Dec 31 - Jan 2

We left home at 7 am Friday morning, for the eight-hour drive to Ooty.
The interesting stuff started when we entered Bandipur National
park. First, you cannot drive there alone at night, at least five cars
need to be traveling together. The reason for this, according to the
signs on the road, is to disturb the wildlife as little as
possible. The park is supposed to have wild elephans, tigers,
leopards, various monkeys and deer. It being daytime, we only saw some
chittal (Indian spotted deer) and common langurs along the road. The
langurs are very cute, with jet-black faces that have a permanent
cranky expression on them. They ran around in the trees along the
road, and also perched on the stone mileposts, observing the passing
cars.

Next to Bandipur, there is a small Madumalai Park, which is notable
for their elephant sanctuary. The sanctuary has several dozen temple
elephants, who are used in ceremonial processions once a year, and get
to hang out at Madumalai the rest of the time. We arrived as some of
the elephants were getting a bath in the river, which consisted of
lots of snorting, splashing, and getting scrubbed by their handlers
while lying in shallow water. For a small entrance fee, you can also
walk around the actual camp, where the elephans are tied to trees
(with fairly long chains so they can wander around), and are taken on
walks by their handlers. 

The final part of the drive to Ooty involved going up about 1500
meters on a very steep switchbacked road. The views are great all
around, but we only stopped once for a brief time, to not allow any
slow cars to catch up with us, passing on this road is very hard.

We arrived in Ooty at around 3pm, and made our way to Hotel Nahar, in
the center of town. My preference was to stay somewhere on the
outskits, which is quieter and less polluted, but by the time we were
making reservations, everything was already booked. The hotel was
listed as "Top End" by Lonely Planet, but I think it deteriorated
since their last review. Our room was a little dusty, and until we
heckled the staff the following day, the pillows and bedsheets were a
little questionable. However, it was planning a New Year's party in
its courtyard, which promised to be pretty fun (we were worried that
it would be noisy and end late, but as it turned out they quieted down
at about 2am, so we got a good night sleep that night).

After checking in and making sure our driver was accomodated for (as
usual, he decided to keep his lodging money and sleep in the car
instead),  we went for a walk around Ooty. Ooty (or Ootamound) was a
British Hill Station in the late 1800's. Lately, there has been a
large influx of Sri Lankan refugess into Ooty, who came to work on the
tea plantations, so it looks more like a small Indian town (with the
associated noise and pollution) than a hill station. However, once we
got out of the center, the surrounding coutryside was very pretty.

We ate lunch at the Tandoor Palace (again recommended by Lonely
Planet, and the only reasonable-looking place on the main street), and
then stopped at the Reflections Guest House, near Ooty lake (a little
dirty, but set in a nice eucaliptus grove) and arranged for a trekking
guide for next day. The cost was 300 rupees per person for a full
day's hike and packed lunch, and we were promised a visit to some
villages and tea plantations. 

Getting back to town, the party was just starting at our hotel, so we
went there for dinner and New Year entertainment. There was a fierce
game of musical chairs going on (for real), which lasted for about 45
minutes, with the final face off being between a 14 year old kid and
an older guy. The kid won, but only after the first try was declared
invalid since both contenstants were basically standing in front on
the chair and waiting for the music to stop. Come to think of it,
given the mad dash for seats every time a bus or train arrives,
Indians should be particularly good at musical chairs.

Another entertaining part of the party was the DJ. I don't know how
the hotel owner ended up with a guy who was trying to pretend he was a
rapper, I don't know. But this created some tension, since the DJ
obviously wanted to play rap and hip-hop, while the crowd demanded the
standard Indian dance tunes.

We left the party at around 1:30 am, and wandered around Ooty for a
bit, where people were holding mini-celebrations around campfires on
the street. When we got back to the hotel at around 2, the party was
already over.

Next morning, we went to meet our hiking guide at 9:30 am and leave at
around 9:45. There are seven people in the group plus our guide,
Anthony (there are lots of Christian Indians in Ooty). We take a bus
for about 20 minutes down the hill from Ooty, and start our hike at a
lake created by a dam. We walked went through some hills, then an
eucaliptus forest, and finally through tea gardens and some local
villages. It got foggy in the middle of the day, so we had limited
visibility and did not get any sweeping views, on the other hand
taking pictures of people and trees in the fog was fun. The guide was
fairly capable, although not very talkative. I think he got offended
when I said that the hills looked like the Bay Area (they do!). When
the grass is green, they hills are supposed to look like Scotland,
which is why the British liked it.

We stopped in one of the villages for tea and lunch. The interesting
point about that particular village was that it had some of the
Nilgiri tribal people (the Kotas) living there. Otherwise, I think the
village was a poor place to have lunch since it was pretty dirty,
there was no nice place to sit, and there was loud music blaring from
the loudspeaker at the bus stop. So we ate as fast as we could and
continued on to climb a hill above the village which is supposed to
have a nice view. The view did not materialize, since it was stil
cloudy, but there were some breaks in the clouds when we could see
down into the valley where there were interesting cliffs and some more
tea plantations.

We returned back to the village at 4 pm and took a bus back to Ooty
from there. In all, the hike was 16 km and took us around 7 hours.
Definitely a good way to spend the day. We ate at the Tandoori Palace
again in the evening and went to sleep pretty early. The hotel staff
has cleaned our room and changed the pillows, making it much more
pleasant.

The next morning (Sunday) we got up at 8 and walked in the Ooty
botanical gardens for a while, which are pretty nicely laid out
(although the Japanese garden was a disappointment). The nice surprise
was to see some Monterey cypresses, which grew very tall in the
absense of the Pacific winds. We also got a nice view of a familty of
Nilgiri langurs (black with a white head), running around in the
trees.

We left for Bangalore at around 10:30 and were home by 6, with Anand
driving almost non-stop.