Day 7:
We woke up early. KBee and GBee looked active and happy. One night of peace can do that to anyone. Both had fun playing in and around the cottage, while Mr.Bee began searching for his shoe!
Yes, you read it right. One of Mr.Bee’s shoe was missing, but we found it soon, at the bottom-most step.
The kids running up and down the steps
Like Sherlock Holmes, Mr.Bee looked around, found footprints and decided that they were made by a deer. (At first, I wanted to believe they were made by a Cheetah or Tiger. That would have made a very compelling story for my travelogue!)
A deer must have taken the shoe, God knows for what and left it after dragging it for a while and ran away!
After the brief sleuthing, I gave both the kiddos a bath, had a bath myself and waited for Mr.Bee to return. Our car battery had died and he had to call in a mechanic.
By 8:30 a.m., I was already so hungry and I didn’t know how my kids were still playing without hunger pangs stopping them!
We went into the dining area of the resort and sat at a table. The two other tables were also filled up by families of 4. Interestingly, all the families had two sons each! (Not a single girl child in the whole resort. So sad!)
We found Telugu people from Hyderabad at the resort in Sultan Battery! When we went to Delhi, the next room neighbours were Telugus. We went to Taj Mahal, Agra, heard pukka local Telugu from fellow travellers. (East, West ,North, South, you can meet Telugu people everywhere!)
We had idiyappam with matar masala curry, rice rawa khichdi, bread with steamed banana (yummy), freshly cut ripe mango and warm Pathimugam water which is pink in colour and only available in Kerala.
Who needs jam when you can steam ripe bananas?
After our hearty breakfast, we had a quick photo session, before checking out of the resort.
One of the Art installations at the Resort
Mr.Bee bought coffee powder at Sultan Battery, because that is what Wayanad is famous for. We also bought some yellow banana chips (which are GBee’s favourite) and jack fruit chips. Since our stay at the Thejas Resort was not in our original plan, we didn’t extend our stay. We were already 1 day behind our tour schedule! (We had called the hotel in Subrahmanya to postpone our dates by one day.)
The drive from Sultan Battery to Subrahmanya is a pleasant one.
Clean and Green roads – C/o Sultan Battery
The villages near Sultan Battery made us sit up and take notice of them. Every little village was clean and well kept. I could hardly find a chocolate wrapper on the road! Everything was spic and span. Both sides of the road was lined with greenery, with beautiful red hibiscus plants near almost every home. As we drove through the roads, we saw medium sized jack fruits weight training the trees! (May be the huge harvest of jack fruits is the reason, Kerala started making jack fruit chips.)
We found similar jack fruit trees in Karnataka as well…
Jack Fruit tree – zoom in to see the fruits clearly
While we drove through forest in Kerala and entered the Karnataka State Border, it began to rain heavily. We had to have the hazard lights blinking and wait on the road, because we were unable to see anything at all.
Beautiful Forest Roads
We met a monkey on the way. Just as the monkey was nearing my side of the car, Mr.Bee opened the window (he thought I would enjoy chatting up with the tiny wild dude!) and I thought for a minute that the monkey would jump in! Luckily, I closed the window before anything untoward happened. (I felt as if I was escaping a dinosaur, closing a window at the last minute!)
Scared of the monkey, but can’t resist taking a photo!
The roads leading to Subrahmanya from Sultan Battery were ghat roads and by the time we reached Subrahmanya, I was sick of ghat roads! At some places on the road, it felt like the road suddenly came to an end, because, it would suddenly slope downwards! (reminded me of Carowinds!)
Let me include the 5th member of our trip, our Metallic Grey Itachi
We finally reached SR residency, KBee and GBee stopped by the reception to admire the fishes in the aquarium! KBee began yelling at the fish, trying to make them look at him. Obviously fish don’t turn and look at anyone, not even a 2 year old boy, even if the kid is shouting at the top of his lungs for their attention!
A new kind of notice board (comes with a typo!)
We reached the room, made ourselves presentable by taking hot showers and started for the temple, to visit Kukke Subrahmanya.
Thankfully, it was a working day and that too, schools had already re-opened after the summer vacation. So the temple had hardly any crowd. We had a good darshan of the God and returned to the hotel.
We had dinner at the in house restaurant at the ground floor. We ate masala papad, roti with dal tadka and palak paneer and to satiate our thirst, we had watermelon juice.
With that, we returned to our hotel room, to end the day!
P.S:
- One lady sitting beside us during dinner looked so much like the actress who played Sai Pallavi’s sister in Fida. Mr.Bee and I took our time observing her and turns out, she is a doppelganger (a dupe, in short)!
- Incidentally, I met the director Shekar Kammula, director of Fida during my days of working as a Design Engineer. We shook hands, but I was tongue tied. I couldn’t tell him how much I loved his movie, Godavari! (He came there with his kids, who were in ‘tantrum’ mode)
- The doppelganger first ordered masala papad. That made me order it. After seeing us eat masala papad, another couple ordered it! Before the closing time, every table at the restaurant had masala papad either in their mouths, hands or on the table! It was yummy too.
Till the next post, cheerio friends.