When: 24 -28 Dec 2009
Who: Chandana and Myself, little Kavya and My MIL, Sanjay and Bikki, Prabhakar and Seema
By: SX4 and Punto
Visited Before?: Yes, once in May 2007
This was our first trip with Kavya who was just 2 months and one week old at that time and it did require lot of convincing my wife for her to agree on a road trip. To make it easier for Kavya we had planned to break our journey so that we need not drive for more than 150 KMs in a day. Overall she did okay and but we did learn some lessons on travelling with infants. May be I will write a separate post on it sometime.
This was our second Ooty trip and very different from the first one. Last time we had gone in summer and Ooty was beautiful that time. In contrast we planned this trip for a December long weekend and did our hotel bookings at last moment and so we had limited choice and could not check the reviews of hotels we booked and paid a heavy price for this
The hotel we booked, turned out to be pathetic. Nothing about it was good. It was a newly opened hotel and staff did not have a clue of what is happening. To give an example of how things were, I had to call the owner of hotel on his cellphone to get towels d
To add to our woes, half of janta of Bangalore/Chennai had come to Ooty for long weekend. So we spent more time in searching for parking and waiting in traffic jams than sightseeing. How many times I vow not to venture out on long weekends only to be lured by one extra day next time a long weekend comes. But seriously, this time my resolve is pakka. I will never go to a place where I intend to do sightseeing on a long weekend.
But apart from this lesson there were some other takeaways too from this trip. The boating on Pykara lake was mesmerizing.
The return drive through Mudumalai/Bandipur was amazing. It was raining like anything, roads were good and we had forest all around us. And we did not break out streak of spotting wild elephants on this route. Each time we had passed this stretch we have spotted wild elephant herd.
