Ooty (and Coimbatore)

The trip to Ooty took about two hours. The first half was going through the jungle, and then we emerged out onto the hills; there was a particularly memorable sequence of 36 numbered hairpin bends, which were fun. The scenery is completely breathtaking, mountains of green with their tops in the clouds, and valleys with lowland areas visible in between. The road wasn't in too bad a condition, although it did get bad as we neared Ooty!


Ooty itself is quite a large place, set high in the hills. There's lots of evidence of colonial settlements, and we passed plenty of schools and technology academies, etc. It does have traffic, poor quality roads, cows, etc though so in some respects it's pretty unremarkable as a city. The climate, though, is very different to what we've been getting used to - it was cold! Being high in the mountains made it quite a drizzly and chilly place. I quite liked being cold, after being in the heat and humidity.
We had a drive around while Colin got his bearings and found the hotel that he'd been to before. It was an old place, and the main building used to be the hunting lodge of the Ma Ha Raga. It had lines of old photos along the long corridor to reception, which was a large dark wood desk behind a large dark wood wall. It seemed like quite a nice place, and after some impressive negotiation over price by Colin, the porter showed us to our room.
The rooms we had requested were in the "cottages" built probably for whiteys to live in over the hot summer months. They were large, with a few small rooms, old carpets and furniture. We ordered food in our rooms and ate it while they lit the fire in the corner, and then played cards around it. We were cold, that night, for a change...
The next morning we headed off pretty early after a satisfyingly English breakfast. We had a drive/stroll round Ooty and then headed back towards Coimbatore.
On the outskirts of Ooty we saw a building halfway up a hillwith "TEA FACTORY" written on the side. This (no surpises here) was the tea factory that we had talked about stopping by on our way back. A few minutes later we had bought tickets (about 13p each) to go inside and see how they make tea!

I won't go into great details, but suffice to say I found it very interesting, but then, I would! It's clever how most of the work is done by gravity: the leaves are dried on the top floor, and then pushed down a hatch, where the chopping and turning and firing are done by conveyors. It's then raised again, and the sorting of the different weights and the fibrous tissue are done by rollers and sieves, again using gravity. At the end of the tour, they even give you a cup of tea (although, tea here is usually served completely white - no water - and very sweet). I left very happy, having been to a real Indian tea factory.
Up the hill was a little tea shop, which also sold dry tea and other bits and pieces (medicinal olive oil, rub it on your skin, etc). Above the shop was a plantation, and for a small fee (about 7p) we strolled up to have a look. We saw the rows of tea trees on the terrace, stole a few leaves for our own personal experiments, and even met some women who pick tea! Of course, we couldn't understand each other, but we looked cheerfully at each other, and they were kind enough to let us take a couple of pictures.

The road back from Ooty was really good. Hilly and windy, but wide and smooth - probably one of the best roads in India! I drove some of the way in the 4x4 Colin had borrowed.
We arrived in Coimbature later, and went straight to Colin's apartment. We were all shattered, so we ordered a pizza from Domino's, and had an early night - we had to catch a plane early the next morning!