Had a trip to Ooty last week in the Honda City. Thought of typing in a travelouge as I used the new car to drive down to Ooty. I wanted to go on a long drive before the second service which is due in second week of May.The travelouge cum drive review is as below. I hope it will be useful for fellow TBHP-ians.
In Bangalore, we drove through Outer ring road -> Bannarghatta road -> NICE road to reach Mysore road . Major places enroute are Maddur ->
Mandya -> Srirangapattana -> Mysore ring road -> Nanjancode -> Gundalpet -> Bandipur -> Muthumalai -> Gudalur -> Ooty.
Mysore road drives you straight to Mysore and hence is the least confusing segment. Bangalore to Mysore is approx 135 kms. Traffic volume is rather high on Mysore road esp in the evenings and it took us close to 4 hrs with a half hour break to cover this distance, on both ways. Mind you there are speed breakers in every 5-10 kms or so and you may run over some, if not cautious. Srirangapattana is a historical place which will arrive just before Mysore city.
Before entering Mysore city, there is a ring road going to the right side which bypasses the whole city. Taking this route will save time
though it goes a roundabout way via the city's periphery and runs more kms. Once you pass Mysore, the road to Nanjancode (20 kms from Mysore) is scenic with water bodies on road sides. Mysore airport comes on the right side of this road. Gutters are patched up with tar but road is tad bumpy.
After Nanjancode to Gundalpet is the best part of the drive. There are occassional humps and the road to keep you vigilant. Road is single-laned but is in good shape. From Gundalpet, we enter the Bandipur forest which is the border of Karnataka. From Bandipur, we cross to Mudumalai which is the continuation of the forest in Tamil Nadu's side. Drive through these two forests were really amazing. There are sign boards and speed breakers all the way.
Once you exit Mudumalai, Gudalur is the next place. Road to tourist hotspots in Kerala like Sultan Batery, Calicut, Wayanad etc splits right from here. In fact, there is a place named Tapekkadu in the
Mudumalai forest and there is a road to Ooty from this place which is signficantly shorter than the other road via Gudalur, which we took. This road splits left from the main road at Tappekkadu and distance to Ooty via this road is only 36 kms.
If you go via Gudualur, which is the usual route, the distance to Ooty is around 76 kms. Hence there is a saving of 40 kms approx via the other road but from what I heard, the road is narrow and full of steep hair pin curves (36 hairpins from what I was told).
After Gudalur, the uphill climb starts. The total distance is
approximately 315 kms from Sarjapur road in Bangalore to bus stand at Ooty. While going up and coming down, I took close to 10 hrs to cover the whole distance with breaks in every 2 hrs.
Bangalore-Mysore road takes close to 4 hrs to drive. Then comes the Mysore -> Gundalpet drive which will consume another 2 hrs. From Gundalpet, we enter the jungles of Bandipur and Mudumalai where speed breakers are rampant and speed limits (30 to 40 kmph) are posted all over. Once you exit the forests, the climb starts and here too you cannot travel above 50 kmph. Big vehicles coming in the opposite direction, will stray into your side of the road to negotiate those sharp turns without loosing speed. Got to be very careful on those turns. I have been trifile lucky on a couple of occassions. Thank God.
Now about the car, my experience had been good overall. When driving through the straight roads, I realized that the suspension is on the softer
side when compared to my older car -- Hyundai Getz. You can feel those small rolls coming into your seat. Also mine is City automatic. While
driving through the ghats, I was driving in the 'D mode' mostly. Paddle shifters were used occassionaly to downshift before overtaking. I realized that the car revs a bit too long before upshifting to a higher gear and increase the speed when the accelerator is pressed hard on an uphill, primarily to overtake other vehicles. Without upshifting, engine produces more sound and less acceleration at those precious moments. I didn't try the paddlers to upshift manually when this happened.
Again, with 3 adults and a child plus luggage of around 15 kgs onboard the bottom scraped out on every serious hump. Some of them on the Bannarghatta road and Mysore road where almost as high as the cliffs in Ooty. Car literally falls down from the peak of those humps
. Anyway, this is coverd in a lot of other threads and hence is not going deep here.
On the way up climbing the hill, I had to stop at a place because a truck in front had stopped. Soon I realized that another car had given a thud from the behind. I kind of panicked and thought of moving the car to road side to see the damange. Somehow, I thought that the engine had shutdown and cranked the keys again and again, when the engine was actually running. Finally, I parked the car to one side and checked the back. To my utter surprise, there weren't any dents or scatches. I haven't cracked this mystery fully because metals used in new age cars are quite light to reduce weight and hence will bent or scratch with the slightest of impacts. Probably it is that the other car (an old Maruti 800) would have touched the exhaust pipe from an angle, as we were going uphill.
Now on Ooty, it is an amazingly picturesque place. We stayed in a cottage arranged by arranged by my colleague. Temperature now is quite cool esp at nights and water too is quite chilly. Roads are very narrow and many roads are closed because of ongoing construction work. Hence had trouble with the routes as guided by the GPS once we were inside Ooty. I felt that the place now has lot of filth and garbage because of the booming tourism.
I am uploading some pics of the travel here.