Now that I have been in India for a couple of weeks and had gotten settled in to a great apartment, gotten over the jetlag and have started working on the various projects at work, I wanted to start planning weekend and side trips. I posted about my itinerary earlier so this weekend was time to get started.
I decided I would head Southwest this weekend down to Mysore with a stop in at the fortress at Srirangapatna on the way. I had been in contact with a driver who was going to drive me but one of my teammates at work, Naresh offered to take me instead.
We left at 7am expecting to get to Srirangapatna around 9:30am. Of course with India traffic and the f***ing speedbumps every 500 yards, we didn't get there until about 11 and we didn't get to Mysore until almost 2.
South of Mysore there is a national park in Bandipur which is another 80 or so km away. Supposedly, it is very common to see elephants, tigers, and other wildlife here.
Only another 20 km away from Bandipur is the mountain town of Ooty.
Even though the original end destination was only Mysore, we ended up going all the way to Ooty. This map shows how far it is and the estimate time to drive it ONE WAY.
We didn't arrive in Ooty until almost 4pm. Though we did see a wild elephant and had to bribe a very intense park ranger yelling at us in Tamil 500 rupees since we weren't allowed to stop for photographs and he said we had to pay a 5000 rupee fine.
We stopped in Ooty for some tea and some Ooty chocolates that they are known for and headed back. By this point, time in car 6 hours, time on foot, about 2 hours. We had a 6 hour drive back and the sun was going down.
If you watched the Top Gear clip I posted earlier about driving in India, they showed how insane driving at night was. You have not experienced fear until you've driven on Indian highways at night. Since there are so many things you can possibly hit and there are no street lamps, EVERYONE drives with their high beams on all the time. You are blinded probably 60% of the time. 99.9% of the trucks and buses don't have working tail lights or brake lights. Neither do most of the scooters and motorcycles. 50% of the cars only have 1 working headlight. Tractors have only 1 headlight so you don't know if it's a car or motorcycle, nope it's a f***ing tractor. You have pedestrians crossing the street all the time as well as dogs and cows.
I'll post video tomorrow but I told Naresh that if I was driving, I would have just pulled over and waited until sunrise. It was pure terror for 6 straight hours.
I have never been so happy to make it home in one piece.
I decided I would head Southwest this weekend down to Mysore with a stop in at the fortress at Srirangapatna on the way. I had been in contact with a driver who was going to drive me but one of my teammates at work, Naresh offered to take me instead.
We left at 7am expecting to get to Srirangapatna around 9:30am. Of course with India traffic and the f***ing speedbumps every 500 yards, we didn't get there until about 11 and we didn't get to Mysore until almost 2.
South of Mysore there is a national park in Bandipur which is another 80 or so km away. Supposedly, it is very common to see elephants, tigers, and other wildlife here.
Only another 20 km away from Bandipur is the mountain town of Ooty.
Even though the original end destination was only Mysore, we ended up going all the way to Ooty. This map shows how far it is and the estimate time to drive it ONE WAY.
We didn't arrive in Ooty until almost 4pm. Though we did see a wild elephant and had to bribe a very intense park ranger yelling at us in Tamil 500 rupees since we weren't allowed to stop for photographs and he said we had to pay a 5000 rupee fine.
We stopped in Ooty for some tea and some Ooty chocolates that they are known for and headed back. By this point, time in car 6 hours, time on foot, about 2 hours. We had a 6 hour drive back and the sun was going down.
If you watched the Top Gear clip I posted earlier about driving in India, they showed how insane driving at night was. You have not experienced fear until you've driven on Indian highways at night. Since there are so many things you can possibly hit and there are no street lamps, EVERYONE drives with their high beams on all the time. You are blinded probably 60% of the time. 99.9% of the trucks and buses don't have working tail lights or brake lights. Neither do most of the scooters and motorcycles. 50% of the cars only have 1 working headlight. Tractors have only 1 headlight so you don't know if it's a car or motorcycle, nope it's a f***ing tractor. You have pedestrians crossing the street all the time as well as dogs and cows.
I'll post video tomorrow but I told Naresh that if I was driving, I would have just pulled over and waited until sunrise. It was pure terror for 6 straight hours.
I have never been so happy to make it home in one piece.
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