Mettupalayam

The road up to the hill country resort of Coonoor is a steep, winding road full of hairpin bends that twists through a forest full of wild animals. There are even signs warning that elephants have right of way (although surely nobody would be so silly as to try and argue right of way with an elephant?)

It is only 30km from the nearest town of Mettupalayam to Coonoor, but in that 30km, we go up 1500m into the mountains. It was around 7pm, just after dark when we left Mettupalayam (after stopping for a toilet break and a drinking coconut) and we expected to be at Coonoor within an hour. However, a few minutes into climbing the hills, while overtaking, the engine died. We rolled back down to somewhere a bit safer but it still wouldn’t start. With a bit of pushing, we managed to get turned around and leveled out on a shoulder a little further down, but still no luck. Then we rolled all the way back down the hill with the engine still refusing to turn over, hearing an elephant trumpet in the trees just beside the road as we did so. We came to a stop just before the bridge that was the divider between civilisation and the wild forest.

This photo was taken the next day from the civilisation side:

A passing motorcyclist stopped to help, positioning his bike so that the light illuminated the engine, and Gopal tried various things to try and get the engine started again, without success. Despite being well-intentioned, he really didn’t know what he was doing and was probably making things worse rather than better so eventually he left. Gopal’s phone has an LED torch in it which was our only source of light. I held that as he tried various diagnostics to figure out what was wrong. All this would have been quite interesting except that as I mentioned in the previous post, I was still suffering the after effects of food poisoning. And after a couple of hours (by now it was nearly 10pm), I really needed to go to the toilet.

I begged Gopal to let me have the torch so I could go off into the bushes, but he insisted it wasn’t safe. He wanted us to walk back up the road to where we’d passed a police checkpoint and see if there was a toilet there. I was not too happy at this – I really needed to go quite urgently at this point, but he insisted. We’d barely walked a few steps when someone stopped and told us that even the road wasn’t safe and we should go the other way across the bridge to the nearest village. So we turned around and went across the bridge. Some women were standing outside a house and told Gopal that the area over the other side of a side road was safe, but while we were figuring out how to get into that area, someone took pity on me and let me use their toilet. So I have now unlocked the ‘Successfully used a squat toilet in the dark’ achievement.

With that out of the way, we resumed the diagnostics, eventually ruling out issues with the fuel pump and fuel lines among other things. When I say we, I of course mean Gopal :) I held the torch and occasionally supplied my swiss army knife – he’s the only one who knows how an engine works. After a while, and various people stopping to tell us it wasn’t safe on this side of the bridge, we decided to push the car across the bridge and stop where it was safer and where there was some light. Two guys on a scooter helped me push the car across – thankfully this time we only had to push it on a level surface. After about half an hour under the other side, we had an audience of half a dozen people. That came in handy when the power went off – one of them also had an LED on his cellphone and so we had a little bit more light. They were a bit drunk though and not particularly helpful. By this time though Gopal had narrowed the problem down to a crankshaft position sensor or its cable. But without a multimeter or tools, it was really impossible to either fix or diagnose further.

So we packed a few things into a backpack, locked up the car and hitched a ride back to Mettupalayam. The first accommodation place we went to had neither hot water nor towels, but the place across the road was a little bit more well equipped. Access to a toilet, shower and bed never felt so good :)

Getting the parts necessary to fix the car wasn’t going to be easy in a small town like Mettupalayam on a Sunday. After breakfast, Gopal went out to meet up with a relative of his brother-in-law to go down to Coimbatore (the nearest city) to find the part.

I’d considered going out to get some water and for a walk around while I waited, but as soon as I stepped outside I knew that was a bad idea – it was about 38 degrees outside. I went back to my room, lay on the bed under the fan and called room service to bring me up some tea and water instead :) Two 1L bottles of chilled water and a cup of masala tea cost me $2.30.

I didn’t have to wait very long – the part was in stock at the first big store they went to, so Gopal came back and got it installed fairly quickly and was back at the hotel to pick me up in the early afternoon. We decided not to stick around in Mettupalayam, but to head for the quietness and coolness of the hills of Coonoor.