Pondicherry (Feb 6-9)

Pondicherry you may have heard of through "Life of Pi" fame. For us it was a 3 hr bus ride further south along the coast and is not a typical Indian town. Having been the domain of the French up until a few decades ago, it has a nice waterfront area with a walking promenade, a number of colonial buildings, some big catholic churches, bakeries with croissants and a few other holdovers from the French. This all takes place in the first 4-5 blocks set back from the sea front. Then you cross a 'canal' which is more like a sewer and suddenly you are in India again!. The number of people, vehicles, shops, etc increases (easily) by a factor of 10 and you are in a whole different world.

But first a few words about our bus ride. We were told to just walk a km up the road to the highway and buses would come every 10 minutes and to flag one down. Well 10 minutes was more like 20 between buses and the first 3 were so full we couldn't get on them. So about an hour later we finally got onto a standing room only bus that is the most rickety thing you can imagine. How many kms must be on those buses?!?. Mind you for the 2 hr , 120km ride it only cost us 50 cents each. It is truly remarkable how cheap it is for buses and food here.

We ended up finding - after strolling around for 30 minutes in blazing sun - a most wonderful place to stay...perhaps one of the nicest so far on our trip. A small building, 4 stories high with 1 or 2 rooms per floor and a common roof top deck with a beautiful view over the ocean and perfect parisian croissants provided for breakfast.

The place was tended by a young (Age 22) Indian boy, Ramu, who was a long way from his hometown (Hydrabad) and who was starved for social interaction, being required to basically be on premises nearly 24x7. He talked our ear off about growing up in his home town and showed off his new mobile phone that took a year to save up for!

Overall there isn't a lot to do in Pondi (now called Puducherry). Walk around and look at a few decaying french buildings a 'sort of' museum, go into the Indian part of town to browse some shops, tour a Hindu temple to the god Ganesh, and get blessed by the resident elephant, Laksmi (via a touch of the trunk to the head...after you deposit a coin in his trunk).

The seafront promenade explodes into life each evening and especially on Sun eve,when there must have been tens of thousands of locals strolling around, buying food off vendors, some Indian dancing going on, etc....All in all a real festive atmosphere. This is probably quite unique to India...thx to the french perhaps for setting aside the waterfront.

We also rented bicycles one day and rode 6km north of town to some beach areas. They were nice beaches, wide, surf coming in, and long...many kms and with virtually no development. But also with lots of trash, both on the beach and in the water. The ride itself was pretty hair raising. We were on the street competing with motos, tuk-tuks, cars, trucks, buses, pedestrians, and an unbelievable cacaphony of horn blowing. We survived. Oh yes, also, the chain popped off Lori's bike and because they have chain covers over the whole chain I was having a hard time figuring out how to get the cover off to get at the chain. Fortunately some Indian fellow watched us struggling and came over to show how its done. He didn't know English and he wouldn't accept any money as thanks...such a contrast from the rest of your time in India where you are constantly harassed by people who want money for nothing. Good people are everywhere...but I guess you have to be off the tourist track to find them!

At our guesthouse there was also another Cdn couple who had been cycling around south India for the last couple of months...They said they had some days where they rolled into pretty small towns with pretty dodgy accomodations....I can just imagine! They were headed to Auroraville to spend 2 weeks helping with reforestation. They gave us their blodsite address so we can check into their experiences.