The miniature train as it is known, is one of the Indian mountain railways given world heritage status by Unesco in 2005. I was well excited by the prospect of heading down the mountains behind a steam locomotive, but it turned out that these days the first hour is done via a diesel train, before the engine is switched for a steam one. This would have had me a bit worried if we hadn't read about it in the local paper whilst we were staying in Ooty. The article described how a group of trainspotters from Britain had been brought over to offer suggestions for improvements to the service. Accompanying the article was a photo positively stuffed with odd looking blokes with big white beards. I wondered if that could possibly be me in later life?
The miniature train turned out to be quite an accurate description as the carriages were indeed tiny. We had only been able to reserve ourselves a seat in the second class carriage, but I wasn't too worried about this as long as we could actually get into our seats. As usual it was complete mayhem trying to get inside the carriage as soon as it arrived, with young men elbowing old women and children out the way despite everyone having a reserved seat. Once inside with our massive bags we realised one of the problems with it being quite such a tiny train. There was no space for baggage at all, and most of the Indian families accompanying us seemed to have brought at least two king size suitcases each.
While Clairy was being pushed around by elderly women I endeavoured to get my rucksack under our seat, and hers under the one behind us. With some dangerously forceful squeezing I did eventually achieve this, and we finally sat down to watch the chaos around us as various large bags were rammed through the open windows and into people's faces.
Even as the train finally got going, it seemed there was still a game of musical chairs in progress. The chap on the right with the woolly hat on had managed to fill his two whole reserved seats with his family's baggage, resulting in them having to move seats each time someone got on the train to claim their own seat. This circus very much reminded us of the Friday bank holiday train from London to Devon, although it possibly lacked some of the miserable yet cut-throat selfishness of good old England.
The views were great as we rumbled out of Ooty. The visibility was also pretty good at this altitude.
Gorgeous blue sky looking towards the front of the train.
The landscape was quite sparse at the initial higher altitudes.
Then we snaked our way through some shady forests.
The diesel engine out front.
A regular sight no matter how exciting the mode of transport. A sleeping beardo.
We stopped to swap to the steam engine, and Clairy spotted this optimistic notice. 'Clean habits are noticed by others and copied too' (Honest!).
The steam engine regularly filled the open carriage with smoke and ash, but that just added to the experience.
Choo-chooooo!
The descent rapidly became steeper. I kept trying to photograph the regular signposts advertising the gradients of the next and previous sections of track for the drivers, but I was a bit too slow. The steepest I saw was 1 in 9.6!
Heading down we travelled through some really pretty tea plantations.
We loved the dense bushes with tiny picker's paths in between.
We weren't sure exactly what the purpose of the tall trees between the bushes were. Possibly just to hold the soil together better on the steep slopes.
The train filled right up as we stopped at the small stations on the line. Each carriage had a few people riding on the open balcony at the back. I thought this would have been a good spot for the views, if possibly slightly treacherous.
As we reached the main valley through which we would descend on to the plain below, it became apparent we were definitely on the best side for views, despite my asking for the wrong side when we booked the seats. As the valley sides dropped away to some colossal vertical drops below, Clairy was happy for me to be have the window seat and take the photies.
Looking down the steep-sided valley.
A road of lethal bends followed the track down below, and we were again thankful that we were on the train and not in a minibus driven by a crazy man convinced that every item of traffic in front of him was an insult to his masculinity and therefore had to be overtaken immediately.
You can just about make out the plains down below through the haze.
There were a lot of narrow bridges with huge boulder strewn ravines underneath...
...and also a lot of tunnels. There is an obvious problem with steam trains and tunnels, that I hadn't really encountered before. The long ones resulted in the carriage being absolutely thick with choking black smoke. I was sure we would arrive all looking like Victorian chimney-sweeps.
After an hour and a half of steep descent, we stopped at a station so the engine could refill it's water tanks. There was also a little shop selling bags of samosas and various other hygienically questionable but nonetheless tasty looking snacks. A huge group of macaques appeared and ruthlessly stalked the passengers. I watched a chap of some religious order feed a samosa to a macaque with one hand and then have his entire bag of food ripped from his other hand by another who felt the need for a rather more direct type of generosity.
Clairy squeezed off the carriage and got some nice pics.
What a lovely old beast. The engineer was re-greasing some important part.
'Fill it up'.
The macaque that was to be in this shot did a runner, but we still liked the end result.
Oh hi!
As we reached the plains the sun was setting resulting in a beautiful peachy sky.
And finally we headed into the town of Mettupalayam where we would leave the miniature train and switch to a normal one for the last hour to our destination of Coimbatore. The track passed some pretty basic housing and cheerful waving kids...
...some of whom were picking around in the rubbish dump alongside.
I like the smoke from the train and the evening light in this one of the houses of Mettupalayam.
After waving a teary goodbye to the miniature train, we had an hour to wait until the express would take us to Coimbatore. The platform was full of strange characters, one of whom was a coffee-waller who had the most insane frog-like delivery, which involved him standing right in front of pretty much anyone, and repeating the neverending two-tone refrain 'COPPEE..coppee..COPPEE..coppee'. In the end it was too much for us and we both agreed to have one.
The train soon turned up and a cheerful train officer opened up a reserved sleeper carriage for all the foreign tourists, despite the fact that none of us had a reserved ticket. Who were we to argue.
Here we are enjoying our coppee...COPPEEE...ccoppppeeeeeeee.....aahhhhhh make it stop.
What a beautiful lady.
After arriving in Coimbatore we located a hotel that would just about suffice for the one night we aimed to stay there before getting our train the next day onto Fort Kochi in Kerala. We headed out to find somewhere to eat, starving as we were from our day of sitting on trains. We eventually found the RHR hotel restaurant that did us a decent curry and Clair's favourite peas pulau rice.
Confident of their standards we returned the next morning for breakfast much to the joy of our waiter from the previous night. I asked what some of the Dosa's were that we didn't recognise on the menu, and said that I wanted a large one, like the big fellas we had seen going to tables around us. He confirmed that we wanted a large dosa, and I asked for the same for Clairy, but he replied that we could only have one and headed off to the kitchen. I was a bit miffed by this and was silently cursing him for not getting us two like we had asked when it suddenly all became clear.
He had ordered us the biggest dosa in the world! Look at the freakin' size of that thing...even I had to agree that maybe two would have been too much.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day you know.
MMmmm...Just thinking of it now makes me hungry. Clairy did help eat some of it, honest.
Clairy also got this nice pic of the swastik flower display.
And this fab shot of the restaurant through the bizarre ugly-fish's tank. Nice.
And that was it for our brief sojourn in Coimbatore. We picked up our bags from the hotel and walked back to the train station to catch the train on to Kerala.
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