June 9th: Ooty: Botanical and Rose Gardens

In our new clothes :) 

We decided to be adventurous and take the town bus to Ooty. It’s about a two hour bus ride up the mountain so we ended up catching the 10am bus. It was pretty crowded at first but the conductor on the bus made sure that we got seats. It was actually a really nice and refreshing ride. At one point a drunken guy got on the bus and was being rude so the conductor stopped the bus and kicked him off. The guy was basically breathing down our necks and the smell of liquor was so strong. He definitely swaggered off when he got kicked off.

Sitting on the engine of the bus

                When we finally reached Ooty it was half past noon so we decided to go grab some lunch. We went to the Nahar Hotel where we had one of the best lunches ever. Paneer butter masala and palak paneer with butter naan. It filled us up so much but it also energized us to start our trip. Our first stop was the tourist office. We wanted to see if we could book tickets for an elephant ride in the national tiger reserve in Thepakkadu. Unfortunately we couldn’t book tickets the day before but the rangers at the office were super nice and gave us a map of Ooty and Muthumalai forest.

The view from the bus and our amazing lunch

From the tourist office we headed to the Botanical Gardens.  We ended up making a pit stop at a Café along the way that had these amazing Choco Balls and they were only Rs.15. We also went to the Modern Store which apparently is the place where you can get pretty much anything that you are craving from peanut butter & nutella to SPAM. It was interesting because they had all these different types of Riesling and zinfandel but when you took a closer look you realized that everything was “de-alcoholized.” This was also the one spot where you’ll pretty much find every foreigner that is traveling in and around Ooty. The store was pretty close to the garden so it was an on the way stop to pick up some Kleenex.

Choco Balls and the De-alcoholized Wine

Looks it's Gudalur

Onto the Botanical gardens which are gorgeous. We enjoyed walking around and seeing all the plants and flowers. Anna and Hayley were a tourist attraction themselves and had quite a few people come up to them and ask to have their picture taken with them which was kind of annoying especially since most of the people coming up were in their 20s and 30s. They weren’t really comfortable with it and we kept saying no but people kept coming up to our group throughout the day.

                After leaving the botanical gardens we decided to go to the Rose Gardens which according to the signs were only 1 km away but we quickly learned that either the sign lied or we took the longest most roundabout way of getting there. We really had to use a restroom and saw a Dominos along the way so we decided that we’d go in there buy something small just so we can use a decent bathroom. Probably one of the downsides of traveling in India is that it is hard to find a clean bathroom anywhere. The Dominos menu looked pretty interesting but we were all still full from lunch so we just continued on walking towards the Rose Garden. After a number of twists and turns and walking down random alleys and walking up steep hills we finally reached the rose garden.

                The roses were definitely gorgeous but the garden probably would have looked better if the roses were planted closer together. We went through the garden taking pictures next to pretty roses and wandered around until we needed to get to the bus station. We wanted to catch a bus around 5:30 so we would be back to Gudalur around 7:30-8 but we just missed the 5:30 bus and the 6:00 bus never came so we were stuck waiting until 6:30. Anna and Hayley wanted to get some jasmine for their hair so we did while waiting. We spent the other 50 minutes staring down all the random people that were looking at groups and refusing the people that came up asking to take pictures with Anna and Hayley. None of us could understand why so many people wanted to take pictures with Anna and Hayley. What were they going to do with the picture? Frame it and say that this was the day they took a picture with a white person?

In the Rose Gardens

Finally we got on a bus and managed to get two seats. Since the previous bus had never came this bus was overcrowded and people were majorly pushy which none of us really were willing to put up since we were so exhausted. In particular there was this one lady that somehow managed to push both me and Anna simultaneously until Anna gave her a nice little shove which stopped her from leaning onto her. She went and sat on the lady behind us instead but Anna and I couldn’t wait until she was off the bus for good. We finally made it back to Gudalur around 8:30 and took an auto back to the hostel. We spent some time talking with the people that were in the hostel before we all excused ourselves to go to bed. Although we only went to two places in Ooty we had a really good time exploring together and just hanging out.