Ooty trip..... Exploring Dunsandle Tea Estate, Coonoor

Dedicating this travelogue to my friends. When I was in NeST, we planed a tour to Ooty. All most all colleagues visited Ooty before and this made us to rethink about the destination. As usual I discussed this with my parents and they suggested the place Dunsandle near Ooty.

Dunsandle is the tea estate in Coonoor near Ooty which comes under BBTC (Bombay Burmay Trading Company). My dad was with BBTC and he got enough friends in Dunsandle Tea Estate. My dad arranged the accommodation for us. We all stayed in my dad's friends house.

We started our journey by 10 o'clcok morning and reached Dunsandle in the evening.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Midhu and jismy (my friends) for sharing these pics.

Dunsandle estate ( is situated in the Nilgiri hills), is 6,000 feet above the sea level. This is the road towards our house. The road was lonely and really beautiful.

Bus services are available to this place. Home stays and other hotels are not available since its a Private Estate. Dunsandle is only 20 kms away from Ooty town.

The weather is usually pleasant, 15-20 degrees Celsius , but gets notoriously cold during winter, with temperatures dropping to as low as zero degrees Celsius. The rainy season is extremely cold and wet. Fog is common during monsoon and winter

This is worker's (tea plucking worker's) houses.

Dunsandle is one of the oldest tea plantations of South India and still going strong.

Aunty's( dad's friend's wife) garden was blessed with beautiful and colourful flowers.

I tried to bring these plants to my place... but failed. May be because of our climate.

Next day morning we got a chance to visit the tea factory.

It produces typical high elevation teas with the distinctive Nilgiri aroma and flavor.

Inside the tea factory - Drying plucked tea leaves.

After learning how to make tea powder, we went to Ooty town. Journey from Dunsandle to Ooty was awesome. We stopped almost all places to take photos and spent more time in Dunsandle than Ooty.

Both sides of this place was covered with yellow flowers which was like yellow carpet. In between these plants we got everlasting flower plant and everlasting flowers. We plucked a lot. When we went to Ooty town we saw some females selling these flowers.

Like this everlasting yellow flower, the memory of this trip is also everlasting. We couldn't enjoy the beauty of Ooty because of the heavy crowd. We visited Ooty in the peak time and from almost all places of India lot of tourists were present to see the flower show. But in Dunsandle no one was there because no one knows about this place. Its loneliness is its beauty. If you ask me which is more beautiful Ooty or Dunsandle, I will surely say its Dunsandle.