The Ooty Trip That Rocked

"The weather is humidly perplexed, mind is utterly relaxed

drudge inside is kipping, while party time is intruding"

how can the feeling of the day where exams end and vacation start be described? that too, wen u done with a semester at IIT ..well i cant describe, its something that one can only feel, the dizzy mind , the relaxed body , the play ful mood and ofcourse a thirsty mind for boozy night. well i missed a boozy night coz i was made to shop, neverthless i see here myself a one more semester old. it makes me feel i`m reaching my death bed closer and closer i can hear the mourning raaga and can see the coffin. may be i`m being pessimistic. But wasnt left with any option so i hav to carry on.The next day after my last quiz on which i`m supposed to go to kishkinta which i`m not so willing coz of certain reason which even i`m not clear enough, one of my close friends and room neighbour raghavendra aka raghu came up with a interesting offer. he made a offer that i couldnt resist not the way in the movie god father where he points a gun to head and ask people to accept the offer but the offer is lil different. it goes this way ` he will take me to ooty in a rented car-- will pay all my expenses -- will give me few bucks for my expenses -- he will safely get me back to chennai. and i need to pay it later after some 3 months in installments`. wow...a total irresistable offer. ofcourse raghu wasnt left with many options ( coz of certain reasons ... thats a diff story ) except to make a offer to me. so it didnt take much time to get convinced to the offer so i decided to stay in the team. the team of five, the big boy raghu , the smiley prashanth , the unpredicatable harinath and one and only f1 racer who is naive of reverse gear sass. and so thats exactly how the memorable trip started. now one thing i can say is... any trip from here on i make needs to be highly extravagant to be more memorable than this trip. i feel no trip can beat this.

so the scheduled plan is we wil be starting at 1:30 on saturday travel to ooty or if we cant make by night to ooty we stop at someplace but we will be in ooty by next day morning 9, stay there for two nights and then move to kodaikanal and then jump back to the boring chennai. finally we ended with a plan that no way fits into this. so the days is decided the time is confirmed and people are warned not to be late. after one night fight for certain accesories we ended up gettin all required items importantly sasi kanth`s ipod which stayed with us in every need and deed. it was so kindful to us it never even asked us to charge it. after not so uncommon last minute hurry by every one the trip commenced and fun started rolling in. wen i look back at ths trip there are certain disturbing things which we argued upon , things on which we fighted for a while , things we blamed on one other and things we got annoyed but final thing i can say is if these hadnt happened we wud hav defintely missed certain kind of fun. so the journey started in hot and humid afternoon , the sweat was pouring down and the uncomfortable ease was building up. we are expecting a smooth journey , exactly at that time the first unwanted thing strucked us. we ran out of petrol and we hav to push the car for another half kilometre to make our journey faster. definitely it can be considered as one unexpected memorable moment pushing a santro in the hot climate when the sun is grinning at us right over our heads. poor prashanth dressed up in a short which is few inches above knee. he remained special attention to crowd giggles while pushing the car , and it would definitely remain a memorable drive to sass coz thats his one and only drive with no cribbs ,suggestions and warnings. luckily the petrol bunk is not so far and special appreciation to raghu for his energetic pushing of car. so after a tank full ( thats a kind of revenge on petrol ) we resumed our mission . after few fights for setting AC blowers direction peace was resumed. after a few breaks and few arguments about halts we kept on moving with few laughs. sass prashanth and me shared a parota which we ate in the car moving with 100 kmph trying not to spill the curry at the same time not sparing parota. we ate just like how people who are starved for weeks tend to eat wen given food.

I feel one shouldnt be deprived of things they want to do. if they are deprived they burst out and gets eager and eager to do the thing which they are deprived off. i guess sass is deprived of letting him to drive a car. so he was so eager to get into the driving seat. based on sass`s bike driving we are not as conident as he is in his driving abilities. it was secretly decided before journey to try our level best not to give sass the driving seat to save the world or atleast a couple of lives or atleast ours. after few kilometres of journey the sass`s misery started. he started commanding us to give him the drivers seat , later he asked , later he pleaded. to satisfy him it was decided to give him the seat after few kms. no one knows wats this few implies , it depends on generosity of raghu. we drove much slower than we anicipated. we moved accordingly on the map. luckily the map is accurate. on the way at some night 2` o clock we were stopped by a big `Radham ` which is 4 storied building high so we decided to hav a look.unfortunately it turned out to be fiasco. after parking a car we realised there is old, yet a bigger temple near by. this radham amused us so we started picturing it . what we missed is there are security guards who are guarding it and we need to take prior permission for taking a photograph. so a guard caught us taking photos and demanded us to return the film. as usually we had language problem in communicating with so we decided to get into car and run away. so we got into the car started it and drove fast but we cudnt escape the one shot from the stick he is carruing that gave a dent to car. we drove exactly in the opposite way which we hav to travel. so we need to cut this road once again to get on to track. so we hid ouselves and car to see the any unwanted consequences. the thing that scared us most is this tamil village people are too strict regarding this temple issues. wat if the enitre village wakes up and confront us? wat if they crush cam ?? there are million questions that ran thru us minds. but definitely we missed common sense that time. probably that running away is unnecessary. i guess that guard is expecting a ten or a twenty rupee note. either we shud hav sorted it out in a better way or we shud hav said no photos are taken . coz of these confused array of events this remained one of our unexpected memorable moment.

After few mins of drive sass took over the driving and its damn late and i crashed in the back seat along with raghu and prashanth. thought we are crashing our sub conscious is still on sass driving as we are approaching ghat road which will be full of deadly slopy curves. after few hours crash i was scared to see some huge vehicle which took a deadly curve and also took away my sleep, i woke up to realise we started traveling on ghat roads and we are into the amazing nilgiris. so i alerted people and they too lost their sleep. the curves are not so deadly but they are deadly. at this point of time it seemed sass is doing to good job with driver seat. we stoped there to hav a coffee at a stall near lass water falls.we could hardly see the water fall but the sound was scary enough. we had warm coffee in the cold ooty morning. the journey from hear on was rocking awesome. the cold wind hitting us, the amazing mountain view , the racing clouds , passing fog the unexpected narrow roads with deadly curves. at one point we got mesmerised by these admirable beauty of nature so we had to stop for a photo shoot near connoor a town near to ooty with beautiful view of mountains. from here on every full stop in this blog implies either a sarcatic comment is made on harinath which he generally takes to heart and fights back or some dumb argument made or dumb joke cracked by harinath, and also a dot here on implies harinath busy working with his money maintenance book.if someone keeps arguing with harinath rest of us wil hav a great fun time. we all need to thank him again and again for his unpredictable attitude. now i`m scared, i dont know how he will react to this. the important thing i forgot to mention is harinath is entitled to do the finance coord post. to be accurate and easily attributable he maintained a small book in which he noted every economical transaction. every i meant literally every, he made a entry into sass account for one rupee with which he bought a mango piece. he kept on referring it now and then to be updated. here on every full stop implies either hari referring his book or we making fun of that book.

By 7 in the morning we reached ooty but not sure where to stay. heard from local junta that most of cottages are booked and its hard to get one. so we ended up taking room in some cuppa level hotel a double bed room for five so that it will be economically liable. so after agonal bath with water which will be around 6 or 7 degree celsius we got ready and started crashing. definitely thats not wat we all went for but after a tired journey we cudnt resist sleep. we slept hard as if we were in some class or lecture. we woke up again at 11 as we are reminded us of our virtues. A special mention here, sass and me had special shave which include rough handling and sloppy work with ice for 20 bucks. i dont accept on the point that we are fooled. its really a special shave for which me and sass had the feel till evening. exactly at this point while we return ing from so called special shave we found certain shop. i exactly cant figure it out either we are very lucky enough or the poor hyderabadi who ran off from hyd is very unlucky but finally we did found it... the none other than `` THE HYDERABADI BIRYANI HOUSE `` ( u wil understand why he is unlucky in due time ) so naturally the chauvinist hyderabadis decided to hav biryani at this place. the biryani is delicious and also pretty cheap.

we enquired abt the places to view and decided to attack dodabetta , the highest peak in nilgiris which is 2700 mts high from mean sea level. so one can get a better view of whole nilgirs. so we started for our first sight to see following a dumb ooty map. that map is simple, if it shows a right turn from the place u r standing it means there is no right turn for two kms eithr front or back.it took a while for us to realise it. so we decided to stop refering to mao and enquire wherever we can from local junta. after wasting a long 1 hr and few litres of petrol we started for dodabetta. meanwhile we had a small photo shoot on the way where the mountains are occupied with tall trees with leaves only at top so its not bushy enough, there is a clear path and tried for video shoot which wud hav turned out to be tooo soood if sass hadnt messed with it. finally after few beautiful land scapes. we reached dodabetta it takes a whole 10000 characters to describe the place. we actually saw clouds flosting over us, clouds forming from mountain , the way they are colliding and generating lightining. i can definitely say we are on cloud number 1 - few hundreds.it was little scary though. its definitely a place to be. its simply awesome awesome and awesome i dont find many words that exaclty describes it. our next plan is to go to ooty lake to hav boat ride. but time didnt pertain us to do, so we shifted our plan to go to botanical gardens. so after parking a the car a half kilometre from botanical gardens which is the car parking for visitors of botanical garden. the moment we entered the botanical garden we realised its the happening place in ooty. i found few trees and lots and lots of people. may be coz i`m too confined to beauty as i stay in chennai and that too in iit madras, i found every girl with boobs and without a dark skin is good looking. not only me i found even rest of junta are feelin the same way. this place is pretty cool. i can see loads and loads of trees which we dont find regularly and few which need cold climate to sustain , few trees that are pretty huge few trees that are pretty tall few trees that pretty scary. this garden is so long that we gave up half way thru and deicded to walk back and actually we are so tired we tried crawling at certain places that are sloppy enough so that we can comeback with less effort . we had few coffe and lots of chat there at a place where kids are playing away to glory , and people are smiling away for eternity and sun is taking its turn to sleep while moon is grinning . finally after few chats and loads of laughter wen sun is down and lights are on we started walking out cutting thru the mist and fog . we came to rooom took a break for while went to net centre and uploaded pics into ipod with lot of pain. there is a whole lot of confusion abt havin grub that night over which we had few misunderstandings. we wanted to hav excellent grub as cheap as possible so that we can make a halt at banglore via mysore. so after almost entering many hotels and snacks corners we decided to go back to apni hyderbadi biryani house. so we delayed and delayed b4 deciding that. by the time we reached hbh we are invited by tired wokers and empty room and cleaned benches. so we started pleading for some food of any form so that we can get off going another kilometre for hotel. initially it didnt work . after hyderbadi - hyderabadi sentiment they accepted to share few romali rotis which the workers made for them selves. so after pulling off more rotis then we asked initially for we had a decent grub and rushed into room for a eager crash.

that night we had yet another argument in deciding the next few days plans and planning money accordungly. though it started in a serious way it ended perfectly in funny manner. sass and prashanth decided to sleep in car and after few mins of review on harinath economic guide he took off light to let us sleep properly. the one thing we realised here is in ooty u dont find fan. so we started missing fans. we missed the sound it makes irrespectively it blows in air or not. we had sound sleep that night. so here the first day of our journey came to a end.