After one night in our initial dirty accommodations in Ooty (the Green Valley Inn, I think it was called?) and a fair amount of complaining (mostly from me, regarding the complete filth and discomfort the beds at Green Valley offered), I was ready to move to new sleeping quarters for the rest of our stay in the hill station town.
I try not to switch guest houses in the same town if I can avoid it. It’s a huge daylight time eater. You’ve gotta:
- Check out of your current place and pack the bag in the morning (complete with still-wet towel if you took a late night / morning shower).
- Choose a new place and find It, which means a potential long hike with the bag or a taxi/rickshaw ride and applicable costs.
- If the new place you’ve chosen is full, you’re looking for yet another place.
- If the new place has a late check-in time, you can’t get settled there until the afternoon or evening, and your still-wet towel sits and rots in the pack.
Meanwhile, you’ve just killed 2-3 hours of primetime for getting your day started. Now it’s finally time for you and your low blood sugar to get some breakfast. Or should we call it lunch at this point?
But we moved anyway, and it was worth it. The YWCA was a 2 km hike away, and I scoped it out while Chloe and Mathieu packed. They had dorm beds for 110 Rupees per person. Cool.
We checked out of Green Valley and found the nearest rickshaw driver. 60 Rupees for 2 km? It should be 40, and we KNEW IT! We indignantly/proudly lugged the packs out of spite, chewing through even more daylight just to show the rickshaw driver how shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot low-budget things can get. The three of us agreed later that we should’ve just paid for the ride. Two kilometers isn’t backbreaking, but it would’ve only cost us 20 Rupees a piece to save half an hour. Oh well. Small mistake!
The room was a four-bed affair in what was most likely a converted garage. But it was clean, and the beds were comfortable enough too. Done.
Home sweet garage. Ooty YWCA 4-bed dorm.
After lunch, we wandered to the Ooty Botanical Gardens, which was really more just green space than anything. Exotic plant life? Not really. The greenhouses were so cramped with Indian tourists taking forgettable pictures of one another making stern/flat faces that we could hardly see the forgettable flowers within. Still, a nice way to use the remaining daylight.
Ooty Botanical Gardens.
We climbed up the hillside in the gardens as high as we had energy for, and wandered down to watch the weekend goings-on. Three white people in plain view was too much for the 20-something Indian guys to resist.
“One photo?” we fielded, over and over again and denied all of them as politely as we could. The “pose with some guy you don’t know” routine had worn thin. Can you imagine going around asking people for photos just because they look different than you?
The sun was setting, so we exited the park and drifted around the market a bit. Ooty has chocolate shops about everywhere you look, and we finally went after some of the stuff. Mathieu grabbed half a kilo between three types of chocolate, and we stood in the street munching and passing the three bags in a triangle. It wasn’t melt-in-your-mouth good – a bit waxy – but still a welcome thing. There was more street food to be had, so grilled corn, white peanuts, tea and some other miscellany became an impromptu dinner.
Chai from a tea shop on the street should cost between five and ten Rupees, depending on the size. These were five.
Chloe is on a round-the-world ticket, traveling for a full year – next stop, Sri Lanka. She didn’t have a lot of days left to achieve her goals in India, so we made Ooty a short 2-night stay and agreed to leave town the next day with Kochi, Kerala as our next destination.
Fishmongers in Ooty’s main market.
Ooty doesn’t demand a lot of time, as there are only a couple of things one really needs to do there:
- Trek in the surrounding hills / pine & eucalyptus forest
- Ride the Nilgiri Mountain Railway – the “toy train” – down or up the hillside between Ooty and Mettupulayam.
If you had to choose one of these things (according to what I’ve heard) the toy train should be the one. It leaves each day (to my knowledge) for the downhill route from Ooty’s train station at 2:00 PM for the trip to Mettupulayam, which was on our way to the next destination. We were really looking forward to it.
But it didn’t happen. The next morning, we made an appearance at the train station, which completely lacked a ticket agent for at least 10 minutes, and then was mobbed so hard that it took another 15 minutes just to push through the crowd.
The ticket office had engaged in one of my favorite forms of Indian inefficiency:
To book a train ticket, you have to fill out a one-page form with your train number and passenger names, dates, etc. This is marked nowhere in the station, so your first go at the ticket office will end with a form and a trip to the rear of the queue for a second pass. Grrr.
What’s worse, the form in question is inside the ticket window, out of reach of everyone that needs a form. So you have to ask the swamped ticket agent for a form (“FORM?!?”) – and each time, he has to interrupt the booking process he’s in the midst of, reach for the form and hand it out the window, adding seconds to each booking each time a form is requested.
Why can’t they just put the forms outside the window? Because this is INDIA (or the DMV. Hard to tell.).
I stood at the front of the line for what felt like an eternity, and between my presence and Chloe arriving to push to the front of the line with the form, Indian-woman-style, we got the agent’s attention and presented our booking form.
“Not possible, waitlist 48” he said and shifted his gaze to the next pusher-shover in the amorphous queue.
WHAT? Really? We had no idea we needed to pre-book. The Lonely Planet sure didn’t address this – LP made it feel like this was something you could just hop onto. Had we screwed up? Was the world out to get us today? So we can’t ride the damned toy train? Nope.
I felt like throwing my guidebook down the (open) sewer. What had we accomplished in Ooty? Just eating chocolate and sleeping in near freezing temperatures. This wasn’t enough to make anyone on our team happy.
Well, at least I’ve still got this going for myself. It’s a good thing, right?
We got a pissed-off crappy breakfast after our defeat at a filthy south Indian restaurant across from the (stupid) train station. Stupid masala dosas all around, except for Chloe, whose turn it was to be sick for the day. The stupid server delivered a bill offering the expected prices, then pulled the check before we could pay it and tacked on some additional, unexpected tourist-tax. Thanks for kicking us while we were already down. We scowled and paid the jerk.
There had to be something to do to salvage the day. How about a visit to a scenic overlook – maybe the highest point of elevation in the region?
A hazy view from Dodabetta Lookout (2633m).
We hired a rickshaw to take us up to Doddabetta Lookout and shared the view with hundreds of Indian tourists that had the same idea. They lined up in the standard long, messy, press-your-shoulder-into-the-person-in-front-of-you queue to peek through the one available telescope.
The most orderly queue in all of India.
A little under an hour there and we were through – back down the hill to collect our bags and move on toward Kochi via a government bus.
There’s a little game that Indian bus stations often like to play. “Get situated and seated on one bus that you’ve been told is the correct bus, then scramble like hell to get on a different bus once we change the assignments at the absolute last second.” After cramming and cramming our backpacks under bus seats and into undersized overhead racks in the first bus, this happened. Back of the second bus for us. We barely got a seat!
There were more traffic cops on the ride down from Ooty than I had seen anywhere else in India. The bus pitched and tilted hard around each corner to angles like these.
We bounced down the hill from Ooty’s cool eucalyptus & evergreen forest back into the hot and humid palm tree terrain of lowland Tamil Nadu and on to Coimbatore, a horrible transit hub town of 1.5 million people that’s not worth sneezing on for the backpacker. All the traffic, dust and irritation of any big Indian city without any of the interest or history. We arranged for the next government bus out of Coimbatore (around 9:30 PM) and on to Kochi, the destination we had in mind in the first place. We were due to arrive at 3:00 AM.
The Kerala government buses are just hard upright seats with no assignments and blackout blinds that you can drop from the top to block out the sun and wind. Through the night, we stopped more times than I could count. At each bus depot, the majority of those onboard would empty out and be replaced by even more passengers. Mathieu and Chloe intermittently slept in contorted positions against the seat in front of us and the window frame to the side. I had the unfortunate aisle seat, clutching my aisle-residing backpack the whole way, and had a new, unfamiliar but now regular Indian butt or thigh pressed against my shoulder at each available opportunity. We were packed in like sardines, over and over again. Each time the bus stopped, the air got stale and hot. Sweat.
3:00 AM finally came, and we nearly fell off the bus at Ernakulam, the town to the east of Kochi where all the regional buses and trains land. Nothing was going on other than locals sleeping on the pavement in wide arrays like off-duty zombies. We stepped over the sleepers and found a drowsy rickshaw driver, who charged us the rather inflated night rate to get from Ernakulam into Kochi. Fine. Let’s find a guesthouse (any guesthouse) and go down for the night. Tired!
Most tourists stay in the Fort Cochin area of Kochi (also – Kochi and Cochin are interchangeable spellings – same place!), and we headed there hoping to come across a place with an open reception at our unfortunate hour (now approaching 4:00 AM). All the lights were out in town, and all the roads empty. We banged on a few dark homestay and guesthouse doors. Nothing. The remaining light started to drain from our eyes – was this the night we had to sleep on a park bench due to our flexibility/lack of planning?
On our fifth or sixth try, someone finally helped us out. 800 Rupees per night for the three of us. The place was clean and the owner pleasant, thankfully (though, barring both, we probably would have taken the room anyway). Mathieu, Chloe and I slept late in our new digs and woke up in the sticky mid-morning Kerala heat.
NEXT STOP: Kochi, Kerala
