Coorg - Honey Valley

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After a brief lunch in Virajpet, and eating at a very local place for pittance, Ronny tried to bargain for a cab to the next junction as the next bus was a 3 hour wait, the problem was there was only 1 cabbie and he was not moving from his spot, unless he got the price he wanted. 5 mins later we were all in his cab!

Reached our destination at a little junction which had 3 shops/ houses, called up the homestay(Honey Valley) and he came to collect us, for the 20min (3km) uphill ride on some very rocky road(if you can call it that).

Reached our destination which was this homestay which contained no more than 20 rooms spread over 3 buildings, and then we were surrounded by hills, mountains, trees, and clean smelling cool air. The wildlife here is immense, i saw a woodpecker for the first time ever, with a bright red crest of hair, and Ronny had a eagle fly 10 metres past him on one of our walks.

The following morning we started out on our first walk, with a booklet which contained all the walks in the area(16 in all). This book however was not like an OS Map back home. The main picture looked like Tolkien had drawn it for Lord of the Rings, and I expected an Orc to jump out at me at any time, and the explanations were not good on how to reach the various points. Those of you that know me, will know by now, that I was not chuffed about going on this walk, and I was given the name using my intials( DSO) Stressed Out Dan(SOD)!!!!

We reach the top of one of the mountains and my god the views were tremendous, green hills, and big mountain in the distance, no - one near us for miles and NO LITTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We return for lunch, and by 3 o clock the heavens opened and a storm developed and erupted above us. Wow! It pissed it down, thank god we were back.

That evening we started chatting to some of the other guests, Bart a Belgian man who was travelling around on a Triumph motor bike, who was really chilled out and reminded me of Reggie, it was uncanny and Becks and I made the comparison straight away. Lucky for us there was a Chinese lady (Linda) and her English husband (Chris) there as well, and they gave us loads of tips for China.

Next day was walk no 2. 2 of the family dogs walked with us that day, and we decided to take a flatter walk!!!!! Started out flat and then after going downhill, past several new building sites( getting slightly lost a few times and me getting very worried) we saw the clouds coming in again!!! We all sped up with Becks leading the way, and then we hit the sign were the jeep picked us up to take us to Honey Valley!!!!!!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

We all reached the top in 25 mins, sweating and thirsty but dry, as the rain stayed off for a few hours but the thunder kept singing!!!!!

We all ate well that lunch and dinner, and we had a good chat that night with everyone.

I can't describe to you how unlike anywhere else in India this place is!!!
Quiet, clean, beautiful surroundings and just a chill out, but away from a beach!

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Comments

[Stuart]

Sports and email
Hi Dan and Becks My email won't send from home at the moment, but I hope this gets through. I liked Hong Kong when I was there as well, very exciting place. I don't know much about F1 but, apparently, Ross Brawn had become Honda's F1 technical director in 2008 and bought the team from Honda - turns out that much of the money came from Virgin as Branson is keen to get into GP and is bank-rolling the team, I think. Brawn thought that the car Honda was developing was potentially the best in GP and it turned out to be true. Button and Barrichello got 1st and 2nd in Oz and Button won in Malaysia. Lewis Hamilton was initially promoted to 3rd and then got disqualified for telling lies about the circumstances. Sorry, I don't know all the ins and outs except that Hamilton is making himself less popular and Jensen Button's star is in the ascendant. World Snooker Championship. The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield 18th Apr-4th May 2009. I thought I sent you a final report on the cricket (sorry). England had two jammy wins but deserved to win the decider thanks to Andrew Flintoff, who took 5-19 including a hat-trick. He is still unfit, but was brilliant on that day. Soccer: ManU have had some inconsistent results, but scraped home 2-1 at Sunderland, after a late show 2-1 against Villa. The winners in both games were scored by Federico Macheda, a 17yr old Italian striker. All the other big 4 teams scored 4 on saturday, but Chelsea were 4-0 up against Bolton and ended up scraping home 4-3. Bizarre! 1 Manchester United 31 13 1 1 9 4 3 33 71 2 Liverpool 32 10 6 0 10 4 2 38 70 3 Chelsea 32 9 5 2 11 2 3 35 67 4 Arsenal 32 9 5 2 8 5 3 26 61 5 Aston Villa 31 5 7 3 10 0 6 6 52 6 Everton 31 7 5 4 7 4 4 13 51 West Ham 7th on 44 pts, so the top 4 look settled, as do 5th and 6th In the Champions League, Chelsea won their ¼ final first leg 3-1 at Liverpool, Arsenal drew 1-1 at Villareal and ManUtd drew 2-2 at home to Porto (who looked really good, so it could be tough for them next week. Barcelona won the other ¼ final 4-0 against Bayern Munich.