It had been sometime since I had used my Club Mahindra membership and so decided to visit one of the popular South India destination, the good old Kodai(2133 m /7000 ft above sea level). Our plan was to take a trian from Bangalore to Madurai, take a taxi from Madurai to go see Rameswaram, come back to Madurai and then head to Kodai. We had our train reservations done (but were waitlisted) and our taxi reserved in Madurai. To our luck, our waitlist never got cleared and at 4 pm, I came to know that we did not secure ourselves seats on the train. It was a scramble time. I asked our driver Prashant if he can drive our Scorpio to all the way to Madurai and Kodai and he readily agreed. So, with all the bags packed and now with the extra drivers kit, we left Bangalore shortly after dinner on a roughly 450 km journey to Madurai at around 9 pm.
The roads till Salem was very nice and we reached Salem in just about 3 hrs. At Salem, we took a wrong turn and ended up wasting almost 30 min driving on a wrong road until we realized the mistake and did the course correction which essentially took away almost 45 min. The problem with Tamil Nadu is most of the road signs are in Tamil including the mile markers which is a real problem for anyone other than Tamilians. The road from Salem to Madurai is under construction (part of golden quadritalateral) and so every now and then you have traffic in both directions on the same road which can be really painful if you are driving during nighttime. I took the wheel for couple of hours to relieve my driver Prashant and then he got back on the wheel again as we were approaching Madurai. We reached Madurai around 5:00 am (8 hrs which was a decent time considering the road condition). We rented a lodge and crashed for 3-4 hrs. We woke up, had breakfast and went to see Madurai Meenakshi temple. Unfortunately the temple was closed that day (a bummer) and so we decided to head straight to Kodai.
From Madurai to Kodai again because of non-english road signs we got misled sometimes by ourselves and sometimes by people with whom we managed to have a conversation and finally got on to the right road where they did have signs in English. We reached Kodai around 1 pm and decided to have lunch by a lakeside restaurent which turned out to be so so. Club Mahindra has an associate resort in Kodai called Hill country resort and that turned out to be a very nice place. It is not upto the standards of Club Mahindra especially when it came to room amenities or cafeteria but still was a good one. To our surprise our neighbor turned out to be also from Bangalore with two of thier kids who happened to be class mates of our two kids. We rested for the day.
During the next 5 days we had lot of fun doing the usual stuff like boating, horse riding, bicycling around the lake etc. However, I had more fun with our neighbor Sunil who turned out to be a very active and jolly personality. He taught me Snooker, billiards and gave company for drinks. It also turned out that he is a very good hiker and we hiked on 2 different mornings climbing some pretty steep hills. I was amazed as to how the kids handled the hike compared to me who nearly gave up. Having our vehicle turned out to be very handy as we could go anytime anywhere and eat whereever instead of at the resort. I have to say that Kodai has much better eating places compared to Ooty. At the seven hills junction there is pastry/pizza shop that turned out to be very good. Another place that I liked was "Dal Tadka" where they serve hot phulkas with north indian curries. Has a definite home cooked feel to it. Woody's was one of the worst eating experiences in Kodai with below average food and pathetic service. Our favorite place turned out to be pure veg restaurent near bus station called "Astoria Veg restaurant". This is a very clean place and wholesome food that is reasonably priced. The service was very good.Sivaruchi is another good place.
We did the ususal sightseeing like coaker's walk, suicide point, pillar rocks, Green valley view, Silver cascade etc. Silver cascade was very disappointing as there was hardly any water coming down and the access to it is now disallowed. I remember when during our college days, we went to kodai, it was so much fun to bathe under Silver cascade.
We did the usual purchases at Kodai like chocolates, spices, medicinal oils etc. I am particularly pleased with the Aloe vera gel that we got.
