re: Bangalore - Mysore - Ooty : Route Queries We returned from Ooty / Destiny Farm yesterday evening. Here's a quick recap of our trip.
We left Bangalore at about 5:45am on Thursday [25th Oct]. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I took Chord Rd -> Magadi Rd -> Outer Ring Rd -> BMIC Expwy -> NICE -> Kanakapura Rd [NH 209]. Thought of having a quick breakfast at Hotel Gokul in Kanakapura but it seems they open only at 11am. Instead, drove till Kollegal and had breakfast at a small joint (Nandini, I think, was the name). Roads were very good and not crowded, so we made good time. The only issue I have with the stretch till Kanakapura is that the road never stays straight for a decent stretch, so I had to keep slowing down and accelerating. No problems with directions because roads are clearly marked. The stretch between Kollegal and Chamarajanagar (and even further to Gundlupet, actually) can be a bit slow because it goes through villages very frequently and some stretches are very, very narrow (sometimes only enough for vehicles to pass in one direction). Continued past Chamarajanagar to Gundlupet without any problems although the quality of the road falls a couple of notches here. From Gundlupet, the road becomes a beautifully smooth, black runway. Very difficult to stay below 120kmph. But, you're forced to drive more sedately once you enter the Bandipur forest area, partly to take in the silence and scenery and partly due to the speedbreakers [very gently, nicely designed ones, I must say]. People talk a lot about the dream-like highways in TN, but I found that, in the Bandipur forest area, at least, the roads on the Karnataka side were far better than those on the TN side. To fast-forward a bit, we navigated the 36 hairpin bends [over 20km] and reached Ooty around 11:30am and then continued on to Destiny Farm. The road quickly becomes terrible here. Although we didn't have any problems with directions, the car took quite a beating, I'm sure. And, from there, we proceeded to Destiny Farm by a truck that they sent to pick us up. There is practically no surface here but just two deep ruts in which the truck bounces, bumps, shakes, rattles and grinds its way through. It takes about 40 min to do the 3km from the parking lot to Destiny Farm. I will reserve my comments about the place itself because it is not pertinent to this forum, but suffice it to say that it's no Kashmir. The return journey was more adventurous. We left the Destiny Farm parking lot at about 11am and at some point, in Ooty downtown, I must have taken the wrong turn/fork/deviation. We didn't encounter the same ghat section that we had come on [the one with 36 hairpin turns]. Instead, we were on some road that went past Pykara Lake/Dam towards Gudalur. We asked somebody if the road took us to Mysore and they answered in the affirmative, so we continued on the same road. But, quickly, I realized that this was not the same route. It seemed a bit longer, the turns weren't as sharp and it wasn't [at least, in my opinion], as scenic. The quality of the road on this route was also pretty bad. It took us far longer to reach the Bandipur forest bit. By the time we reached Gundlupet, it was already 2:30pm, so we had taken more than 3 hours to get there. We decided to return by the same route [Chamarajanagar -> Kollegal -> Malavalli -> Kanakapura -> Bangalore]. We found that the directions, especially when we passed through the town areas, were not clear at all, so we had to stop to ask people how to go to Bangalore. On a couple of occasions [Chamarajanagar and Kollegal], we had to backtrack a bit. We had a highly forgettable lunch at a place called Nijaguna near Chamarajanagar. Traffic around late afternoon / early evening was also a bit heavier, so we made slower progress. From Kollegal to Kanakapura was still a great driving experience though. The road is very good and it passes by the Cauvery river near Bluff / Shivanasamudram, so it is quite scenic. After Kanakapura, it became dark and the traffic was very heavy, so progress was very slow. The absolutely appalling habit of Indian drivers to keep their headlights on high beam made my task much, much more difficult and exhausting than necessary. We reached NICE around 6:45pm and decided to go on NICE all the way till the Tumkur Rd exit and take the elevated Nelamangala Bypass back home. This route would be much longer, but at least I wouldn't be facing oncoming traffic with high-beam headlights because of the wide divider. This stretch was fairly uneventful (except for one place on NICE where they had put the usual barricade, which made me brake rather suddenly from 120kmph down to 10kmph in a very short distance). Finally, we reached home at about 7:30pm.
Thanks to everybody who responded to my questions about the route to Ooty. |