Kochi to Pondicherry

Hi there,

My last entry was written in Kochi (Not Kocki as previously stated, I doubt that's even a place!) where we caught the first bits of the monsoon weather and spent three days enjoying the excuse to get a bit of reading done, play lots of cards and finally venture out in the early evening, when there was normally a bit of a dry spell. It doesn't really cool it down much, just turns the place from sauna to steam room pretty quickly. Kochi was really nice, it's made up of two islands off the mainland, one which is a naval base and the other, Fort Kochi, an old Portuguese fort, which is where we stayed. You could tell it would be spilling over with tourists in the right season, but again we missed that all. You could see it for the fishing town it used to be with these enormous Chinese fishing nets that are cast into the sea all day, taking 6 men and a system of counterbalanced rocks to shift. We spent a fair bit of time watching those, and gaping at the enormous fish and little sharks that they'd pulled up.

From there we went on to Alleppey, and spent a heart-stopping forty quid on chartering a houseboat fr a day and night, which took us round the beautiful Keralan backwaters. It was really spectacular, even in the rain, which only seemed to make everything look more green and alive. The food and hospitality were amazing too, it was the most relaxing thing we could have done, and worth every penny. We had a great guesthouse in Alleppey too, a real family run place. We spent the evening in the living room talking and watching football with the owner, and eating one of the most delicious home-cooked meals we've had here. The plates just kept coming out, each more delicious than the last, and all vegetarian too. We've eaten fish maybe 3 times while we've been on the coast, but other than that it's been an entirely meat-free month!

From Alleppey we spent about 4 hours on the floor of the noisiest, bumpiest, swerviest and beepiest bus we've ever been in, and were eager to get off at Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala (until we saw the rats and roaches). It was really just a stopping off point, and having witnessed some pretty gruesome crash-carnage on the road in, I was keen to leave the next day. Our journey to Pondy, the tiny French enclave on the South-East coast of India was 16 hours by a bus similar to the previous one, only this one had the unfortunate addition of all-night Bollywood at DEAFENING volume! I quite like to watch it for the dancing and stuff, but it really was ear-piercingly painful! We got through it though, a little ruffled and even more devoted to rail travel, and set about finding a place to stay in Pondy.

The town is host to the Sri Aurobindo ashram and a slightly strange community who live by it's principles, in what is supposedly a self-sufficient international community called Auroville (google it!), and we are staying in one of the ashram's guesthouses. It has a few oddities, such as no noise (at all) after 9pm, and names over all the doors of all the rooms (we're staying in 'Imagination'). In a fit of mischievousness we joked about replacing all the names of virtuous traits like 'Kindness' and 'Progress' with things like 'Obstinance' and 'Moodiness' but didn't think the ashram folks would see the funny side, so we left it.

Today we discovered the third best thing about India after the Taj Mahal and biriyanis: mopeds! We've been carving up the streets all day, although you have to be pretty cautious as there don't seem to be any rules to it. As neither of us has ever ridden one before there was a brief spell of being overtaken by pushbikes this morning, but now we are lording it over anything slower than an entire Indian family on a motorbike. They get a bit sluggish.

We're doing a bus tour tomorrow so we'll have our tartan blankets ready to go over our knees, and hopefully there'll be no more Bollywood. We lost our Lonely Planet, so it's the next best way to orientate ourselves. I daresay the day after will see some more moped action!

Our next move will be on the 1st of July, when we'll be getting a bus to Chennai to catch the 33 hour train to Delhi fro our flight out. We don't really want to go back, as South India has really just served to illustrate how stressful the North is, but we only have one night there before flying to Bangkok, so we'll just make the most of it. After the last 2 weeks or so since we've really started to enjoy India we can't complain too much.