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| From the roof top of our couchsurfers home |
Pondicherry is a small city and the capital of Puducherry, it was established and was a thriving French colony in the 1800’s. The city, which was returned to Indian government but remains strongly French influenced. Bakeries sell croissants, strong coffee and pastries, and French tourism is very much alive and well here. We arrived into Pondicherry via government bus and stayed with a couch surfing host in Auroville. We ended up staying longer in Pondicherry than we planned…. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) there was an array of things to do and see and we were having far too much fun with our host Nahid!
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| A spiritual Ross |
Each morning after a swim our first stop was to the local ‘Kofi bar’ for a ‘world famous coffee’ ice-cream coffee extreme and sometimes a vege curry with dosa. Our host was an acentric and young self proclaimed free women with the desire to help anyone with anything… after our first evening at her beachfront house, the household quickly become full with several people bunking on the floor! She hosted a roof top party one evening and we danced for hours to popular Bollywood music before all clambering down to the ocean for a swim under the full moon. Nahid was inspiring and frightfully independent and through her we made many friends!
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| Indian party food (a mix of deep fried snacks) |
In Pondi we also went along to our first Indian blockbuster. A mix of police brutality, romance, slap fighting and singing. In summary the good policeman was promoted, got married and slapped up lots of bad guys. It wasn’t an English subtitle day so were just guessing here? We also visited some more temples and also went inland for an evening in the Sadana forest. Unfortunately India’s forests have been 99.9% wiped out by deforestation but we got to see the current practices in place for restoring what once was a very lush beautiful part of the country.
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| Struggling to squeeze through another door! |
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| The neighbors shrine |
Now that we have been in India for almost two weeks we consider ourselves quite lucky that we haven’t been struck down with a gastro intestinal bug or sickness. We have been very diligent with the hand washing and using mosquito spray but admittedly it took several days to figure out the mosquitos are so hungry and so big they can bite through cotton clothes. So now everything is covered with citronella oil.
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| Consuming the delicious masala dosa |
The only real issue (aside from the tireless touters and scammers) is the heat, it is overwhelming and it makes travelling (or actually just moving) difficult. We still can’t get over that we are experiencing the coldest part of the year…. Ek.
Tot siens,
John and Kara
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| Pool party, Pondichery |
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