Thursday, April 24
We took Friday off that week cos it's a long overnight journey too Ooty which is pretty far away-and as we found out later when we gave our team Ooty chocs on Monday, no one even noticed we were gone! (oh..but maybe John did!) :p It's our first Indian train experience and an overnight train at that- and we had to book a non-AC sleeper- being poor med students/ poor med student who'd rather spend $$ on sarees :) We'd heard horror stories about tha Malaysian's trip to Ooty where they tried to get tix the day before and couldn't so took the crowded common cabin where everyone squeezes in and has no seats for the whole 10 hour journey cos they didn't succeed in bribing the train conductor to change to 2nd class.
We took our first public bus ride that night with our weekend bags, cos the public bus pulled up just as we walked out of the campus gate and the guard told us to get on- it looked really empty, and we thought ok..but little did we know that tt was cos it was the first stop and we had an hour's journey ahead! People kept piling in and it got a little freaky when there were these 2 men who kept staring at Joey and Teresa and the one beside Joey kept looking at her bag! But we survived- and it wasn't too bad- and a very cheap alternative at that at 4 Rs instead of a 100plus Rs auto. :p
We hardly got sleep that night, cos the train cabin floor was pretty dirty and Harti and I were on the lowest of the 3-tier bunks and Harti swore she saw cockroaches scuttering up the walls but I refused to look.. It was nice and breezy but everytime the train stopped at a station people peered into the windows and the coffee man came on at every stop going 'coffee coffee coffee' at god knows how many Hertz waking us at every SINGLE stop!!! Really wanted to wring his neck!
We reached the Mettupalayam station at 6 plus am and needed to get onto the toy train at 7.30am, but there were no tickets left! Nowhere to buy them, and even people with reservations couldn't get them. :( So after being in the waiting list cue rather fruitlessly and missing the train, we just barely got onto the only other 9am toy train. It was a higher class toy train with a smaller capacity and better seats, with food and chips and biscuits to go. :p I really liked the train ride- it was scenic, albeit a bit long at 5 hours and went through all the hills and tea plantations- though Jeremy and Stanley were upset at not being able to see the nubile young women picking tea in the plantations as advertised in the pamphlet.. :) It was a steam-run train which meant it was really noisy, especially when it went though tunnels and all the smoke got sucked in through the windows as well. :)
So we finally reached Udagamandalam (ooty!) at 2pm and checked into our YWCA cottage which were lovely with pretty flower gardens outside! The girl's cottage was very nice, complete with pink furnished sitting room outside- the only qualm was that the water was brown- but by that time, not having bathed for 12 hours I was just glad for warm hot water- brown or otherwise. :)
We went to the Ooty botanical gardens that evening- and seriously, it was really pretty. Colourful flowers, pretty roses all sculpted lovelily- it could rival many of the rose gardens we've been to in Europe- this was seriously one part of India that totally didn't feel like India. :) The rest of the evenign before dinner was dedicated to shopping at the Tibetian market and buying homemade chocs for everyone at CMC. :) Then dinner was at King's Cliff hotel- which is a really pretty posh hotel we really wanted to stay in (it has personal fireplaces in each room!!) at a pretty reasonable price but was all booked out! So, to make up for it, we had dinner there in it's very nice cosy restaurant (complete with fireplaces of cos)- nice and warm, and good food. It felt like Christmas. :)