Apologies and Holidays I

Dear Frustrated Readers,

I’ll admit I have been terribly remiss in updating this blog. I have been back in Kodaikanal for a month, and not so much as a peep! I blame this partially on the fact that the internet has not been working in Loch End for the past 8 days; partially on the fact that the semester has started and I am busy doing all of the planning that I promised myself I’d do in advance and still haven’t done; and partially on my own laziness. Actually, scratch that. It’s a bit different from laziness. It’s intimidation, pure and simple. Too much has happened over the past two months for me to ever adequately describe it in a single blog, and the prospect of writing one blog entry for each location fills me with UTMOST DREAD.

Nevertheless, let me try.

First, an overall view of the trip and details of travel:

Lowri and I left Kodaikanal on the 24th of November, and took a bus down the mountain to Madurai. At the Kodai Road train station, we had dinner at a little dosa/parotha place across the road, and then waited for about 4 hours for the train. We took the train to a station near Pondicherry, arrived at 3AM and discovered that there was no train to Pondicherry until 10AM – so we decided to hop on a bus. We stopped at the side of the road and hailed the first bus we saw, but it was already (typically!) so full of people that they were hanging out of every door. Impossible! Especially with our giant backpacks. So we took an autorickshaw (henceforth to be referred to just as “rickshaw”) to the bus station, and got on the next bus headed for Pondicherry. Lowri had to stand while I sat with both packs on my lap, and the ride took about an hour and a half, bringing us to Pondiherry at approximately 5AM. We had been planning on heading to a little guesthouse recommended to us by a friend, but had no phone number for it; so we got off the bus and collapsed on a bench on Pondicherry’s lovely seaside promenade. It was still completely dark, but there were multitudes of joggers and power-walkers (Indians are VERY into power-walking, and usually do it with mittens on, which I find hilarious). After many forays and misunderstandings, we finally did make it to that guesthouse, but only after we had watched the sun rise, gloriously, over the Pondicherry shore.

We spent a few days in Pondicherry and neighboring Auroville, eating well and enjoying the first relaxing stage of our journey. This involved: an excellent steak at a French restaurant, some random Aurovilleans who took us to the beach, run-ins with the police, a broken scooter, trilingual shouting matches, and real coffee.
From Pondicherry we took the train to Chennai, then switched trains immediately to get to Hyderabad.

--- And here I will leave the first installment. Hopefully having begun it will inspire me to finish... Photos soon. ---