Travel is exhausting; just sitting in a seat can be mentally taxing when large distances are being covered. This is especially true here, where you can be packed into a vehicle that is literally overflowing with people and the appalling road conditions lead to bags and people flopping on top of you while the incessant honking assaults your ears and putrid smells you could never have imagined existing penetrate directly into your stomach and trucks heading dead on towards you tense every muscle in your body and make you want to scream STOP!
Our trip is short and we want to see so much that we grin and bear it because the abuse is worth it, but sometimes the journey is a unique and beautiful experience in and of itself. The “Toy Train” to the town of Ooty in the Nilgiri Hills is one of these moving highlights. It is a hundred-year-old steam engine that climbs into the mountains on narrow gauge track, pushed by a locomotive that stops every 10km to fill up with water. If I were a train enthusiast, it would have been a dream fulfilled, but even just as a beauty enthusiast, I was awed by the scenery; gorgeous hills and rock outcroppings, rivers and waterfalls, tea plantations and a technicolor spectrum of wildflowers. At the end of the line was Ooty, a small town nestled among alpine forests and farmland and a great place to take a break before heading down the back side of the mountain on a road that brought out an aspect of stressful Indian driving we had not yet experienced — steep and winding with sheer drops on every side through 36 hairpin turns with red skull and crossbones danger signs reminding you of the thin line that separates excitement and terror.