Ooty and the Nilgiris: where I nearly stopped

The Nilgiris were the last three days of a fifteen-day loop out of Bengaluru — the Malnad, Coorg, the north Kerala coast, then up into the hills. By the time I got there I had been driving for two weeks and was, in theory, ready to go home.

What I actually wrote instead was:

So this is it! Will live and code in the woods!

It is the earliest thing in my archive that sounds like the idea I have been circling ever since. The search has since moved north, toward real snow, but this is where it first showed up — at the tail end of a road trip that was supposed to be about something else.

Three days is the wrong number

I did the Nilgiris the way most people do: as the reward at the end of a longer drive, with just enough time to see that it was worth more time. Three days was enough to decide I wanted to come back and not enough to do anything else.

If you are planning a South India loop, put the Nilgiris at the start, or give them their own trip. They are not a good finale — they are a good destination, and the difference costs you a week to learn.

Ooty is the name, not the place

Ooty is what the hills are called on the booking sites and it is the least interesting part of them. The town is where the buses stop. The Nilgiris are the ridges either side of it: Kotagiri, Coonoor, the tea country falling away in terraces, and the roads that connect them.

Drive up one ghat road and down a different one. They are genuinely different landscapes and it costs you nothing but a slightly longer line on the map.