wandering the nilgiri hills

i have spent the last 2 days in the beautiful hill town of ooty, in the nilgiri hills, part of the western ghats. by the bus stand, ooty looks to be a small, run-down little town. that is where our hotel is. after a long walk, though, we discovered the up-market parts of ooty, too. very different from the sleepy, out-of-the-way hill station we thought we had found. happily, the fancy part of town includes a nice coffee shop. we've gone twice.

we have spent most of the last two days walking in the hills around the town. it has been difficult to find internet, and we've done a lot since we were last able to post on the blog. we have a bus to mysore in an hour, so i'll just give the highlights and elaborate later.

we left the beach, and went to a town called kollam. from there we took a cruise on the beautiful keralan backwaters to a town called alappuza. this experience deserves a whole entry itself. we saw fishing, with traditional nets used by the chinese, and people washing clothes, kids getting ferried back and forth to school, and lots of birds. i must have seen eight brightly colored kingfishers. directly after getting off of the backwaters cruise, we went to the train station and bought a ticket to kochi. the plan was to use that ticket to get to kochi (further north), but we got on the wrong train, and ended up going south (the direction from which we had just come). fun. we found ourselves in an odd town, the name escapes me right now, in the middle of the night. the train station was in the middle of nowhere, so we got a tuk-tuk to the bus station, stayed for the night, and got on the right train at 8:00 the next morning. yes!

it took us all day to get to calicut on the train. the trains are nowhere near as comfortable as the chinese trains, but the food is much better. that morning, i think, we'd had coke and potato chips for breakfast (sorry, mom, it was all that we could find!), but on the train, we had briyani. it was wrapped in wax paper, and then in brown paper with little packets of spice and raihta. we shared one. it was unwrapped, between us, and we ate it with our hands, shoveling the food into our mouths. deliciously messy.

calicut was not fun, we had the hardest time finding a hotel. we went to a number of hotels, and they were all full. finally, we accepted the help of a man on the street who helped us find a room. he said, because the area wasn't used to a lot of foreign tourists, they were unwilling to give us rooms. the whole town was creepy (we felt the same as we did in indonesia, kellee. yes, that bad). we left on a 7:00 bus the next morning, headed to ooty.

i love the busses, i will always take the bus here, rather than the train, if i can. we have been sitting in the back of the bus, we get a lot more air, but also a lot more dust. when we arrive at our destination, we are covered in a light brown coat. it is fun to be covered in dust. the back of the bus is bouncy, we have caught several feet of air on some of the more bumpy roads. the trip to ooty took from 7:00 am to 1:30 pm, and in that time we covered a ridiculously small distance. it took a long time because the road into the mountains was so...challenging. steep, dirty, potholed, narrow, unpaved (in places)... it was a tense ride. the views from the road were amazing, but the cliffs and drop-offs were sobering. the road had cut-backs, potholes, and hair-pin turns like the mt. baker highway at the end of a long winter. i wished i were driving, the bus seemed so large and clumsy, but the driver was excellent. it was slow going, though. we went from sea level to 4000 feet, or so. i will have to check our elevation again. it was amazing to see the transition. we left the forests of cocnut palms behind, and passed into amazingly tall and thick bamboo. then, we saw tea plantations, and rubber trees with slashes in the trunks, and little semi-circular buckets attached to the tree to catch the drips. higher there were eucalyptus trees, and they smell wonderful. there are flowers everywhere, of the most brilliant pinks, purples, and oranges. the sky has been bright blue. we haven't seen much wildlife, but a group of monkeys sitting in the road had to scurry away from our careeing vehicle. in the mountains it is dry, and it is great to be away from the humidity. we have been getting a bucket of warm water with which to wash (thanks, katie) because the showers are all cold. it is cold at night, and i have been sleeping in all of my clothes.

ok, the bus will be here soon. duff and i will check back in soon and write more about the backwaters and our amazing time in ooty.