An early-morning 30 minute ferry ride across Cochin Harbour brought us near to the mainland railway station where we boarded our first Indian train, the 9.10 am Bangalore Express. We got off four hours down the line at the inland city of Coimbatore back in Tamil Nadu state, there transferring to a local bus for the final leg of our day’s journey. Although the latter was only 65 km, it took nearly five hours. This was because the bus had to climb a steep section of the Western Ghats through a multiplicity of hairpin bends with plunging drop-offs. But we arrived safely at our destination of Udhagamandalam (mercifully known as Ooty) just before dark.
South India’s most famous hill station located in the centre of the Nilgiri Mountains, Ooty was established by the British in the early 1800s as the summer headquarters of the then Madras government, quickly becoming known as “Snooty Ooty”. In the mid 1840s the Marquis of Tweedale converted a local vegetable patch into a public garden, enlisting the help of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew in 1848. The legacy today is the beautiful 22 hectare high-altitude Ooty Botanical Garden. Also in town is the artificial Reflections Lake created in 1824. Add to that the encircling pine and tea plantations and some crisp mountain air and you have the makings of a very pleasant town with many opportunities to escape to nature when you reach sensory overload in the bustling malange that lies at Ooty’s heart.
Nearby Doddabetta Lookout is the highest point of the Nilgiri’s at 8,640 feet above sea level. The surrounding ranges are home to bison, panther, wild boar and barking deer, not that we saw any of these when we were at Doddabetta yesterday morning. We admired the panoramic view with a rapidly growing crowd of Indian tourists in high Sunday spirits. Lee Tuan’s Asian face seemed to be a novelty and several men asked if she would have her photo taken with them. We clambered over the rocks at the summit and wandered for awhile in the surrounding forest before returning to Ooty in our auto-rickshaw, calling in at a tea factory on the way where we sampled a cup or two of Nilgiri’s finest.
Our hotel was the comfortable Mountview, an old converted colonial bungalow built on a slope overlooking Ooty and only a 10 minute walk to the colourful town centre. A section of the path we took at the bottom of the slope was partly shaded and bordered by a long curved wall adorned with Kingfisher Soda advertisements. Apparently it made a handy men’s public urinal and being next to the bus station, was heavily used for that purpose. The result was a particularly acrid amalgam of petrol fumes and stale urine – passersby didn’t tarry along that stretch I can tell you.
Our guidebook was right – Ooty’s a lively pine-clad retreat that rapidly grows on you. One helpful man in a nut and spice shop we visited was passionate about his town, noting how harmonious its residents were and proclaiming that “Ooty’s perfect”. We mightn't go quite that far in our praise but certainly the town has a lot going for it and is well worth visiting for a few days.
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