Of 30-pondy-trichy

Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

 

So it's undisputed that I've lost a bit of steam after the first few heady months.  The heat and hassle-wallahs will do that to you after a while, I've been gone for something like 76 days now and been in India for 5 weeks.  Very few grand adventures, just sort of shuffling around from place to place.  I tried to engineer a good story by trying to get a cycle rickshaw driver to let me cycle him around the other day, but it was met with blank stares and not much anectdotal potential.  I'm lining up a (smaller) mountain climb and some rainforest safari action in Borneo, Malaysia next month so maybe then Johnny Quest will be back.

 

As for the last few stops, Pondicherry, down the road from Mamallapuram, was sort of the odd counterpart to Shimla, the old British capital in the hills where I stopped a month ago.  Pondy, as it's known, was the capital of French India - and after a few wars with the British, it was pretty much all of French India until they gave it back in the 50's.  So like Shimla, it's like somebody plopped a Euro(French Med) town right in the middle of South India on the Bay of Bengal.  Even the cricket playing tamil kids in the street were speaking French.  Unlike Shimla, it has been kept up rather nicely, with contributions from both the French and this weird Sri Aurobindo Society cult type organization which apparently owns half of town.  That said it was a pleasant enough  if not exactly happening, spot in which to purposefully ignore a dubious occasion.  The food was decent there too as a number of French expats live there and have set up some respectable restaurants.

 

The next stop, Tiruchirapalli, aka Trichy, incorporated (as does most of inland Tamil Nadu, alas) the claustrophobic, wall to wall rickshaw, stifling heat  that Northern India does, so in other words it kind of sucks and is not worth my or your time.  It has a cool looking (from afar) big rock temple/mountain in the center of town, right next to a huge-ass cathedral and jesuit college, (lots and lots of churches down south) but other than that, nothing to write home about, other than that  I spent my first night in South India w/o air conditioning - which will be the last such night, ever.  

 

There's also some weird scam down south where everybody asks you for foreign coins.  Some school kid yesterday asked me for it for a "school project" and I gave him a nickel and some pennies and some Hong Kong change, and then I realized his project was probably a fabrication after about 10 other people asked me for foreign coin "souvenirs" as well.  Not sure what the hell they are doing with them.