3. Munnar Travel: Travelling Around Munnar
After a good nights rest, got up to a lovely sunrise viewable from the Window. The valley looked really beautiful with the mist and red haze of the sun.
Today we decided to roam around Munnar basically drive down the Top Station road.
a. Top Station – 34kms
b. Kundla Dam – 24 kms
c. Echo Point – 20 kms
d. Mattupetty Dam – 14 kms
e. Flower Garden – 5 kms
The drive is truly awesome on this road with super smooth road and layers to tea gardens. Top it off not much traffic except for the usual tourist cabs. There is a road to Kodai as well from Top station and it looked pretty adventurous but not for a Zen. Maybe some other time on a SUV will attempt it
Being the early birds at Top station was able to spend 15mins in silence at view point # 2 away from the shouts & noise of fellow travellers. There was a sign board there “This Land for Sale” We were pretty tempted to inquire about the cost
After Top station we went down towards Kundala Dam and decided to have a go on the Shikara. We had pretty tiring experiences with paddle boats earlier so this time we were pretty sure that we wanted someone else to row the boat. The Shikara is a smaller version of the ones you get in Kashmir but it was very good ride for around 30mins. Costed us some 200 bucks with a 30mins waiting period thrown in since there is only 2 shikaras for boating.
Echo point & Mattupetty was pretty crowded so we decided to skip them. I really wanted to check out the Indo-Swiss cattle farm but then somehow we missed the sign board that we had seen while going up previously. I guess everyone goes to the Cattle farm before Top station, we being
ulta people they would have never thought someone will be doing top station first.
To compensate for the loss we went in to some Flower garden. Wifey just went berserk seeing so many flowers at one place those too different varieties. I was busy stalking a bee that was busy with its daily work of nectar plucking, trying to capture it on the cam. Yes, I did manage to click its snap when it was busy at its job.
By the time we reached back to Munnar it was lunch time and we grabbed some bite at Sarvana Bhavan. This one was pretty good and VFM than the ones I ate in Chennai. Post this we decided to head back to the resort to take some rest before going for a sunset view in Pothamedu. On our way back we saw quite a few cars coming from Aluva side with race numbers stuck on their side. It looked like these were passenger cars that were participating in some rally of some sort. It would have been good to paint our zen in some bogus number, take a u-turn and head to the finish line first
5pm we decided to reach Pothamedu sunset point which is on the road towards Bison Valley. It was a lovely view of the rows of hills lined one after the other each one rising above the other. Awesome view, had a cup of Munnar tea over there sitting and admiring the view.
Finally came back to the resort at around 6.30pm and sat in front of the TV planning to order room service before retiring for the night. Lovely end to a lovely day.
4. Back to Bangalore: Munnar – Chinnar – Bhavani – Hosur - Bangalore
Started back after a relaxed yesterday at around 10am. Did not want to leave the place but Monday office beckons both of us and we reluctantly moved ourselves to the car. Bought some tea at KDHP sales outlet, filled up some 1000 bucks gas that fetched us 20 lts as the fuel cost is just 47 bucks to a liter here and off we went on our return journey to Bangalore. We reached Bangalore at around 7pm. Not much of a rush on Hosur road. Drove pretty fast over the Dharmapuri Hosur section and was able to touch 155kph on the zen. That really bought a broad smile to my face as 1 Santro gls was not able to keep up to the little box’s pace
Overall a pretty satisfying drive since Thursday night. Surely this is not the end and some more exploration is on the way, but then that’s for laters as got some serious goals coming up in the next few months that should keep both of us busy.
Total Kms covered (including travel inside Munnar): 1600 kms apprx
…..will be uploading the pics soon.