The busride from Mysore to Ooty was rather fascinating. Somewhere halfway through the five hour ride, our conductor lost his whistle. This whistle is an important tool to keep the busride functioning smoothly, as it is used to let the driver know when to stop and when to start driving again. One whistle means stop, two means go. But at this moment, there was nothing to whistle with. Our conductor was frantically searching the overhead cabins, to no avail. The rest of the ride he resorted to whistling with his lips in stead, producing inaudible sounds that were completely lost in the noise that an old bus full of noise people and with the windows open produces.
Ooty is high up in the mountains, at around 2600 meters. Nowadays it is a smalish, quite chaotic town surrounding a British era horse race track. It is popular among Indian tourists as well as for foreign backpackers, although more so during the summer, when this place is a cool retreat from the sweltering planes. I stayed in a quiet place away from the centre, where I slept under four blankets and still woke up shivering in the middle of the night. A very new experience in India. During the day it was warmer again, but not hot enough to warn me about the sunburn I got.
I decided to join a guided hike in the area surrounding Ooty. In the morning, I woke up, found out that my bathroom only had cold water, and went to look for the owner of the place. On the way there, I stopped in the courtyard of the old hotel to warm up in the first rays of the weak sun. The owner let me into an empty room that did have warm water. Hurray.
Two other guests and me were picked up by a four wheel drive and our guide that would show us the surrounding tea plantations for the day. On the way we took two other tourists from their hotel, and then the six of us were on our way for a nice ride and then a great walk through the mountains. After a really beautiful walk through the tea plantations and a simple lunch in a small village (served on a banana leaf) we walked up to a mountain plateau to look out over the hills and villages, with higher mountains in the background. The tea plantations are really pretty to see because of the deep green blanket of tea bushes covering the hills, cut into puzzle pieces by the small paths the tea pickers use to move around. At the end of the day we waited for an hour for a us that didn't want to come to get us back to town, but that was ok, because we saw some big black monkeys in the threes while standing at the bus stop. While waiting there, I also saw a man with eleven toes (6+5), with his extra toe not fitting on his flip-flop but sticking out from it.
After eating too much of the home made chocolate, a local speciality, and sleeping another night with even more blankets in my cold room, I took a bus down the other side of the mountains, and into the coastal area of Kerala. On the way down an amazing number of hairpin bends and an even more surprising complete absence of any accidents, I spotted a family of wild elephants ambling through the bus next to the road. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to take pictures, because our bus was racing down the slope at breakneck speed. But trust me, I saw them.
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