Pleasant Pondicherry

So, I am new to this whole 'blog' thing but I thought it might be easier and less intrusive for those that don't really want to get emails from me.

Hopefully all of you know that I am currently living in India. If this is surprising news to you than that makes me quite sad because it means that we haven't talked for ages, which just isn't acceptable.

I am incredibly happy to report that I finally got out of Bangalore City and took a happy look at what I imagined India to be. Stacy, Danielle (another roommate), and I went to a lovely little (compared to Bangalore, anyway) town on the east coast of India. Pondicherry is on the Bay of Bengal and used to be a French colony. It has about 800,000 people in it and you may ask, "But Anika, you said it was a 'little' town?" My response to that would be that I have been in Bangalore for the past two months straight and there is almost 7 million here so it felt dang little to me.

Okay, enough of the history and trivia of Pondicherry, now here comes the fun part; what I actually did there!

We took this radical night bus that left, can you guess, at night and it was so awesome even though I got about as much sleep as I would have if I was riding an angry ostrich. One of the reasons for this is that we bounced around quite a bit. Because we left at 10:30 from B-lore(local name for Bangalore), we were passing through the country side in the dead of night which made me a little sad because I couldn't see it. For about 4 of the 9 hours that we were on the bus we were travelling on fantastically rugged dirt roads that were more muddy ditches than road. I felt like I was on a third rate roller coaster that was threatening to just dump us out because the double stacked beds that we were on only had two little bars to hold us in. I don't think the unsuspecting sleepers below me would have thought kindly of a strange white girl flying violently through the air and landing on top of them. Well, the ride there was exciting enough but the actual destination of said ride was so much better.

We got there around6:45 in the morning but nothing wakes up in India until around 9:30 so what to do, what to do? Well, we took an auto (rickshaw that is) to Beach Street which, oddly enough, is on the beach. Due to the fact that I had been on a bus for a total of 9 hours, the limited space in my bladder was quite full. So after parting with Danielle, Stacy and I wandered around forever. Up and down, up and down looking for a bathroom. We finally gave up and just sat down on the beach to wait until things opened up a bit more. I have to tell you though, hearing the crashing of waves and seeing the endless body of water stretched out in front of me did not do much for my 'problem'. I couldn't take it any more! I walked very quickly farther down the beach and then Stacy saw a lovely sight! A bathroom at a petrol station! I couldn't believe it, especially because most bathrooms are pay use here. As expected the toilet was Turkish style, a pit in the floor, and as equally expected, there was no toilet paper (they don't buy into the west's whole theory that TP is a good thing). It was a very relieving experience, to say the least, and I don't think you'd want me to say more.

Now I could actually enjoy sitting on the beach, though it really was more rocky outcropping than beach. When things finally opened up we ate and with the sustenance and known location of a rest stop, we wandered around some more. We needed to find a hotel because we couldn't find any open rooms by calling any of the places and we thought that there must be a cancellation some where so we didn't fret too much. We got lucky on about the eighth try.

It was a dirty, smelly, broken down place, and I thought it was awesome! It had the two things that really mattered though, clean-ish sheets and a sit toilet. (This blog is becoming way too long so I am going to expedite the whole thing and give you a semi-shortened version).

Anyway, Stacy and I took a short nap, which we desperately needed after the failed attempts at sleep on the bus, and then we set off! We found a two-wheeler rental shop and we couldn't decide if we wanted to rent two bikes or one scooter. However, it turned out that the scooter was only about rps 300 for 2 days which in American dollars is about 7.50, so we said, "What the hey! We'll do it!" And we did.

We drove around and tried to find interesting things to goggle at and we succeeded because there is always something that can attract your attention here. There is always at least a couple of people to observe if not many, let alone the complete difference in culture, lifestyle, and architecture which continually fascinates me.

There were two things mentioned in our handy though not very up to date travel book that looked worth checking out in the area around Pondicherry, so we set out to find them. The first was the Chunnambra water complex that the book said had boats and kayaks and other such things that you could rent and take out in the bay. However, the map of Pondicherry just pointed in the direction you should go to get there and didn't have the actual location. I began to see this as a problem when I noticed that we passed the same cow in the road for the third time. We asked a couple of people and they either had no idea what we were trying to say or would give us some directions that didn't prove fruitful. Well, after about an hour and a half of searching we wrote it down as a nice tour of the city and decided to try and find our second place of interest. It said that 10 kl to the north was 'Quiet Beach' which I hoped was not a falsely placed adjective. So we set off looking for the road and we started to get out of the city and we were driving on a surprisingly calm and pleasant country (paved, which is a big deal) road. We passed a couple of other tourists (though I loathe to call myself one) and I noticed that one of the scooters holding a younger couple stayed pretty close behind us for some time. We weren't seeing any road or sign that looked like it might go to a beach so we decided to take a random side road and see if it got us there. As I had suspected all along the scooter behind us followed us onto the road and said they were also looking for the elusive quiet beach. Well, I suppose four heads work better than two so we continued down a little farther without success, turned around, took the next right and there we were! It was a nice beach but a complete sham when it came to calling itself 'quite'. There were loads of people, mostly men, playing around in the sand and water. Because Pondicherry was a French colony, the main bulk of the tourists that go there are Frenchies so everyone would greet us with a Bonjour and I wouldn't respond because, Hey! I'm not French! Anyway, even with the occasional tourists, white-ish people are pretty rare so some of the more bold guys came up and talked to us and wanted to take pictures with us because, I don't know, they thought we were cool or somethin?! Ha ha, I fooled them. If they only knew how uncool I really am, hehe!

It was really nice to sit on the beach and wade around in the water because it was very hot and I missed our annual family coast trip so it made me feel a little better about missing it by going to the beach. There is one thing that just got to me though. When we reached the beach Stacy said, "Ehh, I hate speedos!" I agreed with her as it seemed most of the guys swimming were wearing nothing but. Unfortunately for us and our delicate eyes, when in closer proximity I realized to my chagrin that they were not even speedos but a step down from them, just regular old briefs. That's all, just briefs, with the occasional boxers thrown in.

Well, Pondi was great! We did some other cool things but my formerly proposed shortening of this letter is not going as planned so I will not tell you all that happened, just that we had to stay a day extra because we couldn't get a bus, Stacy and I had a casualtyless crash on the scooter, and Stacy had an over friendly faux-stalker that I had to sternly dissuade from being any more of an annoyance. Stacy's problem is that she's just to likable and mine is that I'm not!

All I have to say now is that if your ever in Tamil Nadu, take a little trip to Pondi!