Final day of our visit to Ooty and the surrounding places. The last day had been fantastic after the beautiful landscape views. Today was early morning departure again to see the remaining places and also head back to Bangalore. We planned of seeing the unknown place of Billekkal around 20 km away from Ooty. We went to Pankaj Bhojanalaya for another day’s heavy breakfast and this time it was even better. We were little early to the restaurant and the city tourism was waking up slowly. The service was also very prompt with better tasting food than yesterday. After a heavy breakfast we went to see the famed Ooty Lake which seemed over hyped due to some movies being shot there. The lakes we had seen in the region of Red Hills were no comparison for this one. We quickly explored the area and headed forward to see out next destination. The place of billekkal was unknown to almost everybody and we had a hard time getting to know of it’s where about. We descended down the Ooty hills and stopped at Kalahatty waterfalls to inquire further. It was again bad luck for us and we continued driving further down. We reached the entrance of Mudumalai forest and stopped to inquire from our friends at home. The cellphone network up in the hills was erratic with signals dropping unexpectedly. After many anxious calls we found that the place is a trek from Kalahatty falls and needs a guide to be followed. This information was provided by Silver Oak resort owner Pannalal’s brother. As we had come far away ahead of that place, we decided to skip it this time and head to Bandipur national forest for a safari ride and enjoy there to make up for the lost chance to visit billekkal. We crossed the forest of Mudumalai which lies in the state of Tamil Nadu heading into Bandipur National forest which falls under Karnataka state. Once we were in Bandipur, we could see wildlife near the road also. We could see deer running around, langurs playing with each other tails and elephant a little far way but visible. This made us quite excited to see the Bandipur forest safari. On the way it started drizzling and continued till we reached the Bandipur forest around 1 pm. The ticket for safari was to start selling at 2pm and we got in the queue to grab a good seat number. It seemed like our luck was not favoring us on that day. We got the last row in bus where none of the window could be opened and the ride was for maximum 30 minutes showing us nothing more than some deer and bunch of hens. 
It was a very disappointing ride for us and we all cursed it. We decide to start our journey back to Bangalore stopping for a couple of tea breaks. On way it started raining heavily and we had to drop our plans of stopping over for dinner. We just wanted to get home in good time and then think about dinner plans. It was a heavy rainfall which was leading to traffic jams, water logging and vehicles skidding around. We were just lucky and safe enough to reach home in one piece. This was the last day of a beautiful trip to Ooty and Red hills barring the last day which seemed to be completely against us but the experience at Red Hills and around was the pick of this outing.
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