Part 2: Concluding chapter - Drive to Ooty, Coonoor and Wayanad

We reached the lodge in Ooty at 2.30. Only a solitary parking lot was available, that too at the edge of the plot. The adjacent plot was two feet below, to give us a cliffhanger experience. Chandru was fully geared to take it up with the lodge owner.

“Banni, Banni; Vaanga, Vaanga,” greeted the lodge owner with a smile. “When you said all the four from Bangalore were seniors, I visualized a walking stick, and one’s hand another’s shoulder for support. But here you have driven yourself all the way,” he added.  Chandru felt flattered. He skipped the parking issue. Swalpa adjust madi is the key, he argued.

A quick lunch and brief nap, and we were at the Botanical Garden. We overheard a guide telling his group that film guys select this garden extensively to shoot romantic scenes. As we were about to exit the Garden upon the caretakers’ warning whistle, Chandra realized that that she had left behind her shawl on a bush before taking a selfie. After all who wouldn’t like to look the best in a snap. The shawl was there untouched. Later a similar incident happened to me too. On return from the top of a hill that provided a panoramic view of Ooty, I found my new pair of glasses missing. But the confident Aunty reassured me that it would be somewhere in the car. And she did pick it up from under my seat.

Visits to tea factory, chocolate factory… kept us occupied half of next day. At the end, the dickey in the car was filled with various types of tea, chocolates dipped in all kinds of dry fruits, the Ooty-special Varky biscuits, and herbal oils that promised return of lustrous hair, and the medicated ones that would give you instant relief from all kinds of body pain.

We then headed to Coonoor. When we were at a signal near Coonoor, a stranger tapped the window. He asked us in Kannada if we cared for a guide. When he heard us consult each other, he switched to Tamil. “For me, the number plate decides the medium of communication,” he confided. He was a second generation Kannadiga settled in Coonoor. I unleashed a few sentences in Malayalam. He passed muster. I could have tried in Telugu too, but the only word that I knew, “Jargandi, Jargandi,” would have conveyed just the opposite meaning, as we hailed him into the car.

The next three hours were a verbal diarrhoea as he explained the importance of each place – the dwellings of the tribals far down the hill, the area where sandalwood Veerapan lorded over till death, the Dolphin’s nose from where Kamala Haasan (read: his dummy) dived to death in Guna (?), the 25000-acres of tea estate that the old-time heroine Mumtaz and her husband owned.

Next morning we filled petrol to the brim and headed to the next destination. Hardly had we gone a kilometer when the car stalled, on an elevation, waiting to roll back at the slightest sneeze. Alas, after a ten-minute Alfred Hitchcock suspense, a Samaritan stopped by and helped us drive to the nearest parking space.

Chandra, with her sixth sense, guessed the petrol pump chap might have filled diesel instead of petrol as had happened to them once. They walked up to that petrol station only to see two or three customers already lined up with the same ‘stall’ complaint. “Water might have seeped in and contaminated the petrol pump underground tank,” guessed the proprietor. He drained out the entire petrol from our car, cleaned the tank completely, and re-filled unpolluted petrol from another station. We lost about three hours in the process.

We then drove to Wayanad. Fear engulfed the minds of all that the car might not stop again at any strategic point. Unlike the hairpin-bends on way to Ooty, the drive to Wayanad was least taxing. The excellent hotel that we checked into there towards evening, made us feel past is past. A nice dinner, and we retired to bed.

Next morning we went around places that the young boy at the front desk had suggested. Unfortunately his interests proved at variance with ours except for the row-boat ride in a lake. The best part, however, was the bamboo-rice pudding that is very popular in Wayanad. We helped ourselves with extra cups.

During the drive back home the rest of us caught up with our quota of sleep as Chandru alone stayed awake to dump us all in one piece in Bangalore.