Weekend Trip to Ooty

  Udhagamandalam, Tamil Nadu, India
Monday, August 20, 2007

Don't let the big name of the city scare you, its called Ooty.  Five of us went to Ooty, a hill station, this past weekend.  On the way there, our taxi was so bumpy!  I was in the back trying to sleep, but I was thrown out of my seat every few minutes.  It really didn't work.  For the first time I traveled into a new state, and when we were in a line to cross the border, a monkey jumped into our car!  It jumped into the taxi drivers window and he just ducked and covered his face.  There was this little straw thing hanging on the mirror, and the monkey grabbed a piece of it and just jumped out!  There were tons of monkeys in the jungle we drove through, and there were all these signs saying not to feed them.  Of course though, being India, all the cars were stopping to feed the monkeys and they were jumping all over the cars!  It was pretty cool, and we made plans to have monkey food on the way back.  We also saw a wild elephant, but we could barely see it.  I took a picture and it looks like a rock, but it seemed cool at the time!  After 36 hairpin turns we made it to Ooty.

I'm still not sure why, but its a touristy area, and there were lots of foreigners there so we were getting less stares than usual.  The city was really pretty, and the weather was so much cooler than Mysore, since we were up in the mountains.  There wasn't too much to do, but we bought chocolate since they were known for the chocolate, and then we went to a tea museum.  I guess the thing to do was go to a neighboring area, Coonoor, where there are a bunch of tea plantations, but we didn't make it there.  We had a frustrating and long dinner experience with terrible service, so we didn't have time to do anything later in the night.

The next day we bought our monkey food and were on our way.  It was actually quite an eventful drive!  I think we saw six wild elephants, and one not so wild elephant.  It had people with it, and they covered it with leaves.  Maybe helping it camouflage itself?  Not too sure... 
When we found a group of monkeys we took out our food, and the results are in the video.  Another monkey jumped on the side of the car and just took an entire bag that was sealed, hopped off the car with a jump that reminded me of a kangaroo, and ran into a tree to eat it by himself.  The rest of the food kind of spilled all over the place, so as we drove away all of the cars had monkeys in the middle of the street eating food.  Oops!  It was a really cool experience though, monkeys are pretty smart, and way more fun to play with than squirrels!

It was a relaxing weekend, I wish we would have had a little more time to explore the surrounding area, but good overall!