Arriving on our luxury bus at about 10.30 at night we lucked out at a big ashram by the sea and got a cheap room for the night. At the reception desk we also discovered that we had left our wallet and 2600Rs behind, a wonderful start to a new city. After filling in our details we headed up the stairs as quietly as possible, had a MUCH needed shower and went to sleep.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
The next day we woke up nice and early to take a walk along the beach and get some breakfast. We were both rather excited by all the French cafés and the promise of good food, when you travel for long periods of time, food breaks like this are a culinary blessing and we fully intended to make the most of the cheap booze (Pondicherry is it's own state and has relaxed alcohol taxes) and the steak (rarer than hens teeth in Hindu India). We stopped at a small 24hr café by the sea and were impressed by the wonderful French service (it was awful) and French cuisine (the coffee was good although bitter and I was flatly refused any garlic on my toast... err NO GARLIC!? Wasn't it a FRENCH café?!), it didn't do much to lift the awful mood I'd woken up in, especially because the mouthwatering smell of frying garlic was wafting out from the kitchen, bastards.
The sun at 8.30 was already roasting so I wandered back to the hotel to work on photos and my diary while Djalma sorted out maps from the TIO (Tourist Information Office) and an appointment at a stomach specialist so we could get a professional opinion on our on/off diarrhoea for the past two months. We went to this “specialist” together and filled him in on our symptoms, basically that for the last two months – the whole time we'd been in India – we'd had “loose movements” with brief reprieves courtesy of Immodium and the occasional course of antibiotics. He felt our stomachs looked down our throats and told us it was perfectly normal – I could just imagine my Mum reaction at his casual dismissal of what he deemed travellers diarrhoea when it had persisted for so long. After insisting that the shits were not normal for such a long time he relented and prescribed an ultrasound and suggested that a stool sample be tested. We went to collect pots for poohing in and were given one container not much bigger than a thimble – I've no idea what kind of stomach problems they deal with on a day to day basis but poohing into a container no bigger than the end of your thumb is just not possible on a normal day let alone an explosive one – we tried to explain this to the man giving us the container with less and less patience and in the end decided to leave when they cleared out a container holding some powder and handed it to us (um, shouldn't it be sterile?!). We cancelled our ultrasound appointment and decided to make an appointment at a Western hospital but not before fully enjoying Pondicherry's culinary delights (with the help of some Loperamide should it prove necessary).
*Our Ashram deserves a special mention. It has very cheap, very clean rooms I believe all have en suite facilities and working showers – not something to be taken for granted in a country which more often than not lacks the infrastructure for clean drinking water, flushing toilets or more than a dribble for a shower when not using a bucket. It is also decorated with life improving advice and noble ideas, which reek of self-righteous piousness. My favourite slogan, which is on the way up the stairs to our room, reads 'Be nice to people who drink and smoke because they won't be around us for long' what a load of patronising bollocks. Above a rubbish bin: Throw away; negativity, over self-confidence, gluttony... blah blah blah.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
Wandering back through town we passed by several French cafés and stopped in one to feast on the most delicious food, I had some Darjeeling tea and an enormous almond croissant while Djalma got his mouth around a real French baguette filled with cooked spinach, sweet fried onions, sautéed mushrooms and borsalino cheese, they were both mouthwateringly good (and heavy on the wallet). My mood much improved with the tea and sugar injection we carried on back to the ashram to wait out the heat of the afternoon.
Around 5pm we headed back out, walking along the reinforced seafront dotted with ice-cream, coconut, souvenir and snack vendors.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
We passed by the monument to Gandhi, the French embassy and a huge cathedral that lit up in neon when the night drew in. We passed through lots of slightly French flavoured streets teeming with very Tamil traffic.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
We finally arrived at a small rooftop café serving cocktails and food and my snapping frenzy hushed up after the first sip of my blue lemonade which wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be (an excellent reason to sample the rest of the cocktail menu). We sat outside providing the local mosquitoes a smorgasbord of not so fresh foreign flesh and drank and chatted. At some point after an excellent dinner of baby squid, chips and salad, Djalma went off to get a scooter for the following day while I ordered another cocktail and was joined by a French girl, Gail. She was travelling by herself and was very talkative so we sat and talked and drank (her, coke, me, planters punch) until Djalma came back and joined in, I was feeling very pleasantly tipsy although slightly conscious about the difficulty with which I was focussing. This didn't stop me helping Djalma polish off his mojito before ordering one last drink for the road. Mistake.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
We got on the little moped and made it back to the Ashram just before the gates were locked, thank goodness, and slept like babies for an early start the next morning.
The early start never happened. But we did make it out after papaya lassies, omelettes and garlic toast for breakfast. The early morning traffic wasn't nearly as horrendous as the evening traffic and we left Pondy behind on the open road to Auroville which we managed to completely overshoot and then spend about quarter of an hour trying to locate the turn-off to.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
After stopping for directions countless times (we later fund out our assumption that they must not want to be easily found was true) we pulled up at the visitors centre, which is quite separate from where Aurovillians live, and met Mari who we knew of through Djalma's best friend, Pri. We wandered through the exhibition looking at their multinational photos and reading about the small “city's” philosophy. Contrary to my preconceived idea of the place it wasn't a new religion, or at least it wasn't meant to be, but a social experiment designed to unite like-minded people (a crucial point because not just anyone can roll up and live there) in a city where continued education and a drive for knowledge of the divine come first, where people can live together in harmony regardless of age, race, creed and social standing. This is badly re-worded from the mission statement but you get the idea. After getting slips of paper she took us over to the heart of Auroville, Matrimandir, a huge golden globe set in the middle of what will be twelve different gardens. Normally tourists or visitors aren't allowed in, especially just to look, you are supposed to concentrate or meditate, but we went inside the huge silent dome to a big white room. This was the only place I've ever experienced deafening silence, it was quite something. People sat round the edges facing into the middle where a huge perfectly round glass ball directed light from a hole in the roof to another ball below. Everything was white, the immaculate carpet, the cushions we sat on, the pillars, the walls and the ceiling and everyone was silent, almost – you could hear everything and when Djalma scratched his hairy leg I could hear his nails move across every single hair and shifting slightly on the cushions sounded like I was shifting gravel, we left the people contemplating life and retraced our footsteps, past the equally silent women watching the path to the dome, to the gardens outside.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
Leaving the golden Matrimandir behind, the opposite to the centre of every other city on Earth in that it is a centre of silence and contemplation as opposed to chaos and disorder, we went for lunch at the visitors centre. It was surprisingly expensive, for the same price as a good steak dinner anywhere else the money would buy you a mushroom tart, not cool. The food was good although it took almost an hour for people to take our order (they were understaffed) during the time we waited we had what I would like to say was a good long conversation but was more of a question and answer session about life in Auroville for Mari. We asked about what life was like there, how the money side worked, how did it work with all the visitors or tourists. I was quite surprised about some of her answers and when she spoke about her frustration with, typically westerners, who came along for an hour and wanted to dissect and understand the essence of the project at Auroville which she said was too complicated to grasp in this time (and rightly so) I felt more than a little embarrassed at recognising myself in this group, I also felt more than a passing resemblance between myself and some the other annoying traits other, usually Europeans, show. It made me uncomfortable aware of how I think and conduct myself around foreigners, all a bit too English.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
After a decent lunch she left to go shopping and we decided to go for a bit of exploring in the social experiment city. We didn't get very far, we were refused entry to the gardens around Matrimandir, which we had been in only a few hours previously, denied even for a few moments to take a photo of the gardens, we jumped on the bike to go to the lookout point, for which we did have a piece of paper but we weren't allowed to park the bike there despite there being plenty of room, we decided to just leave it and head back to Pondy and stop off at a beach somewhere on the way.
We left the private little city behind and halfway back ran out of petrol, fortunately for us a lovely man on a bike took Djalma to buy a couple of quart bottles, previously housing brandy, of petrol and we were soon on our way to the beach. We stopped off at a small hotel/hangout area which was actually fenced off from the beach and Djalma went off to the beach, in a roundabout way, while I sat feeling a bit like an intruder at a table. We left after a short while, Djalma dropped me back at our hotel, my legs were quite tired having been supporting my body against the bumps and turns and minor frights from a day on the back of a scooter. We rested for a short while before the call of the elusive Indian steak called us out from our room, we strolled to a bamboo filled outdoor restaurant ordered some fish fingers to start, some beers and the reason for our trip to Pondicherry STEAK. We kicked back and enjoyed our surprisingly tender slice of cow with chips and sad looking boiled vegetables.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
We made the most of our room the next day not checking out till the last minute before returning the wonderful French café called Bakers Street for a mind bendingly indulgent breakfast. We had a quiche, a divine chocolate brownie (almost as good as my Granny used to make), a chicken baguette, the usual French baguette filled with fresh lettuce and juicy chicken pieces covered in a rich, creamy, peppery sauce (a welcome change from mayo), an éclair, another chocolate brownie and a sweet lime creamy mousse with chocolate and crunchy bits of heaven at the bottom and on top. I washed mine down with a coffee and had to ask Djalma to take me away before we ordered more and I exploded in a mess of over juiced taste buds.
 |
| From Pondicherry, India |
We headed to a small expensive café/artshop (whose signature piece was a pierced elephant graffiti artist) with free but irritatingly slow wi-fi to spend the afternoon passing time till our train was due to leave. The food was so expensive that I went back to get another chicken baguette for dinner, I just couldn't believe that a plain old chicken baguette could be that good. After getting to the train station an hour before our train was due to arrive I left Djalma under a cloud of mosquitoes to get some baby wipes and some anti-mosquito spray which worked like a dream.
Our train arrived and we got on, leaving some of the best food I'd had in a while behind. We arrived at some other station where we waited on the platform watching a cricket match on the TV by the food stand before heading into a non veg restaurant to snooze until our 1am train. The three hours flew by and before I knew it we were boarding the night train with our unconfirmed reservation tickets hoping that at least one person hadn't shown up and that we could take turns sleeping in that berth. The train conductor for our carriage, as for all carriage, was a loud, rude and useless turd who refused to help us shouting at us 'no chance, no chance' until we found the empty berths ourselves.
Early the next morning, I was woken up at around 5am but waited until 6.30am until I woke up Djalma who had slept in another carriage, we sat together in the newly emptied train and watched the green misty world whiz by, well I watched it out the window while Djalma curled up on the seat and slept with his head on my lap extremely annoyed that I had woken him up just so we could sit together.
We arrived at our station mid-morning, possibly Coimbatore although I can't quite remember, and got a bus to Mettupalayam from where the toy train leaves for Ooty in the Nilgiri hills.
No comments:
Post a Comment