What to expect
Highlights
- Needle Rock View Point — Oosi Malai — needle mountain — the conical rock 9.1 km east of Gudalur by routed road, on NH-181 towards Ooty; Wikipedia and Tamil Nadu Tourism both publish it as about 8 km. A walk of roughly a kilometre from the road brings you out on a near 360-degree panorama that takes in Wilson pine plantations, Frog Hill, Kokkal Hill, the Rockwood hills, the Silver Cloud tea estates, Gudalur town below and the Mudumalai forest running north; the official description adds Bandipur on a clear day, and names sunrise and sunset as the hours to be there. No entry charge or opening time is published by the Forest Department, whose Nilgiris ecotourism list does not include this viewpoint at all, so ask at the gate rather than trusting a figure off a booking site.
- Frog Hill View Point — A lay-by on NH-181 at the first hairpin bend below Naduvattam, 12.2 km from Gudalur by routed road, looking across at the ridge that gives the place its name: seen from here the hills fold into the shape of a crouching frog. It is also signed as Valley View Point, and it is the spot to stand in if you want to see Needle Rock itself — the actual 1,440-metre rock, as opposed to the viewpoint named after it, rises about ten kilometres west across the valley alongside Morapu Malai. Tea estates, forested slopes and scattered hamlets fill the ground in between.
- Nadugani Ghat — The pass that carries NH-181 off the Nilgiris and down into Kerala, 12.1 km south-west of Gudalur — the road to Nilambur, 49.5 km on, and to Kozhikode at 109.5 km. It is the western door of the district, and the reason a Tamil Nadu town at the top of it does most of its trade in Malayalam. The descent runs through the reserved forest of the Nilambur slope, elephants cross it, and the two routing engines we check agree on its length to within 200 metres, which is not true of any road out of here heading north. The marker sits on Nadugani village itself, on the map as node/402240869; the ghat is the road below it, not a point.
- Devala — A village 16.6 km west of Gudalur that was, for about a decade, the centre of a gold rush. Mining in this country is documented from the 1830s, but it was an Australian named Withers who founded the Alfa Gold Mine in 1874 — the first company to mine gold in the Wynaad — and bought close to a thousand acres near Devala. When an Australian expert's report was published in 1879 at least fifty British and Indian companies poured into the Pandalur–Devala hills, and the rush that followed ruined the district's coffee industry without ever paying for itself. What is left is tunnelling: adits through these hills run anywhere from 500 to 3,000 metres. They are unlit, unmaintained and on private estate land, so this is a place to read about on the way through rather than to go looking for a way into.
- Naduvattam — The village 15.9 km up the Ooty road from Gudalur where quinine came from. On 30 August 1862 the Governor of Madras, Sir William Denison, planted out the first cinchona permanently established in the Nilgiris here, and the government factory that grew up around it was run by W. G. McIvor, the gardener who had brought the seedlings on. The plantations were worked by convicts, and at McIvor's own request five hundred Chinese prisoners were sent up to Naduvattam to do it — a piece of the hills' history that gets far less telling than the tea does. The cinchona estates are still there on the slopes above the highway, and the first hairpin below the village is the Frog Hill lay-by.
