Memories from Munnar-Nov 2019

People say a picture speaks a thousand words. In today's uncertain times,these pictures remind us of the happier times , they remind us to have hope and faith and believe that this time too shall pass. Also, looking at the pictures gave me the chance to write about our trip to Munnar. so here is my experience of travelling to Munnar.

Munnar has been on my wishlist ever since the song " Kashmir main Tu Kanyakumari" from Chennai Express. Although i have seen tea gardens in Ooty, the beauty of the tea gardens in Munnar looked so different and serene. We were planning to drive down to either Goa or Munnar in November and finally decided on Munnar since the roads to Goa were under construction. 

Planning and Booking:

The plan was to leave early in the morning ( Nov14th) from Bangalore and drive the 480 km with a few breaks in between.  

One day when I was looking up some munnar travelogues I found a hotel that looked beautiful, "Hotel Amberdale". I quickly checked the reviews and booked it for 4 nights. The hotel is situated inside a tea estate and looked serene with beautiful views from the Balcony. 

Day 1:  Bangalore- Munnar ( 480 kms)

Planned Route: Bangalore-Salem-Avinashi-Udumalpet-Munnar. 

With all bookings in place, we started our trip from home in Bangalore at around 5:30 in the morning. Start this early would mean that we would reach the hotel around 2 in the afternoon, right in time for lunch. Little did we know, how wrong this assumption was. 

We generally stop at Shri Krishna Inn on the way to Salem, but on this morning the hotel was just so crowded that we had no place to sit, hence decided to go ahead and find a new place to eat. We finally found a newly opened Adyar Anand Bhavan and had our breakfast there. As the events of the day unfolded, this turned out to be a good choice since the food was good and we ended up having a heavy breakfast. 

We then continued our drive towards munnar and passed through two natinal parks and sanctuaries with zero sightings. At every border crossing and entry into these parks you need to enter your car number, drivers name and number of passengers into a register. The only problem with these national parks that I found was the the roads were narrow and wore an extremely deserted look. My earlier experience was driving through the Bandipur national park which is comparatively busy and had regular vehicular movement.

As we crossed into the Chinnar wildlife sanctuary at one turn you see the Athirapally water falls at a distance. This sight was a treat to our eyes but also the fact that we were completely alone in the forest was a little unnerving. 

Athirapally Water falls

Road through the Chinnar wildlife Sanctuary

We crossed the national parks and were about an hour away from Munnar and everything was as per schedule. We would reach the hotel around 2:30, in time for lunch. Alas, the delays started from here. Apparently the roads were being laid and so the traffic was stopped for close to 45-60 mins for the road relay work to be done. Although there was a delay what was amazing to see is the work that used to take days years ago now is done in an hour. I remember the time when relaying of the roads was a tedious process, which used to take close to 3-4 days.

After about a 45-60 min wait here, we continued on our journey, to be stopped again for about 20 mins. As we reached Munnar though, the beautiful tea gardens and the scenery enroute were mesmerizing.

We finally reached the hotel at 4 and realized lunch timings were over. We checked in to the hotel and were finally taken to our room. The "Ananta" room that we had booked was beautiful. The rooms at the hotel are maintained amazingly well.

Room view -1

Room view 2

View from the Balcony

After lunch we just relaxed in the room and try to figure out the plan for tomorrow. The hotel turned out to be one of the most beautiful hotels we have stayed in and had extremely friendly staff. We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel and called it a day.

Day 2: Munnar.

We woke up in the morning to a beautiful sunrise. The hotel actually has a balcony where complimentary tea is served if you are watching the sunrise from there. We however decided to watch it from our own balcony.

Breakfast was complimentary and after it I just checked with the hotel travel desk to get information on the best tourist places. They gave us a map and also options to take the hotel taxi to go to these places at an additional cost. Since we had driven a long way the day before we decided to take the taxi for a day tour. There are 4 directions with different tourist places to see. We decided to do the Mattupetty direction. The other 3 are Coimbatore, Kochi and Thekkady.

We started around 10 in the morning towards the Mattupetty direction. Our driver was a local guy but spoke really good english. Our first stop was a point called the "Shooting Point". The is just a view point where you see acres and acres of beautiful tea gardens.

Shooting Point

Second stop was just on the way to the elephant safari. The point was called Jungle Honey bee tree. Truth be told, i was little skeptical about this since i thought they would show us some bees, it just ended up being one tree on the road which has a lot of bee hives. We moved on to the Elephant Safari. We were already told that the Safari was closed, which we were fine with. We just wanted to go see the Elephants up close. For Rs 100, they allowed us to feed a pineapple to the elephant. Feeding the elephant was one of the most amazing experiences i had in my life. It was just amazing to see the creature up close. It was also heartening to see that they were fed well and being taken care of very well.

Fourth stop was to go to a flower garden. The garden was small but beautiful. If you have seen "Sims park" in Coonoor or "Botanical Gardens" in Ooty you can just ignore this. The only advantage was that there were hardly any people here and hence the crowd was minimal.

We then went to the Kundala Dam and Lake. This lake was just filled with people boating and walking around. The best part of taking the taxi instead of our own car was that we could relax and take in the scenery and also that the driver was such an intelligent guy. He kept telling us interesting things like where "Chennai Express" was shot and a few other movies.

Kundala lake

Kundala dam

We skipped the Echo point since it was super crowded and went on to go to Top station. On our way the driver told us that he spotted an elephant in the tea estate some time ago and hoped that it would still be there. We are fortunate enough to spot not just one but three elephants in two different locations.

The sight of the elephants within the tea estate was an surprising and amazing sight. We continued on our way at to go to Top station. The road to Top station is filled with beautiful tea estates and every corner we turned was picturesque. We kept clicking pictures all the way to the Top station.

On our way to Top station.

View from below top station

Top station.

Top station was super crowded and unfortunately completely engulfed in fog. We had a quick lunch here of Maggi and Mirchi bhajji. We left for our hotel right after lunch. On the way back we went to Mattupetty dam and as we had on Kundala dam we drove over the dam and reached the hotel around 5 in the evening. Diner was at the hotel again.

Sunset from the Balcony

 Day 3: Munnar

We woke up to a beautiful sunrise and decided to go to nearby places today. We decided to see only two places today, Attukad water falls and Pothamedu view point. The places were about 5-6 kms from the hotel and so we decided to take our own car.

Sunrise from the Balcony

Panorama view from the balcony

After the complimentary breakfast, we left to see the Attukad waterfalls. The waterfalls were in full force and it was a beautiful sight to see.

Attukad waterfalls in full flow from the road

After spending some time on the bridge overlooking the falls, we decided to go to the Pothamedu view point. Google maps showed us a short cut to get to the view point from the water falls, but we decided to go back to the main road from where we had taken a diversion for the falls and continued on the main road to the view point

Pothamedu View point

Our hotel as seen from the view point. 

 We reached the hotel in a few hours and as usual had our lunch at the hotel restaurant. We decided to relax that afternoon and catch up on some lost sleep. In the evenings, the hotel arranged to have a cooking class with one of their chefs and it was great experience to learn some local cuisine from him. We ended the day with dinner at the restaurant. The food at the restaurant was quite good and hence on the first day we had decided we would eat at the restaurant whenever possible.

Day 4: Munnar

Today was our last day in Munnar and we tried to get tickets to Eravikulam National park to see the Nilgiri Thars but there were no tickets available. We did however get tickets to go see a traditional Kalaripayattu show in the evening. Since the show would only finish by 8:30 we decided to take a taxi from the hotel again. The show was supposed to start in the evening so we decided to go to the Tea museum in the morning. We thought we might not enjoy it so much but on the contrary this place was very fun and informative. They had a small documentary running which gives a brief history on how tea plantations started in India and specifically in Kerala. After the documentary, we toured the museum and learnt how tea is made in the factory. Also, there is a place where we can do some tea tasting.

We came back to the hotel for lunch and relaxed for a while before the show in the evening. before leaving for the show, the hotel informed us that the dinner in the night was complimentary and will be ready by the time we get back from the show. We took the taxi to the show venue and collected our tickets. The show was amazing. We could definitely see how martial arts evolved from our own age old Kalaripayattu.

The complimentary dinner that night was their dinner buffet and the food was very tasty. We decided to leave early next morning and asked them to pack some breakfast for us for the trip back home.

Day 5: Munnar-Bangalore

We started around 6:30 in the morning and reached bangalore around 3-3:30 in the afternoon. The journey back home was uneventful and went off smoothly. Munnar that was almost always on my travel list can now be checked off.

Sun rise from the balcony on the last day

Foggy munnar while we were leaving

Tea gardens on the way back to Bangalore

Foggy roads

Welcome Back to Karnataka.

This trip was all that i had imagined it to be, only difference being i never knew the roads were so bad. Road quality once you go off the national highway near coimbatore just deteriorates. Hopefully the roads get better soon. I would love to go back to Munnar anytime of the year but I am sure there are many many more places in India for us to see. So long, until we meet again for another travelogue.

Trip to Singapore - June 2015

From a long time ,we kept planning to go for a trip somewhere out of India. We kept postponing the plan year after year , since going abroad meant spending a lot of money.  Finally in June this year we decided it was now or never and that's how this entire trip was planned

Planning the trip:

I started reading a lot of travelogues from various websites, looking at air tickets , hotels, travel options in Singapore etc. The amount of information available online these days is tremendous, so its important to filter out whats needed and what isn't.

The first step though, was to get a Singapore Visa. We decided to get it from Thomas Cook. They take about 7-10 days to get the tourist visa done. It costs about  1900 rupees per person (1500 of which is Visa fees).

To get the Visa, we need to book the tickets and the stay in Singapore in advance. Though, Tiger Airways was way cheaper, husband decided that we would fly Singapore Airlines ( turned out to be the better decision). For the stay, we selected Holiday Inn Atrium after reading a lot of good reviews about it.. We booked the hotel using Cleartrip, and the air tickets were booked from GoIbibo.
With the hotel and tickets booked , getting the visa was easy.

You can book all the Singapore attraction tickets online. Initially, we were advised against this online booking ,since it kind of fixes that plan as to what to do on which day. After we decided to go for it anyway, we realized that these tickets actually are not for one day. They actually are valid for one entry in a weeks time frame. So for example we booked the Universal Studios ticket for 22nd June but the tickets were valid for one entry up to 31st Jun. This means the flexibility was back. Plus you get some discounts if you buy tickets online.

After booking tickets to Universal Studios and 3 bird park/zoo (combo) online,we decided to take about 1000 Singapore Dollars ( 1 SGD = 47 Rs).

We were now all set to leave on 18th night. I was too excited to sleep in the flight and the turbulence made sure, any sleep coming my way would rather go to someone else.

Day 1 , Singapore:

We landed in Singapore early morning at around 6:30, we were out of the airport in about 10-15 mins. I was too tired to look around the airport and so we decided to do that on our way back to Bangalore.We reached the hotel around 7:15 in the morning. The taxi costed around 20-22 SGD.
The hotel staff agreed to give us a early check in around 9. We decided to have breakfast at the hotel for today, while waiting for the room. After asking at least for like 8-10 times we were given a room finally at around 9:15. The room though, was extremely spacious and clean.

After a short nap, we decided to check out a local market for lunch called "Lao pa sat". The lunch was strictly OK, considering both of us prefer vegetarian food. From here, we went to "Gardens by the Bay". We had already taken our EZ pay flash cards (loaded with about 10$ each) which allowed us to ride buses/metros without bothering about paying the exact far. You have to just flash the card while getting in and out of the bus/metro station. The problem how ever was that we didn't know which bus to take to reach Gardens by the bay from our lunch point. We tried asking a few people around, but that didn't help. Finally we found someone who told us how to reach Marina Bay Sands and from there to the Gardens. After all the trouble we went through though, one step into the cloud forest dome and it felt as if it was all worth it.

Gardens by the bay:
It mainly consists of two domes, the Flower dome and the Cloud Forest dome. The variety of plants and flowers you see here are absolutely amazing. The best part is that the domes are constructed in the way the water just slides off the domes and is collected as part of Rain harvesting. The same water is then used to water the plants. These two domes are supposed to be self sufficient in themselves.  These gardens are constructed on the land reclaimed from Sea.

We came back to the hotel after having dinner in Little India and dozed off for the night.

Day 2: Jurong Bird Park , Night Safari
In the morning we landed up at Ananda Bhavan for a nice south Indian breakfast and decided to do the Bird Park and Night safari today. In hindsight, i think we should have done the Zoo and Night Safari together on one day. Anyway, we were a little late in reaching the Bird park and could get there by about 11:30. I had already looked up all the show timings online and so we accordingly walked around the park. We were there till about 5:00-5:30 after which we decided to leave for the night safari. We had a quick supper at a Thai restaurant in the mall and reached Night Safari by about 8 PM.

Since it was already dark, we decided to just to the shows and the tram ride in the Night Safari, The line to get into the Tram was so long that we decided to do the one show first. Unfortunately, the line was even longer when we came back after the show. After waiting for about 45-50 mins, we got into one of the trams. The ride was super fun as you get to see the animals in there natural habitat. We finished the tram ride and while leaving caught glimpses of the "Thumbukar show" which was a surprise since I though we missed the show which is generally at  7PM.  All the shows are an absolute must watch in the Bird Park and the Night Safari. We reached the hotel around 12PM midnight.The best part about Singapore is that the public transport system, which we are now used to, is so safe and well maintained that you can safely travel at any time in the night.

Day 3: Singapore Zoo
We planned to do only the Singapore Zoo today, since tomorrow we wanted to go to Universal Studios, the main reason to come to Singapore. Since we had already gone to Night safari yesterday, we knew the route to get Singapore Zoo and reached there around 10 AM. Again almost all the shows in the Zoo are totally worth the time. ( We missed the feeding and some pet dog show). We left the zoo around 6 and went to have dinner with some friends at Clarke Quay.

Day 4: Universal Studios
When i was studying in the US, i never got a chance to visit Universal Studios. My husband though has been to the one in Florida. We were both excited to go to Universal. We decided to reach Universal by 9-9:30 AM and hence had our breakfast in the hotel itself. The buffet breakfast in the hotel wasn't complimentary in our package and costs about 26 SGD per person. This was very expensive for us since the vegetarian fare was only a range of breads and waffles.

We reached Universal at around 9:30 and did almost all the rides. We missed only the Dino Flyer but that was same as the Puss in the boots ride.  We caught glimpses of all the street shows but most of the time spent in Universal was in the line waiting to get on the rides. Since we had not taken the express pass, it took anywhere from 45-60 mins of wait time every ride.

Although all the rides in Universal are really good, the best was the Battlestar Galactica roller coaster. It the worlds tallest dueling roller coaster. It has two cars, called the Human and Cylon, which are both running at the same time. We got it sit in the first row of the Human roller coaster and the drop, which is apparently like falling 14 floors, was extremely scary. My husband did the Cylon coaster too which has about six 360 degree turns....

For the Transformers ride, we waited for about 30 mins, but it was totally worth it, The virtual reality effects were really fun.

The only ride we didn't have to wait for was the Mummy Returns ride. We just walked in and sat in the roller coaster car. This ride for me was more scary as it the flips and turns of the coaster are in complete darkness. 

For both the Mummy returns and the Battle star galactica rides you have to keep all your belongings in a locker, which is free for the first 90 mins. 

After an adventurous day at Universal , we decided to see the Songs of the Sea show in the night. This show is a must must must watch and was the highlight of the entire trip for me. 

We reached the hotel back around 10:30 PM and dozed off with a feeling that the trip was almost coming to an end. 

Day 5: SEA Aquarium

All the days in Singapore have been hectic and it didn't really feel like a vacation. So we decided to take it a little easy today. The plan was to just go to the aquarium and possibly try to do some shopping since tomorrow was going to be our last day in Singapore.

The SEA aquarium is beautiful and is home to thousands of fishes and some incredible sea creatures.

Once back from the SEA, we went to Bugis street, which is popular for its street shops. We bought some souvenirs and went back to Little India for dinner. 

Day 6: Back to Bangalore. 

Today was our flight back to Bangalore. We checked out of the hotel at 12, and left our bags at the hotels store room. Our flight back was at 8 in the night and so we decided to go back to Bugis to do some more shopping . We came back to the hotel by about 3 and left for the airport. We reached the Changi airport in about half hour and after checking in the luggage just relaxed in the airport. Changi airport is huge and one can easily spend about 4-5 hours just in the airport. 

The flight was on time and we reached Bangalore at around 10:30 in the night. This marked the end of our vacation. The trip though a little hectic gave us a life time full of memories. 

Some important points to note if you are planning a trip:

1. Public transport system is one of the best ever in Singapore. You can buy a EZ-link card at any metro and just keep adding money to it . This card can be used in all the buses and trains so that you don't have to worry about giving exact change. If you have any money leftover you can always take the card back to the metro strain get it cancelled and get the remaining money back. 

2. Book tickets to Universal and all the zoo/bird parks online from India. Doing this will help in carrying less cash to Singapore. Plus you get some discounts for booking online. 

Overall this trip was one of my most memorable trips and I hope this write up justifies the amount of fun this trip was. 

Until next time...........