how bout dinner at Charing Cross, OOty?

You must be wondering about the title of this post.well..I myself am. It so happened like this:

Saturday night was the aerosmith show. The show was good (Poor aerosmith takes the backseat as i have more interesting stuff to share). The turnout was close to 30000. So by the time we got outta d place it was pretty late. We had to drop a girl at Hebbal (northernmost of bangalore). My friend and i had some plans for the next day. We were too hungry and set out to have dinner at 2 AM in koramangala.. and to our surprise.. the least waiting time was 2 hours in the restaurants at this godly hour. We had dinner (or so it may be called) at 3 30. and walked like nomads at that hour. We had a car and hence were intending to do a small picnic or atleast meet a coupla friends the next day. at 10 in the morning i was busily browsing for some one day picnic spots. we were 5 in number. Suddenly this place called Bandipur popped up in the screen.It was 210 kms away.(70 kms from mysore). Our plan:

1.30 hours to mysore. 1.30 hours to bandipur. reach there by 3.. start at 4. be back by 7.Then the chennai gang head back to chennai by 12. (man can only propose....)

we could start only by 12 :/ .. and the roads in Bangalore are so @~#$@$#ed up dat we hit mysore road (mind you.. not mysore. mysore road.) at 1.30. We reached Mysore at 3 30 and finally reached Bandipur at 5 30. It turned out to be a beautiful place.Everything was grazing around ...elephants, sambas, deers... monkeys.. bores.. the safari closes at 6. and we cudn make it to the safari either. We had to do something more.. for the 4 hour drive deserved something more.The staff there casually said "mudumalai is only 9 kms away"....we were like: "WHAT??? MUDUMALAI??? MAN THATS TAMIL NADU... WHOA!!!!!!" We hit the Ooty main road and reached Mudumalai.What a feeling to cross the karnataka check post and enter tamil boundary.... (oh man. i can imagine how it feels at the Wagah border).
It was nauture at its wildest. Fantabulous river and elephants abluting in them. we reached past the safari timings.We were just so excited and thrilled that this board couldn have eluded us "MASINAGUDI 7 KMS". So we headed for masunagudi.great drive.. great roads. epitome of verdance (pardon me for the introduction of this new word in the dictionary). We stopped everywher to capture the elephants/ deers/ sambas... etc in our cameras (ofcourse). we were prohibited from parking anywhere, honking, making noise. So this complete state of tranquility prevailed.Once we reached Masinagudi at 7 ish it started getting cooler. It was Tamil everywhere.The home feel :) .. we pinched ourselves .. we jus cudn believe we were on the better half of the border... probably we pinched ourselves too early.. Cos in the next 1.5 hours we were havin dinner ... Hotel Charring Cross, OOTY.How could we not visit Ooty when its just 30kms from masinagudi. :D

It was cold... quite cold... very cold rather.We were wearing cotton clothes (for .. who knew we would land up here).it was smoke emanating from 3/5 sensory organs. That was the closest we could get to smoking.Bought some chocolates.Had a sumptuous dinner. walked down the Ooty streets. I still cant believe... this being my first time visit to Ooty. It was 10 ",1]
It was 10pm.Then came suggestions from some of us .. "Hey, connoor s jus few kms amay.. what say???... we can then hit coimbatore and return to bangalore via plains. It will be a complete circle." At that moment nothing seemed implausible to us.We decided to take the road less travelled. lol. Via the jungle and Pycara falls.Thats risky and dangerous.We couldn have retuned via masinagudi(though that would ve saved another 30 kms) cos travel after 8pm and before 6am was prohibited. We started from Ooty. There was no sign of civilisation or human beings. Bad roads.Wild animals staring into the head lights. No visibility. too foggy. moonlight making it all the more eerie.Whenever we spotted two blinking eyes.. we would stop the car.. face the headlights towards them and take photos. One such encounter was wid a huge bison.my friend said bisons were foolish animals. and we believed. went right next to bison and took a head on snap. and the animal was really fooolish. It posed.... the next encounter was even worse. An elephant. right ahead of us. we dared to park the little indica next to d elephant and take snaps.and from outta nowhere two more elephants gazed at us from behind. WHOA...PHEW!!!!! escape. we flee immediately. ALLL THIS HAPPENED AT 1AM... Then we entered the Tiger zone.. Bandipur. sadly we were not lucky enough. We den entered Karnataka... and then mysore and den bangalore at 4 30 am. The chennai gang left at 8 30 am..here typing this post in my office, RMV Extn, Sadasivanagar, Bangalore.

If this post finds its way to the other side then probably i would believe it was real.