Mar 29-30, 2014 – Ooty & Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, India 🚌🧳🌳 (Part 2)

This second part of this trip started off with the visit to the botanical gardens 🌳🌲🌴 in Ooty. After our quick “Jungle Safari“, we went to our hotel 🏩 to freshen up, change into new clothes 👕👖, and have some food 🍕. After spending good 30-40 minutes, we embarked upon our itinerary for the day.

This included – visit to the botanical gardens, followed by a quick lunch at some local Idli-Dosa place; Then, visit to the local festivities, and finally heading back to the hotel before the dark 🌚 (because, some of us – me 🤣, are afraid to roam around in the dark).

It was a packed itinerary keeping the tourist places and food scenes in mind.
Shall we?

Botanical Gardens – I had been to botanical gardens before, especially the one in Nagpur ❣️, near my hometown 🏠. The botanical garden in Nagpur is notoriously 👩‍❤️‍👨 famous as the hookup spot for the young and new couples 🤓. If you visit this place, you will find young couples in weird and embarrassing places 💋.

I liked this botanical garden as it was well maintained 👍🏽 and came across as a family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 hangout place. I saw many kids in the line for the park and roaming around inside. Plus, how can you forget my love for greenery as reflected here too. The one spot which stood out for me was that they carved the Indian 🇮🇳 map out of some bushes 🥬, flowers 🌼, and soil 🧱. Interesting thing about it was that they used the different colored 🎨 soil to represent the soil from each individual state, which I thought, was quite clever. I still remember that spot, which you can see below 💝. I am not sure if it is still there 🤷🏽‍♂️.

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Lunch – Though I do not have any pictures from the lunch 🍽 that we had, but, I distinctly remember we had some south Indian delicacy – “Idli & Dosa” from the nearby restaurant. The reason I remember this is because it was scorching heat 🔥🥵 and we had to look for some place to eat. People, it was 2014 and we had no access to the Google Maps 👴🏽.

Local festivities – I don’t remember whether the locals were celebrating some festival, but, there was a tremendous crowd 🤨 to check out all the cool things and displays that people put out.
It was a crowded place and we ended up spending good 10 minutes for the parking, before requesting our driver to find the parking spot and join us later.

There were countless things to do. We had a couple magic shows 🎩. I saw a giant wheel 𐃏 too. I panned across the scenery, and saw a long line of people waiting for their turn to hop in to one of the boat tours. We were not sure about the attraction.

Here’s the line for the boat tour that I was talking about. (Don’t ignore the scorching sunlight! 🥵)

I remember looking at the crowd and thinking of buying the tickets. But, as soon as we realized the wait was going to be more than an hour 😲, we dropped and “settled” for other fun activities. 😏

I saw a couple guys blowing out giant bubbles 🧼 to attract the kids and hopefully get some tips from their parents. Having looked around all shops and activities, we decided to purchase a package deal, which gave access to 2-3 attractions. It was economical 💸 and sounded fun.

We started off with a haunted 🎃👻 house. For people in the US, it is quite common to experience the Haunted Houses during the Halloween season, so in comparison, this haunted house was “cute” 😝. But, hey, this was in India and in March of 2014. So, nothing to complain over there. 🕶

After the haunted house, I remember going through the Mirror Tunnel 👓. I thought that was really cool as it made fools of us every single time. I still remember I was trying to be a smarty 🤓 pants before my friends and failed miserably when I knocked myself on one of the glass walls – my friends made fun of me 😂🤭 then and I did not hear the end of it for quite some time.
It was fun to watch other people struggle too through that Mirror Tunnel.
You check it out for yourself. 👇🏽

I think this was the last spot that we checked out before calling our driver 🚙 to get the car. At the end of that day, everybody was tired 🥱. Even though, it does sound like we did not do many things, trust me, the five of us know how much energy and time we spent at each spot; Making fun of each other and having the time of our lives.

On our way back to the hotel, every one of us fell asleep 😴 and woke up only after reaching our hotel. Our driver told us that he would pick us up at 8 AM the next day for Coonoor 🙌🏽, which was the last destination in our itinerary before heading home.

Time to conclude the part 2 of this trip. 🧘🏼‍♂️

Part 3, here I come!

See you soon!