A town the British built at 2,200 metres to get out of the heat, on grassland the Toda had grazed buffalo across for centuries, around a lake that a Collector of Coimbatore had dug because the valley floor was a marsh.
Ooty announces itself by temperature, the same as every hill station, but it announces itself by traffic first. The road up from Mettupalayam climbs about 1,900 metres in forty kilometres of hairpins, and on a long weekend in May you will spend part of that climb stationary. Then the gradient eases, the eucalyptus starts, and the air changes. That is the whole reason the town exists: two hundred years ago a British administrator worked out that you could be cold in Tamil Nadu if you went high enough, and everything since has been built on that discovery.
The centre is not a monument, it is a junction. Charing Cross is a road meeting with a fountain in it; the bus stand and the railway station sit 219 metres apart at the bottom of the bazaar; and the town runs uphill from there in every direction, which is the thing photographs never convey. Nothing in Ooty is flat. The lake is 2.3 km from the bus stand and downhill, the Rose Garden is 2.3 km and up, and the Botanical Garden at 3.5 km looks like a walk on a map and is three quarters of an hour of climbing on a road with traffic and very little pavement.
What the town is actually built on is other people’s land. These downs were Toda country — buffalo pasture, hamlets of barrel-vaulted huts, a religion organised around the herd — and the first English house here stands on ground its builder bought from them. The Toda are still here, along with the Kota, the Kurumba, the Irula and the Paniya, and the one place in the district that treats them as living communities rather than as scenery is the Tribal Research Centre Museum, 8.2 km out on the Avalanchi road. It is the least visited thing on this page and the one most worth the drive.
Then there is the cloud, which is the weather rather than bad weather. Doddabetta clears and closes within minutes; a viewpoint that shows a white wall at ten o’clock is often showing three ranges by eleven. The right response is to go twice rather than to wait once, and to do the high things first thing in the morning — the peak is 9.8 km and about a quarter of an hour from the bus stand, and by mid-morning most days it has gone in.
And the town is inside a biosphere reserve, which is not a label but a set of rules you will meet. Nine check posts on the roads in inspect every vehicle for banned plastic, controlled access applies at Avalanche, and a night traffic ban holds on the Gudalur road where it runs through Mudumalai. Gaur come onto the golf course and the estate roads. None of this makes Ooty hard to visit; it makes it a place where the plan has to bend around the forest rather than the other way round.
Legend & myth
The name of the hills is the plain description and the oldest thing here. Neelam is blue and giri is hill, and the district administration takes the first mention of the Nilgiris back to the Silappadikaram. Its own preferred explanation for the colour is not haze but the kurinji, the shrub that flowers across whole slopes about once in twelve years and turns them violet — the plains people, on this reading, named the range for a flowering they saw perhaps twice in a lifetime.
The town’s own name is a different argument and a quieter one. Udhagamandalam is the official name and the one the railway station, the municipality and the taluk all use; Ooty is the contraction the British left behind, and it is what the road signs, the buses and the town itself say. Both are correct, and you will meet both on the same journey: a ticket printed Udhagamandalam, a bus with Ooty on the board.
More about Ooty
History
The British found the Nilgiris almost by accident and then would not leave. In 1818 Whish and Kindersley, assistants to the Collector of Coimbatore, came upon Kotagiri near the Rangaswamy peak; John Sullivan, the Collector himself, established a residence in the hills and reported what he had found to the Board of Revenue on 31 July 1819. In 1822 he built the first English house on these downs, Stone House — Kal Bangala to the Toda he bought the land from — and it still stands, now the residence of the principal of the Government Arts College. The lake followed in 1824, made by damming the marshy valley floor; the municipality puts it at 65 acres.
The administration caught up with the settlement slowly. The hills had been ceded to the British in 1789 and run from Coimbatore; the Nilgiris were separated from that district in August 1868 under Commissioner James Wilkinson Breeks, and made a district in their own right in February 1882, with Richard Wellesley Barlow as the first Collector. Raj Bhavan, on the western slopes of Doddabetta, was built in 1877 by the Duke of Buckingham. Today the district runs from 900 to 2,636 metres, covers 2,452.50 sq km, and held 7,35,394 people at the 2011 census.
The railway is the last piece and the one that made Ooty reachable rather than merely known. Southern Railway’s own figures: 45.88 km of metre gauge from Mettupalayam, opened as far as Coonoor on 15 June 1899 and through to Udhagamandalam on 15 October 1908, worked on the steep section with an Abt rack and limited to 13 km/h on it, with 16 tunnels between Kallar and Ooty and 250 bridges of which 32 are major. The line is often described as having a gradient of 1 in 12; the railway that runs it gives the average as about 1 in 24.5 and the steepest as 1 in 23. UNESCO added it to the Mountain Railways of India on 15 July 2005.
Why visit
For the temperature, which is still the honest answer after two hundred years. If you have come off the Tamil plain in April, the first evening in Ooty is worth the whole climb — and it is cold enough that a jacket is not optional in any month.
For two gardens the state has been keeping for a very long time. The Botanical Garden is 55 acres in terraces below Doddabetta with a fossilised tree trunk reckoned at 20 million years old and the flower show every May; the Rose Garden is four hectares in five terraces on Elk Hill, with more than 3,000 varieties on the district’s own count and an International Rose Society award in 2006 for the best rose garden in South Asia.
For the railway, if you book far enough ahead. It is one train a day each way and reservations open ninety days before; between April and June it is gone weeks in advance. Even half of it — the Coonoor section — is the best hour anyone spends in the Nilgiris.
For the far side of the hills. Avalanche at 22.5 km, Pykara at 22.5 and Glenmorgan at 28.0 are forest, grassland and reservoir country with a fraction of the traffic of the lake road, and the drive out to any of them is the point rather than the getting there.
And for the Toda downs themselves, which are the landscape everything else was put on top of. Rolling grassland with shola forest packed into the folds where the water runs is what these hills looked like before the eucalyptus and the tea, and there are still long stretches of it west of the town.
