Our hotel staff being really helpful with us, we soon become friends and were invited to attend the engagement ceremony of one of them!
We took our motorbikes, and left towards a small village up in the mountains where we found around 40 people waiting for us. We were introduced to all the important family members, and learned some interesting things about how thing goes in Tamil Nadu:
The mother of a young girl chooses a young man, if the girl likes the boy, then they make them meet and the boy must accept or refuse the girl. Finally, if, and only if the girl agrees, they engage, which means they have to marry within 3 month. If one of the two parties breaks either the engagement or the marriage, they are thrown out of the village and can't come back.

Both girl and boy are between 18 and 20 during this process, and they can only meet for a few hours before deciding to spend their whole life together: Mothers does everything for them, they have no control at all. Also, boy's family must buy the girl, by giving money to girl's family. After the transaction, the girl moves to boy's house.
Pretty different from how things goes for us...

During the ceremony, old people from village eat first, to formalize and bless the union. Right after the wise men, our turn came: we were asked to sit on the floor and eat while dozens of people were watching at us. A little embarrassing.. Specially because even if we are strongly improving by eating with hands, we still can't reach their level!

Strange fact: the future husband never showed up during the ceremony.. we were told that tradition wants that the boy stays with his mother at home during the engagement party. So we came all the way to his village but never saw him...

On our way back to Ooty, we stopped in a small village for a hot tea, and suddenly came the idea to continue our journey by hitchhiking. So we returned the motorbikes, grabbed our packs and hit the road with thumbs up!

After 3 hours and 5 different lift, including one on top of a truck, we reached Gudalur. We refused a few room full of cockroaches and found a pretty clean room to spend the night. Next day 3-4 trucks, free tuk-tuk's (yes, free tuk-tuk's) and cars brought us to the Wayanad district, in Kerala state. Here we found the real deep India, with no tourist and more important: no tourist infrastructures at all. Problem is that in India all the hotels, lodges and guesthouses must pay government taxes to host foreigners, so most of them refused us. So we just had to be a bit more patients and persuasive. We spent the night in Kalpetta and decided to keep exploring Wayanad district. Hitchhiking is veeeery easy in India, we never had to wait longer than 10 minutes to get a lift. At some point we even stopped to ask cars, because traveling on roof of a truck is way funnier!

We stopped in a small village, bought some food and headed to a mountain lake: we lit a fire and here for the first time we tried to cook Indian food: probably, and unconsciously we tried to hide as much as possible, because we were ashamed of cooking in front of real Indian people, considering the amazing food we had so far.

Well, there was no real reason to feel ashamed, the result was way above our expectation: and much better than what we had in some local restaurants. Menu was: Sambar Masala (vegetable curry) with papadam and chapati (local bread).

We spent the afternoon relaxing on the lake drying our showes by the fire (by cleaning the dishes we went a bit too far in the water!). At some point we remembered that some guidebook mentioned wild tigers in the area... So we immediately decided to head back to the village! After dinner, we looked for a place to buy a fresh beer... but Kerala being very strict with alcohol, we had to ask some locals: 2 hours later, we ended in a big truck, with a very strange driver offering us brandy and mineral water. After a few drinks, he wanted us to talk to his wife to persuade her to let her husband out of home one more hour. Despite the lady was not speaking any English we managed to persuade her! Driver thanked us with a few more drinks and we went back to our hotel.

Unfortunately, we forgot hotel keys on the truck...and it was 11pm. We had to ring hotel manager, who was in the middle of a party, to ask him to come with another key.
30 minutes later, manager joined us telling that the key was somewhere else, but that he wanted to force the lock, because most important thing for him was to have us sleep well.

Our hotel being above the only bank in town, bank guard joined us with a big hammer and started hitting the lock stronger and stronger..for about 30 minutes...but no way to open the door.
After a while they decided to simply demolish the door to allow us entering the room. We were 4 people, between 11 and 12 pm, trying to force a door with lot of noise just above a bank and laughing hard (surprisingly everybody was happy), but nobody in town seemed to worry and believe me: town was small, everybody could hear knocking sounds coming from the bank!