Masinagudi-Ooty Trip (22nd March to 26th March 2006)

This is my first trip to be recorded! So lets enjoy! :)

Masinaguid-Ooty Trip was part of Microsoft Research India Retreat 2006. The trip started on 22nd of March,2006 around 2.30pm from Bangalore. We started off in two majestic buses and roughly 30+ on board! All the 12 interns from BITS were unofficially some how equally distributed in the two buses. So the enthu team is equally distributed! :)

We are now heading to Masinagudi, amidst of Muduamalai forest area.

The trip's fun activities started when we started pouring water thru the windows from one bus to another when the buses stopped at the traffic signals. To my surprise, both the buses were filled with tons of food stuffs like chips, cool drinks, snacks, water bottles, stationary, etc! So what do we do..start eating them!! And forgot to mention, the whole trip was organised by "Fuller Life" and one of the two incharges was in our bus. He, amidst of all protest for organised games, started a puzzle and distributed the questions to us. We formed and played the game. The game was to findout a suitable phrase for each of 30 puzzles. For eg. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTVWXYZ meant "missing U" and so on.. It was nice. My group, Sriram, Prasad, Anandan, Mythreyee and myself did 29/30 wheras kentaro did all !!!! Eventually he won!

We then had a halt, some 50 km from Mysore. We had some snacks and I had a hot coffee from Coffee Day. I also took some audio casettes and CD's from Aishwarya to play in the bus and when we started moving, the songs also started playing. I then slowly fell asleep and suddenly woke up to see another halt in our journey!
We din't stop much here, taking some stupid snaps of stars, some fighting scenes between Suri and his friend/enemy, Bharathi and some others. Then started heading towards Masinagudi.

It was slowly getting darker..like a slow sleep on a boring day... Some were discussing political matters and others mostly half asleep..In that time of day..we even don't know that we are passing through one of the most important and eventually the first sanctuary in south India, Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary. We suddenly saw a big Elephant on the road side through the window of the bus and started shouting with anxiety! Others who missed it were all searching for it and asking eagerly about the elephant. Further, we also saw a baby elephant and a bison. Then the bus slowly moving uphill and slowly we started to see some boards saying Masinagudi.. thought we would stop soon..but still the bus is going on and on...later came to know that we are actually going deep into the forest where some resorts are located..
Finally, after the bus struggling to go throught the small sandy road - barely sufficient for a bus to pass on, we reached Casa Deep Woods, a resort!


divided into two groups
me in jungle retreat
dogs accompanied...thot why have we come here???
then had some great food....etc