Mettupalayam pit stop!
I went for a trip to Ooty last week. It was a great experience as in, we all must be having one childhood experience when we visit the hill stations near out hometown. So, I couldn't help myself from doing "Ooty then and now". To be crisp, nothing much has changed excepting for traffic, budget and crowd.
We reached the Mettupalayam Jn early morning via Blue Mountain express. Just outside the station there was a big bay of cabs, they have fixed price to go uphill. We spent sometime in Mettupalayam as we had to wait for somebody to join us from Coimbatore. We had 3 hours time. So we decided to get a retirement room available in the railway station. If you have to book this, you have to act fast as there were only two rooms available. As soon as you jump down your train, you have to head straight to the station master's room. We paid INR 350 for the room.
We strolled through town for an hour.There was nothing great about Mettupalayam. There were lot of shops selling fruits and vegetables. We found shops selling "seempal cakes" (seempal - cow's colostrum). It was rare as I never get to see anyone selling it in Chennai. There was a fairly decent vegetarian restaurant called hotel Annapoorna. Mostly everyone who stop in this town eat there but for us. We finished our breakfast in the railway canteen as we couldn't wait!
We went for the railway museum to while way time. But, we didn't have enough time to visit Black thunder, a famous amusement park in Mettupalayam. We also missed to book tickets for the Mettupalayam- Ooty toy train, which starts from Mettypalayam at 7:30 A.M. We didn't know that the tickets were issued online through the irctc website. We got to know about it only when we checked with the station master. Only ten tickets were issued at the counter everyday! And the queue for those ten tickets!! You know what I mean.
It takes four hours to reach Ooty by toy train, which I'm sure, had I booked would have been a memorable experience for my kids.
We hired a cab from there and reached Ooty by afternoon. We hired the same cab driver for our local sight-seeing. That worked way cheaper than what was offered locally.
To be continued...
1. Touring Ooty....
2. The real jungle safari @ Mudhumalai.
3. Conoor and the rotten fruit expo
4. Avalanche @ Ooty
