Ooty and Coonoor trip Dec 2011

My family and our neighbour's family went for a 4 day trip to Ooty and Kurumba village (close to Coonoor) from 24 Dec to 27 Dec 2011. I had done some pre-bookings for 1 day in Ooty and 3 days and 2 nights in Kurumba village. In Ooty we booked the Monarch (Mithun da's hotel) based on feedback received from Suman.

We left early on 24th morning @ 5 am. Bonita was all ready with plastic covers in case Aabha got motion sickness. Aadi and Harsh were thoroughly excited. We took the Bangalore city route via city market to reach Mysore road - I learnt of this route from Kalyan and Ajay when we drove together to Coorg a few weeks back for an offsite. This route makes sense if one is leaving Bangalore very early since it took around 40 minutes to hit Mysore road - from Nice road it would have taken close to 1 hour.

Our first stop was... yes you guessed it... Kamat Lokaruchi which comes a few minutes after Ramanagaram. We had wonderful breakfast here - wadas, chow chow bhath and dosas. The stong coffee was quite good too. We then restarted our journey and in a few minutes Aabha wanted to visit the loo - hence we stopped @ Adigas. Out of nowhere my old friend Shoe (Seshadri from IIMC) meets me there! He lives in London and was here for holidays and I meet him there! It was great to meet Shoe - but we could not talk for too much time since the rest of the folks were waiting and we resumed our journey.

We took a chai stop before Bandipur. Post this we entered the Bandipur jungles - we saw some deers on the way. Then we hit Mudumalai - essentially entered Tamilnadu. Aabha got a severe bout of motion sickness and puked quite a few times... poor girl looked very tired.

We crossed Mudumalai and then hit the road towards Ooty when the hair pin bends started - 35 of them! Initially my car was not doing well for the first couple of bends - but then I got the hang of it and things started becoming easier.

After driving for about 7 hours, we reached Ooty @ about 12:30 - 1:00 pm and landed at the Monarch.

Monarch - while the location is good and the hotel is grand (large), the upkeep is not great. There was a big school contingent probably from Mumbai. We checked into the rooms and then decided to have lunch @ Tiffany's restaurant that we saw on the way and which looked quite cute.

Tiffany's restaurant is in Willow Hill hotel and is a good place to eat. This is a part of the Alankar group (possibly from Coimbatore). We had good lunch - the fried rice was particularly tasty! The non-veg food seemed good too (not first hand opinion since I am veggie!). Willow Hill has a good garden with children's play area where I took Aabha and Yashu to play... they had a good time.

Post a good lunch, we decided to hire an Innova to do some sight seeing around Ooty. Here is where my fluent (pun intended) Tamil started to come of use since I used it extensively with the driver. We first went to Doddabetta peak which is supposed to be the 2nd highest peak in south India @ 8650 feet and is the highest in the Nilgiri hills. It was a good drive up to the peak - but the peak itself was quite disappointing - crowded and very standard Indian touristic place (we need to learn how to mark up and market our assets!). Aabha was asleep and I sat on the side with her while the rest of the gang walked around to see the valley from the top. We bought gloves for the kiddos and proceeded on our journey.

We decided to give the botanical gardens a miss and went straight for the lake. There was a queue to buy tickets to enter the lake! We lost 10-15 minutes to buy tickets... how ridiculous. Once inside, we decided to do boating and guess what... once again we had to stand in a queue to buy tickets... this time the queue was a bit faster and in 5-10 min we had tickets for 2 paddle boats - 4 seaters.

Each family took a paddle boat and started paddling. It is a nice lake and luckily was not too crowded. Aabha sat in the front and assumed the leadership role of the captain who was constantly giving directions. Aadi and I took the paddling positions and we started paddling hard - yes it is hard work! We tried to collide with Harsh's boat - but they steered clear. Finally another boat collided gently with us... Aadi was excited. We did this for about 30 minutes and then parked the boat back.

Post this, there were a lot of random activities performed - stuff purchased from magic shop, popcorn, Ooty chocolates round one etc. Then Aadi and Harsh went to horror place while Aabha and Yashu went to toy train. Then came a key milestone of the trip - Aabha's first horse ride.... she rode with me and was quite cool. 100 Rs for a 10 min horse ride! (unionism @ work).

Then we went shopping in the main street - the ladies got busy shopping for oil and chocolates. The amazing point here was how the locals park cars - they steer for every inch!

Post this, we returned to the hotel. Time for drinks and dinner. There was a local band for Christmas eve... but not great - so we ordered for food in the room.

We decided to take it easy the next day morning and had a relaxed breakfast... the breakfast food was not great... would not recommend this hotel. Post that Aadi, Harsh and I did some sports - first badminton and then for a 10 goal game of football. During this time, Aabha visited the garden and did some merry go round.

Post this we checked out and headed out to Kurumba village. We took the Coimbatore-Mettupalayam road. This was a nice drive - we passed some nice small towns including Wellington and Coonoor. We stopped for chai in Coonoor and bought some green tea. We saw the beautiful single gauge train that goes from Coonoor to Ooty. We then took the road to Kurumba village. We had to cross around 8 hair pin bends starting from 13/13 to 5/13. But when we reached 7/13, there was a big traffic jam due to an accident. We had to wait for about 30-45 minutes. By this time, Aadi fell a little sick and was resting in the back seat. We then saw a small board that said "Kurumba village" and we stopped to take the small right - but Nimish drove right past and there was NO cell phone signal here. We decided to hit the resort and assumed that Nimish will head back in sometime.

The road down to the resort was a steep one and we finally reached the resort - a beautiful place!

The Kurumba resort is around 8 years old but maintained wonderfully well. It was a spice plantation before. The resort has a spring and waterfall within the resort! There are around 15-20 cottages/ suites - all intricately designed. The last cottage is a good 5 min walk from the reception and we got the last one! Luckily they upgraded one of our rooms to a suite adjoining the cottage and we settled into our homes for the next 2 days. Our rooms face the stream... and the sound was fantastic!

Finally Nimish landed and by this time we were all very hungry. We attacked the food and the lunch spread was excellent. I had my fill of Keera Kootu (palak preparation) and rasam with papadams! The curd rice was good too.... actually all the dishes were good with a mix of authentic South Indian and other varieties.

Over the next 2 days all of us enjoyed the wonderful food, scenic views from our rooms and some chilled time reading books. We also visited the stream a couple of times with the children and all of us were very excited putting our leg and doing a bit of trekking in the cold stream water.

On day one evening, there was a Karagattam (Tamilnadu native dance) that was performed by a renowned artist. Aabha was very excited to meet him - all dressed in traditional attire and we clicked some snaps with him. The dance performance was very nice.

On day two evening, there was a magic show and shadow show. Aadi and Harsh enjoyed the magic show and tried to guess how it was being performed!

On day two morning, Harsh, Aadi and I set out for some trekking. But, Aadi was quite unwell and his stomach started aching badly. Hence, we had to revert back half way with Aadi trying hard to walk. Our guide actually carried Aadi for a few minutes on his back - some fitness!

A highlight of our trip was a monkey attack - a group of monkeys - around 6-10 of them entered our room on day 2. The attacked all the food kept out - sugar sachets, some cold tea and a packet of bun. I have never faced a money attack - so was not sure what to do initially. Then I decided to shoo them off by literally running towards them from the floor above and that is what I did... they gradually retreated and I locked the balcony door. The resort folks also arrived by this time and drove them off!

Overall the stay @ Kurumba village resort was wonderful - one of the best places I have visited. The food was great, great scenery with terrific mountain and stream views and extremely helpful staff - I would definitely recommend this place - the money is well worth it!

Finally on 27th morning, it was time to say good bye to Kurumba and after breakfast we started our drive back to Bangalore.

We decided to take the route via the Pykara dam. Though this route was a much longer one as compared to the Ooty hair pin bends, the route was extremely scenic and I enjoyed the drive. Aadi continued to be sick and threw up a couple of times - luckily Aabha was fairly ok. After driving for 2-3 hours @ 30 km per hour through some great forests, we reached the Mudumalai forests and took our standard route back - Mudumalai-Bandipur-Gundelpet-Mysore-Bangalore. We stopped for lunch after Bandipur - pretty average place and average lunch of rotis with daal.

This was possibly one of my longest drives - we possibly drove for about 400km and reached home @ 8:15 pm having started at about 10:00 am.

Hence, ended a wonderful trip to Ooty, Coonoor and Kurumba village!