Up and up and up
Trip Start
Jul 07, 2008
1
79
239
Trip End
May 27, 2010
Ootacamund, Tamil Nadu, India
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Hotel ???????, Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India
Very cool indeed
Gudalur - Ooty (54 kms and 2400 metres)
We set off at 7am this morning anticipating a hard day and we weren't disappointed. The road itself was good and the scenery, in parts, was absolutely spectacular. It took us 3 hours to get up to the only board that told us what height we were at, 1720 metres. We carried on climbing for a total of 24 kms, by which time I was beginning to worry thinking if we had to carry on climbing like that we wouldn't make it by the time the sun went down. After the 24 kms mark we had a nice 4 km decent then it was up and down for the next 30 kms. It was a hard but satisfying ride and we were both knackered. We passed through tea and eucalyptus plantations, with the odd several acres of coffee. Some of the houses attached to the plantations are absolutely beautiful, talk about the best seat in the house, they have amazing uninterrupted views of the plantations and the plains below. Our forefathers knew how to pick a view.
Wildlife update: today we saw a giant squirrel and what a lovely thing it was too with its brown and black markings and big fluffy tail. He must have been a metre long. We have been seeing lots of monkeys along the road, some of them get a bit too close for my liking particularly when they are in areas where they are used to being fed. In Maharashtra we saw lots of Common Langurs with their distinctive black face, hands and feet. The ones we have seen most of aren't named in our guide book, but they are brown in colour and some of them have quite red faces, they look as though they are suffering from a bad case of eczema. What we have been seeing today have been Lion Tailed Macaques with their glossy black coats and fluffy tails. They whizz through the trees like lightening and don't often come to the road. We have also seen giant butterfiles, the size of small birds. A black and yellow one with a tip to tip wingspan of approx 5 inches, and a black one with a splodge of purple which was slightly smaller.
I don't want to go on too much about the cold because I know that it is going to be -10 in the UK tonight, but, it's cold for us. Apparently, in the morning it goes down to 3 degrees with frost on the ground. The only difference is that we don't have any form of heating and I had to insist on a bucket of hot water to get clean after our ride (I took the room on the basis that there was hot water, turns out he was fibbing) but I'm not going to complain because we are only going to be here for one night.
Ooty was once considered the queen of hill stations (it still says that on a sign as you enter town) but I think it's probably had it's day. We thought it was a bit of a dump actually and while we didn't make it to The Club (which happens to be right opposite our hotel) to take a look at the Mappin and Webb cutlery or the photographs of how Ooty has changed since 1875, we did see some of the lovely old colonial houses that still exist. Another positive is there is no litter, really, I was gobsmacked. There are signs all over the place, no litter, no spitting and The Nilgiris is a plastic free zone and it seems to be working in Ooty, I wonder if its working as well elsewhere in the region.
Laters
Reading: Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
To date:
The Last Grain Race - Eric Newby
Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzenhitsyn
Utterly Monkey - Nick Laird
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Tesseract - Alex Garland
Mr Vertigo - Paul Auster
