Train trip, tea plantation tour, Tibetan market

Today was the day I’d been looking forward to most;: the trip on the Nilgiri mountain railway, also known as India’s slowest train’. We drove to ‘Ooty’ (Udagamandalam) station which is being renovated, as are most train stations in India, as part of a national programme. The train is a narrow-gauge railway and we were travelling on a diesel-hauled loco to Coonoor, a tea plantation town five stops down the line.

On boarding the train, we were as excited as children. I was lucky enough to get a window seat and had a terrific view of terraced hillsides of the Western Ghat. Even got the ‘engine shot’ and we rounded a bend! We travelled through various stations, including Wellington Cantonemenr (army area) and ……., where there is a cordite factory, presumably for army use.

At Coonoor, the former rail head with a substantial station building complete with several steam engines, we were taken to Highfield Estate. Apart from the name, this has nothing in common with the housing estate I live on in the UK! We walked down a track, passing some people at a temple who were decorating the floor with special patterns of coloured dyes, and cooking a communal meal, in honour of today’s religious feast. First stop was a drinks place / supermarket, which was fun (my first Indian supermarket experience. I bought salted almonds. Then we were taken by a local guide to the tea factory, where we were were given a tour.
To be honest, it was very quick and not as comprehensive as the one CleanSteve and I experienced in Sri Lanka, and we did not see any tea pickers, nor tea being swept into neat squares on the floor, after being jiggled through the sorting filters. Perhaps I can add a link to that visit in 2015.

Then we experienced the tour of the red eucalyptus distillation plant, which again was a whistle-stop, and the chocolate factory experience. We were taken to a shop, too, for a tasting of white, green and ‘orthodox’ (black) tea , and I bought some cardamom tea, and mango ‘chocolate’. The whole tour - part took about an hour.

Our next stop was the McIver 180 restaurant (Graham William McIver was a Scotsman who designed the Botanical gardens at Ooty). The restaurant has a garden with many different flowers, including a kind of giant morning glory-type of flower that grows on a tree). We had lunch outside at leisure. There was a sort of tea restaurant too, with a flow diagram on the wall, about how tea is made. I’ll put a picture in Extras.

Back to Ooty we went on the coach, to the Botanical Gardens, which were under reconstruction. The annual Ooty flower show will be held in April, but there’s a bit of work to be done! What plants there were looked remarkably British/European: I think it’s the climate of Ooty. We were underwhelmed, and felt that Graham McIver might be turning in his grave if he saw it in its current state.

The ‘Tibetan market’ was not noticeably Tibetan, but we did stick our heads into a fancy chocolate shop on the way back to the coach. We’d left the latter in a coach park, where there were signs by the wall reminding people that ‘this is not a urinal’.

After all this excitement, it was time to return to the hotel, which was having a dry day (along with the rest of the state). We drank gin and tonic in our room with guests (Elspeth couldn’t open the wine) and after supper retired early, in anticipation of the 6 o’clock wake up call.