February 17, 2014 Pondicherry, India

In every trip there is usually a time when the world goes as planned but just not as we would have wanted it to.  An all inclusive resort holiday attempts to avoid this travel trauma and after the stress of today, I am thinking that I should perhaps consider this if I ever get the hair brained travel bug again.

Today, our first rainy day, we arrived in Pondicherry and booked into our okay hotel with no toilet paper, no wifi, no restaurant and constant traffic and horn sounds.  The good and bad is that there are definitely no other tourists here. ( having other tourists usually means that there is something to see as well as okay places to eat. ).  We'd been travelling for twenty two hours to get here. First of all by car at break neck speed down a huge curvy mountain road, then by over night train and then by tuc tuc to a bus station where we couldn't actually get a bus.  Why?  Jim and I are not brave enough or knowledgeable enough.  A bus, and there are many, comes along, but instead of pulling into one of  the over 100 bus parking spaces, stops in the road.  A huge crowd rushes to board.  People toss packages through the windows on the right hand side of the bus so that when they join the crush to board on the left, they just might have a seat.  All could be doable, but we are hot and clammy and I am carrying my huge pack and a broken can. Jim carries his big pack, both of our day packs and his video camera.  We haven't got it in us to run to a nameless bus, pushing to get on, only to stand crunched with our heavy bags for the hours drive to "maybe" Pondicherry.  Eventually we get a taxi that takes us back by the train station and on to our destination. 

Pondicherry is seathing with traffic and the noice of horns. The only creature who isn't rushing or scared is the occasional cow that ambles along loose.  

Most of the motor bike drivers are men.  Sometimes they have the rest of their family along or huge loads of stuff.  

Today I saw one woman driving a motorcycle all shrouded in black with only a slit for her eyes, gunning it down the road.  Later I saw another veiled woman but this time her eyes peered out of a shiny red fabric.  Some how that sent a different message than the black.  Mostly the women motorcycle drivers and riders look gorgeous in their multicolour silk saris.  

Buses, often three abreast, honk their low horns while the motor cycles and rickshaws weave around them.  The cars pass everyone, horns blaring.  Amid this, the pedestrians stride along struggling not to be hit. I am scared to death trying to cross roads. Today an older Indian couple helped me across the nonstop heavy flowing traffic.

And yet I still love India.  I love that when I smile at people they smile back.  I love to see people going about their daily lives; hunkered down washing clothes, cooking on clay stoves, sewing on sewing machines.  I love to see the colourful women with toe rings and glittery sandels carrying loads of grass or big curving containers on their heads, or the brown barefoot skinny old men wearing only longhis useing axes or mauls or driving their teams of oxen or carrying loads of gravel on their heads.