Nandi Hills Outing

Plans for visiting Nandi hills started from Thursday. I started looking for arranging transport. Being a holiday season most of the operators were asking for higher prices. One of the colleague’s friends agreed for a reasonable rate for Qualis (since it was a family outing). My colleague told the vehicle is confirmed for Sunday. Sunday morning I called up the guy who is supposed to send the vehicle just to find out that he had sent the vehicle for some other trip since we have not given the address details the previous day itself. He had thought that we had arranged for another vehicle since we have not confirmed the day before. Lesson learnt: Reconfirm your travel with the cab operator the previous day to avoid last minute surprises. Anyway the same operator managed to arrange a Sumo for us in the next hour.Finally the vehicle came and we boarded it and hit the Airport road, the driver asked "Do you know the route"!!! We then found out that driver have never drove for tours, he only drove for BPO organizations in Bangalore. What a bliss to have a driver for an outing, who don’t know the route. I asked him to drive towards Devanahalli and from there we can check the route and go further. Finally we managed to reach Nandi Hills around 11:00 AM.

While climbing the hills itself I noticed the views were stunning. After reaching the top we roamed around here and there. We enjoyed the views of the valley and the steep rocks of the hillock opposite.

Since people have told me it is a summer retreat and the climate will be good, I had lot of hopes on that front. But the climate was almost the same as in Bangalore, though there were few places were the climate was really cool.

If I am not wrong there were as many monkeys as were the people. It seemed to be an art to have our lunch in midst of the monkeys waiting for the slightest chance to snatch the food from us :).

After much of roaming around and climbing the place up and down we started our journey back home in the evening. We missed the sunset as it was cloudy on that day. After having breathed the fresh air for around 7 hours, we entered back to the noise and pollution of Bangalore.
Don't know what is the name of this flower, which was abundant in Nandi Hills. Can somebody update me.