Ooty, more properly Udhagamandalam, is the capital of the Nilgiri Hills district of Tamil Nadu. At an elevation of 2,240 metres, it was a favoured hill station of the East India Company in the late eighteenth century, as a respite from the fierce heat of an Indian summer and is still a popular summer tourist destination today.
We arrived in the town by the Nilgiri Mountain Railway in the early afternoon and were immediately struck by the pleasantly warm temperature. The sun was shining in a clear blue sky, but it wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been in Cochin or Coimbatore.
We spent a couple of days in Ooty, staying at the Woodberry Residence on a hill at the top end of town. We took a full day trip on one of the days, which will be the subject of my next post, and spent the remainder of the time exploring the town.
There are many reminders of colonial times as you walk around. The Ootacamund Club, where snooker is said to have been invented by a British army officer, is very similar to upmarket country clubs you still find in the UK today. There’s also a cricket ground (England cricket captain, Colin Cowdrey, was born in Ooty), riding stables, kennels, the Ooty hunt, a racecourse, a gymkhana club, a golf course, and the Assembly Rooms, formerly used for theatre productions but now more often used to show Bollywood movies.
We also visited the Botanic Gardens, laid out by the British in 1847 along the lines of many municipal parks we’re familiar with in the UK. The gardens cover 22 acres and have around 1000 species of shrubs, trees, ferns, herbs and bonsai plants. There is also a 20-million year old fossilised tree on the site, and a distinctly underwhelming map of India planted with ground cover plants. The gardens should provide an oasis of calm away from the noise of a busy city, and I’m sure they do – but not on a Friday afternoon! The whole town had come to enjoy the peace and tranquillity, thus ensuring that there wasn’t any!
Ooty, as other hill stations in southern India, is also famous for chocolate-making. Shops selling hand-made chocolates are everywhere. The fact that, in reality, these chocs are all made in half a dozen or so medium-sized factories doesn’t make them any less delicious! They are made with a higher percentage of cocoa solids than most commercially produced chocolate we are used to and this, along with the lower temperatures at altitude, means that they don’t melt easily.
The chocolates, along with the best vegetarian food of our trip up to this point, made our stay in Ooty particularly pleasurable!
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