Mettupalayam in Tamil Nadu, India, is one of those nondescript towns that would never feature on any tourist itinerary, except for the fact that it is the starting point for the Unesco World Heritage Nilgiri Mountain Railway. For this reason, tourists, including us, often find themselves spending the night here.
We hadn’t intended to. Our plan had been to stay overnight in Coimbatore and catch the early train to Mettupalayam the next morning in order to join the once-a-day departure of the miniature railway at 7.10am. However, a couple of days before we were due to ride on the train, we realised that the tickets we’d booked and paid for online two months previously, were actually waiting list tickets and didn’t guarantee us a seat!
Enquiries which we made when we reached Coimbatore led us to the conclusion that we would have a better chance of getting a seat if we got at least as far as Mettupalayam the night before we wanted to travel. So, we took a train to the starting point of the journey we so desperately wanted to make, but we were no nearer to actually getting on it!
We went to see the station master to ask his advice. He told us to come back at 4.30am the next morning and join the queue for standby tickets. I pleaded with him. I gave him the whole story about Mark’s Dad and why it was so important that we were on the train (more about this in my next post!). He was implacable. “Come back at 4.30 tomorrow morning.” So, we asked if we could book one of his rooms at the station so that we would be on the spot. “If only you’d asked half an hour ago,” he said, “I’ve just let the last room to another English couple who want to be on the train tomorrow.” With no alternative, we had to thank him for his time and ask him to recommend a hotel nearby.
He directed us to the only half-decent hotel in town, Hotel EMS Mayura. Before we went there, however, we had a look around the Nilgiri Mountain Railway Museum which is just behind the station. I’m sure most passengers arriving to catch the train miss the museum and that’s a shame because it was a very interesting way to pass an hour or so.
Later, we took an auto to the hotel and easily got a room. We decided against venturing out – the town didn’t seem to have much to offer and the hotel had its own bar and restaurant. As is often the case in almost dry Tamil Nadu, the bar was in the basement and was almost pitch black when we went for a pre-dinner drink. This was clearly to hide the identities of all the men in there having an illicit beverage on the way home from work! Still, we could see enough to decipher the label on the ‘British Empire’ beer as well as the various kinds of nibbles they brought us to have with it, including a huge plate of sliced cucumber!!
After an average meal in the hotel restaurant, we retired early, setting the alarm for the ridiculous time of 3.15am!!
The next morning, neither of us having slept well, we were actually awake and waiting for the alarm to go off! Downstairs, despite having been warned about what time we wanted to leave and being assured that reception offered a 24-hour service and that organising transport for us wouldn’t be a problem, there was no sign of life! We could have just left, but we were locked in!! Eventually, the security guard appeared and roused the guy on duty who was none too pleased to be woken up at such an ungodly hour. He certainly wouldn’t arrange an auto for us!
So, we set off at a brisk pace to walk to the station (luckily, we’d memorised the route), determined to be first in the standby queue … and we were!! Not by much. We were soon joined by another British couple (who told us that this was their third consecutive day of trying to get on the train!), a young Frenchman who’d misunderstood the instructions and thought he’d be coming at 4.30am to get a ticket and would then be able to go back to bed for a couple of hours, and a German guy who’d been on the station since midnight, trying (and failing) to get some sleep! The queue we were in was marked for ‘waiting list and unreserved passengers’. There was no difference, so I don’t know why we’d bothered booking online! What I do know, though, is that, when the station master came on duty at 5.30am, we got tickets and were able to get on the train. Not everyone who came in later on the train from Coimbatore was so lucky. So, the night in Mettupalayam was worth it after all!
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