Day 2: May 17th, 2008

Trrriiiinnggggg!!!! (6 am) Snooze. Trrriiinnggggg!! (7 am) Snooze. Trrrriiinnggg!! (7:30 am) Snooze. Trrriiinnnnggggg!!! (8 am) Argh!!! I hate alarms! They’re so pissing off! I got up and found everyone out of bed. We were supposed to leave to Wayanad early in the morning. We found ourselves rushing to get all the work done and seeing this, Sanju made a declaration – “It is OUR trip and we will do what we WANT to do WHENEVER we want to do it! Time doesn’t matter!” Gee. That did reduce the tension a little. We had breakfast at a place called Mahesh Prasad as Su unintentionally cracked some perverted jokes while giving a speech on “How to clean your ear”. Haha.

We left leisurely at around 10 am to Wayanad, which is around 150 kms from Mysore. It is one of the loveliest hill stations of Kerala, nestled among the mountains of Western Ghats. We drove for the better part of the day with music playing on my iPod. Sanju made a statement that this trip was going to be a “purely high spirited” one. (Which it was) Hehe. We had to pass through Muthanga wild life sanctuary. En route I spotted a leash of foxes. They were hardly 15 ft away. They resembled wild dogs actually, but Navu, the animal lover, confirmed that they were foxes. After a silent photo session, we left the cunning animals to themselves and moved on. Not far from there, we found a parcel of spotted deer. Su and I had a vivid recollection of our father singing a Kannada song called “Nee jinkey mari naa?”. Haha. Personally, I felt the deer looked pretty ugly, but the fawn looked cute. The deer freaked out when they saw us and sped into the bushes. Again, we moved on. We stopped at this small, battered shop where Sanju bought a 2-litre bottle of Fanta, which tasted pretty awful. He insisted on having lunch at that place but the rest of us refused. Some uncle we met suggested a clean, vegetarian restaurant called “Kalpakka” which was situated in Sultan Bathery. Sultan Bathery is a small town on the way to Kalpetta (which was where we were going to stay for the night) from Muthanga. It lies approximately 25 kms from Kalpetta. Sanju was behind the wheels this time. We reached Sultan Bathery and found Hotel Kalpakka with no difficulty. Famished, eager to taste some delicacies of Kerala we entered the restaurant. It was a pretty clean room, had air conditioning and looked decent. (Ah! I remember, I had to pee all along! But the restroom was stinky. >:P ) Anyway, we ordered for three meals and two veg biryanis. While we waited, Sanju kept us entertained by opening and closing the door behind, which made a funny creaky sound, like a hen squawking. He was simply fascinated by the sound. Haha. And then the food arrived, bringing with it a strong aroma of coconut oil. Ughh! Should’ve seen that coming. Everything in Kerala has coconut oil in it! But it didn’t taste as bad as I expected it to be. After having a chapatti with some curry and Kerala’s famous Avial (which I hated) followed by some rice, I was pretty full. As we waited for the bill, we realised how many small cups were there on the table. Holy cow! 11 cups per meal plus 4 with each biriyani! That made it 40+ cups on the table. Hrishi thought out aloud “how many cups could probably be there in the kitchen?”. Haha. We had a good laugh wondering how many could really be there. After a pista flavoured ice cream and choco-bar we left the restaurant and headed towards Kalpetta.

Kalpetta is the District Headquarters of Wayanad. Beautiful place, with weird coloured houses. Seriously! Most of the houses were painted with jingbang colours and they all looked newly painted. I felt if you stare at the houses for too long, you’d probably go blind! Now, we were on a mission to find a place for us to stay. We called Pavithran, who is a trek organizer (or that is what I thought he is). But he couldn’t find a place for us. So we went to PPS tourist home for rooms, but they were full. And then we called a female called Fathima, who apparently rented out flats for tourists. She said those were full too. I felt homeless and lost in a city full of people whose language sounded like gibberish to me. We called a guy at PPS who helped us out and told us about a home-stay about 100 mts from PPS. We searched for the place for about 20 minutes. We couldn’t recognize the place even though we went past it about 4 or 5 times. Even the guys in the garage opposite to the home-stay didn’t know of it. Losers! Navu and Hrishi went in to talk to the Malyali kutties who owned the house. All they understood was Rs.2000 and Rs.1500. Hehe. Their language is pretty funny. I would have laughed on their faces if I was in Navu’s or Hrishi’s place. Later Sanju went in with Navu to do the final talk and came out with nothing. :P (No offence intended). It was the same deal. We had to pay them Rs.1500 for a night. After A lot of thinking, we decided to take the place.

“Iqbal Mahal” it was called. It really was a palace. It was a brand new house, with two huge bed rooms, a kitchen, a drawing room and of course a bath room. It also had a back yard, which looked freaky at night. It was around 4 pm and we all freshened up and got ready to break some rules. :P

After about an hour’s sinking, swimming, flying (my first time and Sanju’s too), we went out to buy some groceries. While we were at it, Pavithran called us and gave us the names of a few places we could visit. One among the names was “Lakkidi” which was a viewpoint around 20 kms from Kalpetta. Pavithran said to leave immediately because there was no point in going there after the sun set. So we rushed to the home stay, grabbed the cameras and rushed back into the car and started to Lakkidi. As we went up the ghat section, I could see why the place was the best hill station of Kerala. The view was magnificent! We reached the viewpoint quite quickly and the beauty of nature awed us! Everything was blue. The scene was bloody brilliant! It was picture perfect. I felt it looked like one of the Windows XP wallpapers.

It was finally time to click pictures and I bet Navu (the professional photographer) was the happiest! Hehe. We admired Mother Nature for about an hour and called it a day. We drove back to our home-stay, tired and strained. Sanju made us some Maggi and Egg bhurji (which I ate in spite of having quit eating egg) blended with pride :P .After burning some unwanted plants and highly spirited conversations, Navu and Sanju hit the sack. I turned on the TV and watched Roadies along with Su and Hrishi. I found a really comfortable sleeping bag. It was so soft and warm. I was fast asleep within minutes. Su and Hrishi stayed awake and stole the sleeping bag from me when they felt it was safe! Grrr!! Idiots!