My Thoughts !

After a long time our classmates decided to have a gettogether along with the new-year celebrations. We planned to go somewhere on the new year's eve. But somehow the dates got preponed to x-mas weekend. After a small discussion, Karthi proposed Coorg. Looking at some tourism websites, which described it as the heaven-on-the-earth, we all decided it as the destination. 10 of us started here in chennai on x-mas eve and reached Bangalore in the morning. We scheduled to depart Bangalore @ 8 AM. But it was almost 11.30 when we crossed Honeywell. We stopped @ Srirangapatnam for lunch. Everybody was going into the small hotel there. Ganni, pointed a non-vegetarian hotel near-by for chicken briyani lovers. So six of us went there and sat. It looked like an abandoned placed and seems that we were the only customers! When we first asked for chicken briyani, the server cum cleaner cum owner cum cook said that its not available and after a momentary thought said its available. We ordered it. It was actually chicken pulav served in the name of the chicken briyani. Despite the bad taste, Karthi praised that the chicken was fresh, but I didn't touch it as I reminded of vivek's kaka briyani joke in the movie 'Run'. After looooong journey, we reached there in the evening. We just had enough time to take bath and dressup for dinner - no site-seeing. The next day we went to some places and started our downwards journey in the evening. Two best places was worth mentioning. The first was Abbey falls. We have to take a 10 minutes walk from the parking lot thru the woods. Slowly you would be hearing the sound of the falls and suddendly in one turning, the falls come to eye sight. We were said that this year due to good rainfall, the water level was high. The second place was a river bed, where you have to cross the river in the boat to see an elephant camp. The place was looking very good and breeze was creating a nice atmosphere. As it was not so deep and there were lot of rocks in the surface of the river, we decided to cross the river by walk. We were walking carefully and slowly, and two little gals from that place said, "Uncle, give us way", and were running on the rocks. Several of us fell down in the water and got completely wet. But those two were simply running and jumping on the rocks and crossing the river - experience does matters :-(

Few noteworthy things in Coorg:
* We thought Coorg is name of the city, but hey, its a name given to the hilly area, and its the name of the district. We stayed in Madikeri, the capital of Coorg
* Most of the coffee estates are owned by Tamil Chettiars from the southern-districts of Tamil Nadu. Around 100 years back they considered investing in the real estates here would yield profit and they are right!
* As its a hill station, I thought it would be very chilling there. But Coorg's just 1500 feet above MSL and it was the first hill-station, where I had to switch on the fan to sleep :-)
* Food was pretty decent there in Coorg. It didn't cost much. 15 of us, had a good dinner and the bill was less than 1k.
* We thought that, as its a well-known tourist place and so we'll have lot of ATMs and didn't take much cash. To our surprise there was only two ATMs one is SBI, which will not accept other bank cards and luckily the other one, Corporation Bank ATM, accepts any VISA cards.
* When having breakfast in a near-by hotel, they were charging a penalty of Rs. 5, if you waste any food that you have ordered
* As the web-sites described, its not a great place. May be if we had gone for some trekking kind of activities, it would have been true, but in general, its just an another hill station.