Hi iam just back from my trip to coorg with seven of my other friends. Well i am in the middle of my last break in MBA. Well nice way to round off the MBA stint.
We started from our hostel this monday the 21st of March 2005 at about 8am. Well the ride was really bumpy and half way to Coorg i started throwing up courtesy Kesari Baath at Apoorva Mess... Then we stopped for a while at the nearby stream to freshen ourselves. It was a lovely sight and we had our feet in the running water and it was so refreshing that had we enough time, we would have stayed there a little longer...
Then we started on our trip again and then visited the Triveni Sangamam where Cauvery, The mystic Sujyogi and an another river meet. i tasted the water, though it was not clean,just to see how different it was from the same water that i get at my hometown Salem. Boy oh boy it was really tasteless, while at my place it used to be so salty...well atleast i get it at my place,as it is near mettur...the poor farmers in Tanjore do not even get that, thanks to the Spat between the two neighbouring states (well the neighbouring state has its own reasons,there are farmers here too...)
Than we moved on to the place where River Cauvery has its origin. This place called Talacauvery is a very religious one for very obvious reasons. The place has a very small well (or kinda) and the river's birthplace is this. I wonder how that very small spring provides the most important resource - drinking water for people living in both the states...Well thats the beauty of nature i guess...
Then the most important thing for that day...yeah i am talking about food. I was the only teetotaller in my group and everyone else was just waiting to lay their hands on a bottle of chilled beer and some really hyped about Non veg food. Here again iam in the minority...yeah iam one of the two vegetarians or rather eggetarians in my group...The time was around 2.30pm and we were just looking for any place that would serve these two and of course some vegetarian food, which is taken for granted...
And we came across a mallu restaurant and boy the two mallus in our group became our interpreters at that place (until then Shetty the local boy from mangalore was the official interpreter)...well thinking we would get some good food, we ordered our dishes and we get Kerala rice and at that moment our Tairak De Rajasthan's face was worth seeing...his favourite dialogue on seeing south indian food (read anything other than roti and paneer) came out...kya sadaa hua kanaa yaar...But his stomach forced him to and he had it...Ankur a.k.a. Chacha, my fellow eggetarian took something that the restaurant fellow called omelette...Then we pushed out to have some cool drinks and we stopped at a nearby bakery...Six of us had normal pesticides (read soft drinks) while the other two - the kid with the tobu cycle, Karan and the mallu dolphin, Nair had something called Kokkum...Nair claimed it was a sexy drink and he had had it earlier in a place whose name starts with c (it was ratnagiri...)and karan too was adventurous and he replied "Kya Baat Kar Raha Hai...Main bhi piyuunga" and they had it. The very first sip and the reaction on Nairs face said it all and the rest six were offered this heavenly drink...After enjoying their heavenly drink the awesome twosome then wanted Dharbooz (well water melon in Hindi) and they had loads and loads of it...
Next we moved over to Madikeri, the biggest town in Coorg or Kodagu District. We moved to a place called King's Seat (Shetty referred it so) or raja's seat to see the sunset. well we reached there at about 4.30 pm. We bought some groundnuts and some bhor (resembled what we called elanthapalam in tamil, i do not know the english word for it). Then we waited and then clicked a few snaps near the place where the Raja's of Coorg used to sit. It is a place under the ASI now. Then we had the local specialty...yeah the coffee and it was really nice...then we moved to the omkareswara temple...prayed there and went around the places nearby...then we found a nice hotel...two rooms for eight of us... costing one grand... it had television, hot water, rug and all the basic amenities in a hillstation hotel...it was very clean... we rested for a while before our chance to search for a nice place to have our dinner...
Dinner or rather searching for dinner was awesome...first we came across a hotel called "Hotel West End" which a lot of ppl recommended and it was so smelly for the dude from rajasthan that he ran out...Then we moved to the town's main street and check out places like"castle rock", "choice","capitol", "Durbar" and finally we settled for "Capitol" as it had a nice ambience (on a relative scale. it was nothing compared to even the worst of hotels in our good old Manipal). Then we get the menu and all the piyakkads eyes light up on seeing that both Romanov and Smirnoff Vodka cost the same...They very obviously went for Smirnoff and also ordered for other drinks and tried Pork for the first time. The kid did not like it so much as it was very soft. However he was too eager on having a bottoms up and tried to get everyone in for this...this was all done to accomodate me as the restauranr hardly served any vegetarian food. Being good frenz they finished their drinls fast and in search of a good place to eat, we settled for Durbar...
Durbar was great!!!well that is an understatement i should say...everyone was amused by the first dish that came. yes chappathi and something the waiter called as Dal Fry...we, chacha an me looked at each other and laughed our heart out and thought about the dear junie Sudhir Kamath who rightly warned us before we started that we would not get anything to eat being vegetarians. It is a vegetarians nightmare...well the nightmare was comng true. However our other frenz food was also so great that they really loved it... Karan must have inhaled some laughing gas...he was laughing his heart out at the conversation he had with the waiter who would bring him everything other than the dish he ordered (paratta was what he got when he asked for fried rice)...Then we had some juice which was surprisingly nice and then moved to our room... the climate was really good (a saving grace for the day)...All in all everyone was thinking have we come to the wrong place...no food at all...we imagined so much but nothing at all...we planned our trip for the next day and went for sleep
