Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Exploring South India - Part 1: Tirupur

Although extremely busy, we said to ourselves that we needed to take at least one long trip to explore more about India before 2011 ends. We thought about the northern India, but it required more planning due to our furry son gG (yep, he comes wherever we go). So, we decided to instead take a non-controversial route around southern India.

In conjunction with my recently opened online shop, one city that I really wanted to visit was Tirupur, which is famous for its garment factories. Also since our friend introduced me to a guy who owns a factory there, I wanted to take this opportunity to meet with him. The plan to go to Tirupur let us explore more options in terms of cities to visit. We picked Cochin, which according to the G map, should only take less than 4 hrs. We have not seen the ocean after arriving to Bangalore, so we liked the idea of spending a couple of days by the beach. And that led us to plan the next stop, Ooty, as we wanted to avoid the ride that is more than 7 hrs due to gG. Ooty, which is close to the wildlife sanctuary, was one of the cities we always wanted to visit anyway, so we chose to stay there one night before moving onto Mysore.

Like that, our itinerary was completed!


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Tirupur, Tamil Nadu

Our trip started on Christmas day. We got a hired driver, packed one suitcase for our stuff, multiple items for gG such as gG's litter box, food, bed, etc (yes, he takes up more luggage space for sure) into the rental car, and headed to Tirupur.

The road was amazingly very clean and nice, which made me think that we could have driven by ourselves. And the scenery along the route 44 was just astonishing. The main problem was the G map estimate. According to G, we were supposed to be in Tirupur in less than 5 hrs. WRONG! It took us close to 7 hrs. And by the time we got there, I guess the driver was tired and his driving started to get sloppy which was not fun at all :(

We first checked into the hotel called Velan Hotel, which was an impressively moderate hotel, and headed out to meet a person our friend introduced me. It was already past 5 o'clock on Saturday, but he kindly agreed to still meet with us and showed us around his factory. Thank you!! We really enjoyed the factory tour. It was an intriguing to see how the garments were made by so many people and so many processes!!

By the time we got back to the hotel, it was way past 8 o'clock, as the driver ended up driving us around the same place three times before finally finding the way back to our hotel. We had a cozy dinner at the hotel and hit the bed to prepare for another car ride to Cochin next morning.

To be continued...


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