At a height of 2240m, Ooty and the surrounding peaks definitely qualify as proper mountains. As well as being a hive of human activity these mountains are absolutely full of wildlife – check out David Attenborough’s “Asia” series on to find out just how full!

We had hoped to employ the Ooty “toy train” to climb the hill – the 5-hour funicular that climbs 2000m from Mettupalayam to Ooty would be much easier than cycling.  Sadly, there’s no cargo carriage so we couldn’t take bikes on the train.

Our New Year’s plan was to base ourselves in a budget hotel in Ooty and bounce around the local green pointy bits until festive accommodation price hikes had passed and the head-height fireworks had all been set off.

A number of planned routes have turned out to be service roads for civil engineering projects (dams, power-plants, etc) – quiet, unpopulated in the middle of the jungle, off-limits to the public – not the best place for two exposed and speed-limited cyclists.

Since (mostly unintentionally) (gez: not really) cycling through an actual tiger reserve (no tigers were present) (gez: or were they?) we have been sanity checking our route planning with local people at every opportunity and cross-referencing various maps.

Through doing this we have learned a few things to look out for up the big hills…

India is a highly populated country, so if you can’t see any buildings or houses lining a road on google there is probably a very good reason why.

The most likely being elephants. They are creatures of habit and tend to avoid the roads during the day in India, do not trust this truth in Sri Lanka (see previous blogs).. they also let you know they are coming and mostly continue about their business if you’re sensible enough to stand well back (definitely true everywhere unless said elephant is an angry male and/or he’s in musth).

The next most likely reason is landslide or road damage following monsoon season, while we can always turn around it’s nice not to have to.

After that come tigers, bears, panthers, leopards and dynamite, all equally dangerous in my opinion and you’ll be pleased to hear that our routes have undergone significant revision at the slightest mention of the aforementioned reasons.

Sitting on a scorpion isn’t recommended. This little one isn’t too much to worry about, a bit like a wasp sting. Thankfully we’ve not come across any Indian Black Red scorpions, yet.

Our most significant revision to date being the route from Ooty to this lovely spot where tigers are frequently seen strolling about in the road (but we’ve not found one yet).