Our last day in Pondy was a slow and lazy one. (One could say that has been the theme of this trip). We packed up and checked out around 11 am. Left our bags at the hotel and headed upstairs to the rooftop dining room to read and laze about until we wanted some food.
i have been reading a book by Michael Woods about his travels around Tamil Nadu and Bill has been reading various thrillers. Along our travels we have picked up various different reading materials, I cook book, and Bill mags and thrillers. At this point, I am itching to get into a kitchen to try out some of these new found treats that we have been sampling on this entire journey
Around 2 pm we headed with our stack of p-cards to the post office. This is a first in a long, long time we have written and MAILED post cards before the last day of our trip! Lazy but efficient!
We headed back to Surguru for another dosa or such around 3 or so. The sambhal is soooo good. I ordered vada in sambhal and a dosa, and Bill ordered the paneer and some naan. We were both quite happy!
We took a circuitous route back to the hotel to enjoy our last afternoon in Pondy and headed down toward the sea. We stopped in a church along the way. At the doorway, a sign told us to take off our shoes and to be silent as it was a place of worship. Just as we entered, echoing through the entire sanctuary was a loud crow cawing. It was somewhere in the dome over the altar. It continued to scream out, mocking the signs for the entire time we were in there.
We sat for a while on the sea wall and enjoyed the breeze and the ocean view. The “beach” is nothing to speak of. A rock breakwater heading into the shallows and above a promenade. We talked about what kind of damage a big storm could do, if it was strong enough, and felt that the stones would hold, but maybe just get a bit shifted.
A surprise was spotting a mongoose, otter (??) flitting in an among the rocks. It’s sinuous body slipping so easily into the crags and cracks. The other wild life that surrounded us were the ever present crows and street dogs. On the rocks to our left was a huge shell of a lobster? Turtle? We couldn’t tell, but I was not going to tiptoe down the rocks to investigate. A street dog nosed her way down there and scrounged in the carcass for something to eat. She brought up what looked to be a flipper, so I guessed that the shell was what we were looking at upturned.
Back in Mahabs, we saw many dead sea turtles washed up on the beach. I was unable to figure out if they had been caught in fisherman’s nets and drowned or were nesting and caught by the street dogs and killed. Either way, that was a lot of dead turtles.
At about 6 we headed back to the “old” hotel to read, get a beer, and dinner before heading out to the over night bus. We both ordered non-spicy foods because we did not know the toilet facilities on the bus....was there one or not? Answer, NOT!
At 9:30 Emile, the manager of the hotel, got us a tuktuk to take us to the New Bus Station to pick up the minivan that would take us to Villapurim to catch the bus to Madurai. According to the woman we purchased our bus ticket from, (insert head bobble) “it is only a short distance, no problem”. I was so glad that we consulted Emile about getting a tuktuk. It was about 7-8 kilometers from the hotel. 100 rupees well spent ($1.60).
We milled about the “station” across from Krishna Bakery. This was the landmark given by the bus company to know where to go to get the minibus, not an address, but across from a bakery! We wait with a few other people before Bill finds out that there is a waiting room up a set of rickety steep stairs. We get up there and wait on a balcony. We, actually I, get nervous about the bus, when a young man comes up to the room to get his girlfriend and tells us that the bus to Villapurim is coming.
We exit to the scrum. It is a madhouse of tuktuks, scooters, motor bikes, bicycles, cars, and any other motorized or people-powered conveyances. We are ushered into a sleeper bus, which is not what we were expecting, and head down a very narrow aisle to lower berth 19-20. Bill stows our stuff in a small cubby and we launch ourselves into the “bed”.
The berth has 2 TVs at your feet, personal AC, partition curtains, pillows and a blanket. We settle ourselves into the bed not sure if we will be heading to Villapurim or are off in another direction!
40 minutes or so later we alerted that we are in Villapurim by a man flashing overhead lights on and yelling something that sounds like Villapurim. We roused ourselves and lurch drunkenly down the narrow corridor to the exit. The terminus is a street, not a station. There is a busman here as well in his balaclava, as it is cold to the Indians, and he directs us to crumbling porch to wait for our bus to Madurai. I called it a porch, but it was actually a mosquito feeding station. They were swarming all around us, in our hair, eyes. It was here that I imagined the multi-armed gods were well equipped to deal with a mozie attack!
We are invited up to another waiting room, up a steep, narrow stairway to the 1st floor. The busman tells us to take our shoes off and we can then enter. The anxiety in me is climbing as we have no idea when the bus is “supposed” to come and how would we know. The same young man and his girlfriend were at the stop. Their bus was heading out sooner than ours and they were very helpful in translating what the busman was telling them to us.
Eventually, we were summoned from the balcony by the busman on the street to come down as our bus was arriving. We get down there and there are the 2 Indians, in balaclavas, smoking, who sat down when we first arrived. We are told, “hurry, hurry”, we wander down the street to a waiting bus, passing a pack of street dogs and several cows browsing at the smorgasbord of trash that was spilling our of some dumpsters. It was dark, but you can see the cow pats all over....I hoped we didn’t step in one by mistake!
Again, the narrow, narrow aisle and us with our packs was I am sure, quite a comical procession. There was no storage bin so we had to put our packs in our berth. Oh, this was an upper berth this time! There was a bit of the 3 stooges as we tried to figure out which way and where to put the big packs. I opted to use the pack as a pillow and the small packs as a foot rest, Bill was resting in the opposite direction. It was a very uncomfortable 4 or 5 hour ride. One could neither rest nor sleep as the bus was lurching and rocking all the time in a non-rhythmic way. As I am typing this, my shoulders are aching. Poor Bill’s back is quite ginger this morning.
When we finally arrived at Madurai, again at a street side not a station, we were met by many tuktuk drivers vying to get our fare to our hotel. We finally get a tuktuk and again thank God, as it looked on the map like it was walkable, nope, this station too was about 8 km from our hotel. Another good deal, no matter the price!
It is just before 6 am, and we arrive at our hotel. They efficiently check us in and show us to our room when we fight the light switches, (See Randome Thoughts Entry for full rant) and fall into a deep sleep for about 6 hours!
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