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Why Keylong?
It is an ideal destination for nature lovers and adventure freaks. The place is full of breathtaking landscapes, the enchanting rives, snowcapped mountains complimenting the blue sky, time stopping silence and pleasant weather, in short nature’s untouched beauty and incredibly attractive. Plains look so beautiful that one may feel himself in a Heaven. All around the area is covered by Highly Mountains beside flat lands and green meadows. It gives you the pleasure to feel yourself close to the nature. Here, the Air is liked iced champagne and the skies are an eternal blue

DAY ONE 21.06.08 (Saturday)
We Started our journey from Delhi, at 0010 hrs and reached smoothly till the By-pass near Azadpur only to find a jam on the road opposite Nangli Poona village from which it took about fifteen to twenty minutes to emerge clear. The highway till Chandigarh was hassle free. There were four to five flyovers under construction, which, once completed would make the ride even smoother and cut down time considerably.

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The previous installment of this series covered reaching the small city of Interlaken in Switzerland, and the disappointment of not being able to do the cruise on the same day since we were too late. Anyhow, we drowned our sorrows the first day in some drinks and food, and resolved to see what we could do the next day.
Day 2. I got up in the morning, and given that nobody else seemed to be up, I got down to taking a few photos from the hotel room (and was trying to be different - so took some photos from the reflection off the huge glass window). I had this huge camera (the Sony DSC R1) that is as big as an SLR and takes some great photos, so did some experimentation; and by then, people were ready to get up.

Photo showing morning in Interlaken partly through a reflection in a huge glass window
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We were looking at options to celebrate our marriage anniversary and zeroed in on Wayanad. We were warned of the Kerala rains, but then we wanted the rains and it turned out to be real good. The two and a half days we spent there, the weather was picture perfect- occasional showers and the clouds and mist playing hide and seek in the romantic sense.

The Bangalore-Wayanad route(300kms) is really simple and as usual we drove covering Mysore-Nanjungad-Gundlupet-Sultan Batherry- Kalpetta, essentially the NH212. Kalpetta is the district headquarters of Wayanad. We started on a Saturday morning from Bangalore at 8 am and at 60 kms pulled over into Kamat’s Lokruchi for breakfast. This place as expected was crowded, but the service is very fast. The food is excellent here and I strongly recommend it. In case you miss it, there is Barista on your left about 10 kms from Kamat’s and if you miss this one also then you have Coffee Day I can’t imagine anyone missing all the three. Once near to Mysore ask for directions to Nanjungad. This route skirts the periphery of Mysore. From Nanjungad it is straight to Gundlupet. At Gundlupet take a right and keep on going straight till Kalpetta passing through Sultan Batherry.
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A dream come true. The planning of “Wayanad visit” started way back in 2006 and had been in “planning” stage until recently when the plan was converted to execution :-).

A conversation over the coffee table sparked off a 3-day vacation to the misty hills of Wayanad in God’s Own Country.

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