Pondicherry

After a month-long taxing ride in the North-East, i wanted to go to some place to put my feet up and relax. And what better place to do that than Pondicherry? Never mind the heat though.

So when Moch called me for this trip, without a second thought (as always), I signed up. Leave on Friday evening and come back on Monday morning with the transportation taken care of. Sounds fairy-tale eh? The catch is in the number of people who had signed up. A full dozen and a three-quarter! Yeah, 21 people.

The team (start counting, you may need ur fingers as well as toes): Moch, Jitha, Subbu, Sirish, Anjali, Flavia, Pari, Babitha, Hasan, Harsha, Akhila, Aparna, Naveen, Praveen, Badri, Gautham, Murali, Ritvik, Sushmitha, Holla and yours truly!

Anyways... to keep ourselves entertained during the trip, me and J decided to go speaker-shopping and bought a set of portable speakers for 150 bucks. The speakers entertained/irritated all of us for a good part of the journey.

A few pre-trip calls that JJJ got were quite interesting and worth writing:

X: Hey JJJ, I have a pair of floaters, do I need to wear sneakers??
JJJ: First tell me what are floaters and what are sneakers!

Y: Hey JJJ, do I need to carry change of clothes??
JJJ: I don't care man!

As it always happens with such a large group, we left Bangalore pretty late (around 1 in the morning i guess), which left Aparna quite fuming i hear. After a tea break near Hosur which was almost as long as an elephant's gestation period, we set off to Pondicherry, via Tiruvannamalai (did I spell it right?). The driver of the other cab decided to keep his passengers awake by driving like a drunkard on steroids. The passengers apparently went "Ooooooo", "Aaaaaaaa" and "Ohhhhh" every now and then. The next morning when I got up at 7ish, we were still 60 kms from Pondi and we could see a small hillock in front of us with a fort on its top. So then, trekking instincts took over and we decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately, we took a wrong route and had to abandon our climb mid-way.

Who slapped these people?

After a stop at a bakery for a doodh-peDha session (its paal-khova in Tamil Nadu), we finally reached Pondi at 1 in the afternoon. The chappars that we are, decided to go for budget accomodation, and headed towards Cuddalore where rooms were booked in Youth Hostel. Good accomodation at a mere 100 bucks for a night!

Youth Hostel Dormitory

After cooling our heels for some time, we decided to check out the silver beach very close by. The place is a little crowded (no no, not by the 21 of us) but we managed to find a good place for our frisbee game.

Frisbee Time!

For dinner, the non-veggies decided to get some sea-food and ended up at an uptown place (dont remember the name). The food was decent but the waiter made us wait for too long. Never mind. The Fish-65 was good.

The "no-nonsense" people. Me, Jitha, Subbu and Holla.

Next morning, most of us wanted to go to Mahabalipuram, but Moch, for reasons unknown, was adamant on not going. Pari almost fell at his feet but the bugger didnt budge. But Moch did manage to get everyone ready to go to Auroville. And what exactly did we do in Auroville? Play Frisbee!! Lazing around for most of the day, we went to another beach in the evening for another frisbee session, while some girls and Subbu decided to go shopping (poor Subbu). In the beach, Mochi managed to get his ankles damaged, Harsha managed to do a cool somersault at break-neck speed, Akhila managed to lose her goggles and her cool, me got an inch long cut on the sole of my right foot.

Though in no mood to get back to Bangalore, "Monday-morning" beckoned us. Also, we decided we got tanned enough and headed back, stopping for a quick dinner on the way. Reached Bangalore at 5:30 in the next morning.

A few pics are here, here and here!

Thus continues the quest...