Ooty, how I love thee (Pt. 2) and the bus disaster!

Blogger now has mobile posting. How crazy is that?

It's HOT! But I shouldn't really complain cause apparently they're hitting the 40s in Mumbai? Yikes!

Anyway, so this is Ooty Day Two (Saturday, 11th April, 2009)...After I showed D around Selborne we headed down the hill to The Dhaba Express which used to be one of the really good restaurants in Ooty but it was quite a disappointment this time - the food I mean, the company was excellent! There was Miss Smith (top left corner) who is a maths teacher and a fascinating woman :) The Georges -Mr and Mrs and their son, Stephen and his Mrs., Nisha! (You can see Mr. George vaguely in the other picture on the top. He's the one a little blinded by the sun! And Mrs. George, Stephen and Nisha in the second row.) Then there was me and Dinah (surely you know us?!), John Vaz or I should say DR. John Vaz (bottom left corner) who is also an ex-Hebron student whose parents live in Ooty and he is doing medicine stuff in the US. He got a very short break for two weeks and it was nice to bump into him again in Ooty. We never actually were in school at the same time, he's from the class of '99 and I'm '06 so I kinda missed him by a couple of years but I met him first in school when he'd come to visit and then again in Bangalore once through some other friends and then again last year while I did a short stint volunteering at Mizpah Home and he was IG-ing at Hebron. John's parents also joined us for lunch (you can see his dad next to Mr. George). Miss Mangaldoss (next to John), who used to teach us chemistry is another amazing woman who now lives in Pune. Niru and I had stayed at her place in Pune when she came to visit me in 2008. And Miss Morris who was also a staff-member at Hebron for a long time.

Phew! Sorry if that was a little confusing!

After lunch we parted ways and D and I headed to the Bee Museum which was just brilliant. The tickets are a measly 20 bucks and they show you a 40 minute documentary which was very tastefully made about the Kurumbas who are a tribe of people in the Nilgiris whose main and daring occupation is honey-gathering. I say daring because these people do not use protective gear and hang precariously from cliffs to do their stuff and it was really quite fascinating!

After that we went to Ooty lake which was horribly crowded and messy. We checked out the thread garden.

And then walked walked walked walked to find an auto. I actually enjoyed that but it would have been a good idea not to be wearing non-grip chappals!

On the way we met these three charming little girls who enthusiastically ran up to us to say hello and asked us to take a photo of them and then they just got back to their playing! So sweet.

Anyway, we finally did find an auto but we decided that they'd really taken us for ride for the past day and a half and that we wouldn't cave until they agreed to our price (they don't have fixed prices for autos in Ooty) but they didn't cave! So we had to keep walking... Eventually we did find an auto and we headed to Coffee Day to put back on all the calories we lost in all the walking :)

The next morning we left for the bus stand by around 9:15am and waited for our bus to take us back to Bangalore. The journey was going pretty okay although it seemed much longer than the ride up... Little did we know that that was not even close to the worst part!

About 10-15kms from Bangalore city our bus came to a jerking halt and there was utter confusion. Eventually we figured out that we had actually been in an accident. Our bus driver had hit down a motorcyclist and... he RAN AWAY. Yes, our bus drivers just abandoned a bus-full of people, a half-dying man on the road that HE had hit down and ran to save his own life.

Anyway, thankfully the man wasn't dead on the spot and the ambulances arrived surprisingly fast by India's sorry standards in such things and also the police managed to keep the mob violence-free. After more confusion, we finally all got our luggage and off the bus and stood on the side of road trying to figure out what to do. Obviously no help would come for us (this is India!) and the useless cops tried and failed to stop a couple of local buses to take us the rest of the way. They even failed to stop a bus driver to stop and move OUR bus off the road so that the traffic could continue flowing.

Well, we did finally get on a local bus which took us to the city where we got off and hopped onto an auto to take us home.

That was, needless to say, quite a night! I went from utter confusion to ANGER to sorrow to gratefulness and just utter lethargy in those few hours. What else can I say?