a few anyway. Soon after we arrived, I
walked down to the train station to check on our train to Mettupalayam and learned that a
recent landslide had blocked the tracks, and the train was only running as far as Coonoor.
We found our room to be cold and the bed
uncomfortable. The double bed was made up with single-size linen and blankets, so
there were two bottom sheets with a gap in the middle, and one top sheet that went down
only to our knees. The blankets overlapped in the middle, but parted company once we
got in. Rita was not feeling well and, after a cold night, was ready to leave Ooty
immediately. But when she saw that it was a nice, warm day, she agreed to stay until
mid-afternoon. The plan was to take the bus to Coimbatore, where we would try to
move forward our train reservation to Cochi and head there sometime Sunday.
I walked up into the hills behind our hotel and
found some tremendous views, so after lunch we hired an autorickshaw to take Rita and me
up the hill to Bishops Down so that Rita could also share the view. The autorickshaw
turned out to be on its last legs and overheated repeatedly on the way up, which was OK
because I wanted to stop and let Rita admire the view from the many lookout points along
the way.
We hired a different autorickshaw to take us
and our luggage to the bus station. The plan was to take the bus to Coimbatore, where we
would try to move forward our train reservation to Cochi and head there sometime Sunday.
The road down from Ooty has many switchbacks
and tremendous views. Part way down, we passed a tourist bus that had become stuck on
a hairpin turn when the back of the bus hit the pavement. Our bus driver was able to
get by, despite the tight quarters. The road paralleled the train tracks for part of
the way, so we got some idea of what we were missing by not riding the toy train.
We arrived at Coimbatore about dark and took a
room at the Park Inn Hotel near the train station. Early on Sunday morning, I tried
to change our tickets and learned that it was too late to make reservations for either of
the trains leaving during the day. We decided to stick with our reserved 12:45AM
departure rather than try standby on the earlier trains. There was nothing we were dying
to see in Coimbatore, so we spent the day working on this and other reports, and watching
Florida election coverage on CNN. Our check-out time was 6:45PM (most Indian hotels have
24-hour checkout—the room is yours for 24 hours from the time you arrived; after
that, you owe another day's rent), so we spent the evening at an Internet cafe, at a
restaurant, and finally at the train station fighting off the mosquitoes. By 1AM, we
were asleep in our bunks and on the way to Cochin.
The next report will be from the state of
Kerala, Rita's birthplace.
