Tiger Hill Reserved Forest

After a reasonable night's sleep we had breakfast at 7.30am and then had a trio of auto rickshaws for the 20 minute journey from our hotel to the station. Today our destination is Ooty, a hill town in the southern part of the Western Ghats - the mountain range that runs along the west coast of India from North to South.

On arriving at the station, Pooja located the right platform and then found the carriage that we were travelling in. The train itself must have been at least 20 carriages long and we were booked into second class a/c!

We boarded the train and found our seats with the train leaving on time at 9.10. the journey to our stop was scheduled to be about 3.5 hours and the train initially meandered it's way through the suburbs of Kochi, passing the airport after about 40 minutes. We made steady progress towards our destination, passing through a few towns and fields of rice, along with some palm trees, and eventually arrived at the station in Coimbatore at around 1.10pm. We'd now travelled Interstate to Tamilnadu. Here we meet up with a driver and boarded a minibus for the next stage of our trip to Ooty.

After a short while we stopped at a local restaurant for some food...Puri Masala (a potato curry) for our Christmas lunch, washed down with fruit juice and a filter coffee. Not bad for the equivalent of £2.50 each!

We boarded the minibus again to continue our journey. As with the train, the first part was getting out of the suburbs and from then on we drove through farmland. After about an hour, we reached the foothills and stopped for a quick comfort break and for some of the group to buy water bottles as plastic is supposed to be prohibited in the area that we are travelling to.

From here the road got narrower and we started to climb through forest landscapes. We continued on up and up, seeing rhesus macaques on the side of the road. The roads continued to climb on a very windy route with the temperature starting to drop.

Eventually, after an hour and a half, we arrived at Coonar and our accommodation, Tiger Hill Cottage. We're now at around 2,600m and high in the hills with tea plantations all around. The place we're staying is a guest house which we have to ourselves.

After checking in to our spacious, if not basic rooms, we had a walk through the tea plantation with the rest of our group. The mist lifted and we had a great panorama of the hillside and land beyond.

By now it was 6.30 and so after a quick change we met back up in the living area and sat down for a Christmas dinner... Indian style. The curries were finished off with an Indian style black forest gateuax.

After this we were planning on having a bonfire but because it was raining we ended up staying in and playing a game of yahtzee with the group. We spent the rest of the evening chatting before eventually turning in at just before midnight. Indian Christmas ✔️Read more