In search of the Bollywood hills

For my last day in Ooty, 15 March, I arranged a sightseeing tour through Hotel Lakeview.

The hotel provided a car and a driver. We agreed the places to visit and roughly how long I would spend at each. At every stop, the driver dropped me off, I explored on my own, and then I went back to the car.

What I most wanted to see was the landscape. The tall pine trees and wide, open grassy areas around Ooty reminded me of scenes from Bollywood films of the 1990s, and I specifically wanted to visit places with that kind of scenery.

The names I use for some of the stops are my best match from the photographs.

The pine forest

The first stop was a pine forest.

A dense stand of tall pine trees at the edge of a sunny clearing, with a few visitors walking below. — The edge of the pine forest.

Inside, the trees grew tall and straight, with bare, reddish trunks rising to a canopy high above.

Rows of tall, straight pine trunks on bare ground, with sunlight between them. — Among the pines.

Looking straight up tall pine trunks to their crowns against the sky. — Looking up.

From the edge of the forest, the land opened out into wide, dry grassland.

A wide view of golden grassland rolling down to a green valley, with a small reservoir and dark forested hills on the horizon. — Grassland beyond the forest.

The open hills

The next stop was the wide, grassy hills that I understand are commonly called the Shooting Spot. This was exactly the kind of scenery I had come to see.

Dry grassland with a wire fence on wooden posts, and horses for hire waiting under a tree. — Horses waiting for riders.

Visitors standing on the edge of a grassy hill above a forested valley, with mountain ranges in the distance. — Looking out from the hilltop.

A view down from the grassy hill to a fenced area, a road, parked cars and forested hills. — Looking down towards the road.

Pykara

At Pykara Boat House, I looked out over the lake. I visited but didn’t take a boat ride.

A turquoise lake with a wooded headland and sandy banks, and small boats moored at the jetty below. — The lake and the jetty.

Not far away, a fenced path led down towards a river. Below it, the water spread out over shelves of rock and tumbled down in a series of small cascades.

A fenced path leading down a hillside towards a river winding between pine-covered slopes. — The path down to the river.

White water pouring over a wide, stepped ledge of dark rock. — The falls.

A wide river flowing over rocks and grassy islands, between pine-covered hills. — The river below the cascades.

Leaving Ooty

Back in Ooty town, I took a last few photographs.

The side of a bus beside a large parking area full of auto-rickshaws and cars, with a sign to the Botanical Garden and a hill covered in houses beyond. — Ooty, early in the afternoon.

Colourful houses climbing a hillside above an oval racecourse. — The racecourse and the town.

After the sightseeing, I took the same KSRTC bus service back to Bengaluru.

A modern hotel front at night, with the name lit in red English letters and yellow Kannada script. — An evening stop on the way back, I think.

One photograph from that evening, of a hotel front in Karnataka, may be from a stop along the way.

A last day in Bengaluru

That night, I stayed at my brother’s flat in Bengaluru. My brother was overseas, but a friend was staying there.

On 16 March, we spent time chatting, and we cooked some familiar food from home.

That evening, I flew back to Singapore on IndiGo 6E 73. It left Bengaluru at 9:25 pm and landed in Singapore at 4:30 the next morning, 17 March.

The trip had begun with a group of colleagues laughing all the way to India. It ended with me flying home on my own.