Trip to India - Day 3 (April 22, 2006)

Starting the Day

Another early day; this time, the bus was late. This turned out to be a good thing, as there were no samosas around, but Fay picked us up some idlis, which would have been murder to eat on a moving bus. She also obtained two giant bottles of water, since it appears we went through about four litres the previous day.

Vijay and Vibhawary

As we waited, we checked out the other tourists. To our great surprise, and theirs, we recognized a nice young couple we had met on the Kanchipuram/Mamallapuram tour the day before. They were visiting Tamil Nadu on vacation from Mumbai, on the opposite (Arabian Sea) coast of India.

That’s Quite a Tour Guide!

We got to the main TNDC depot, and waited again for our bus. It finally arrived, and we were off. Our tour guide deserves some special mention; he was neither as friendly nor as competent as our guide on Friday. He said very little, and he had, no doubt unconsciously, a terrible sense of how English is used. As we stopped at each site, he would stand up at the front of the bus, take the microphone, and say, half conversationally and half peremptorily, “get out.”

The driver was not much better, we never spoke to him, but he had, for some reason, to be back in Chennai early, requiring that we shave about two hours off the tour. One can’t really blame him, perhaps, as the tour is scheduled to take about twelve hours.

Auroville

This is a “New Age” community; the denizens have been building a meditation centre, the Matri Mandir, for the last thirty years or so. It is almost complete, and should be ready next year; it is already quite striking. It is in the form of a giant sphere, with gold-plated disks affixed to it to reflect the light.

It was Earth Day, which is clearly a date of great significance for the, many of whom are immigrants from the Western world. We passed a large Happy Earth Day party on our way to the Matri Mandir.



Pondicherry

I have wanted to visit Pondicherry ever since reading Yann Martel’s very annoying Life of Pi. It is a former French colony, and is actually not in Tamil Nadu per se; rather, it is the capital of the Union Territory of Pondicherry, a set of former colonies which don’t quite fit into the other states of South India. There is a strange dichotomy to the city. The outskirts clearly belong to the third-world city, but the town centre is full of beautifully white-washed low buildings and could pass for a peaceful Mediterranean village if the street signs were not in French and Tamil.



Unfortunately, because of our driver’s hurry, we did not have any opportunity to explore Pondicherry beyond those places the tour took us. This was the one disappointment we had on the trip; I hope we can return sometime and stay a day.

Pondicherry Museum

The Pondicherry Museum contains very a few ancient artifacts, including some amphorae dating back to when the port was visited by ships of the Roman Empire on the way to the Far East. Much of what is there is rather modern for my tastes; some of the artwork in one of its galleries are from the 1960s, which makes me thing the only reason it is in the museum is to fill it up. Upstairs, there are some rooms full of French furniture of uncertain, but undoubtedly modern, vintage.

Perhaps the high point of this stop was that there was another Tamil movie being filmed nearby.

Lunch

Lunch was at a very disappointing restaurant; Vibhawary, with whom we dined, pronounced herself disgusted by the offerings. I was hungry; I even ate the fruit salad. I believe, in retrospect, that this was a huge mistake – it is the most likely culprit for the discomfort I experienced on the thirty hours we spent in transit from Colombo to Toronto the following Wednesday.

After lunch, we walked around a little. We were to be back at the bus by 1:45, but all the stores were closed until 2:00. We found a tent about 500 meters from our lunch place, across from a statue of Gandhi, full of people selling handicrafts, but nothing appealed to us.

Aurobindo Ashram

The next stop was the famous Aurobindo Ashram. Interesting, I suppose, if you are into that sort of thing. I am not.

We took a quick tour and got out; not being into meditation of any sort, it seemed like a bit of a waste of time to me, but Fay picked up some books on the philosophy of yoga, and also, for some reason, a book called Learn Sanskrit The Natural Way for me.

The Backwaters of Tamil Nadu Revisited

This stop was as inevitable as the one before. There was no filming taking place at the docks this time, so it was much less crowded than the day before, and a little more relaxing. We say the occasional fish jumping out of the water, but primarily just sat back and enjoyed being out of the crowds and out of the rickety tour bus. I had feared my neck would suffer some kind of fracture from the bumps of the buses over the last twenty four hours. Once again, there was tea. Once again, I had to get some made specially without milk or sugar.

Chennai Central Railway Station

We returned to the main TNDC depot; another woman Fay had befriended offered to take us to a bookstore to pick up a book on learning Hindi for me. We wanted to stick with Vijay and Vibhawary as well, so the five of us packed ourselves into an auto-rickshaw. It was a tight squeeze, but fortunately, they are substantially larger than the Sri Lankan three-wheelers.

The book store was located in the city’s main railway station. I come from a large city (Toronto, population c.a. 2 500 000), but nothing prepared me for the crowds in the train station. I was overwhelmed to the extent that I can still not describe it.

Dinner with Friends

Finally, we ended the day by going out for dinner with our three new friends. Vijay and Vibhawary were kind enough to buy us dinner, and it turned out that the restaurant we went to was a short three blocks from our hotel. We wanted to get to the airport early the next day, so we called it a night. Our bottle of scotch stayed unopened.