Pages From Pondy-Saturday

We had been planning for a trip to Pondicherry, for about a month, and finally all things fell into place, and on April 27, Saturday, Harish and myself, decided to make the trip.

On Saturday morning we reached CMBT-Koyambedu, at 8 AM, we had our breakfast at Nathan's Cafe, a restaurant adjacent to the bus-terminus.

We boarded an express-bus to Pondy, the bus started at 8:35 AM, soon, we were on the scenic ECR and the bus was moving pretty fast away from the traffic snarls of the city.

There were various villages on the way, the bus passed through Mahabalipuram, Kalpakkam, Marakkanam, and we finally reached the Pondy bus-terminus at around 12:20 PM.

We began hunting for rooms, our first stop was Hotel Mass, an imposing white building, on entering it, we realized that it was a Star-Hotel, the room tariff was Rs 1900, for a day, we left the hotel, and crossed the road to another hotel Sabthagiri, the receptionist said that no rooms were there.

Then an auto-driver suggested a guest-house, called Raj GuestHouse, on Palivasal Street, we were a bit apprehensive, but we went there, a double room with a TV for Rs 300 per day, sounded great and I paid the advance, Harish was a bit worried and said that the place was a bit shady, and suggested that I should have looked at some other hotel.

We were informed that we would get a room with the TV in a couple of hours, we left our bags at the reception, and visited the Aurobindo Ashram, then we had our lunch at Adyar Ananda Bhavan.

Then we visited the Auro travel centre to book tickets to Auroville, to our dismay we found that the bus had just left. We were disappointed, and left to our guesthouse. The room was big and clean. We switched on the TV, a local channel was playing the movie"Manamathan," and we saw it.

We left the room at about 5 PM, and walked from our guesthouse to the Manakkulam Vinayakar temple, we completed our darshan and walked to the beach and lazed around the beach till 7:30 PM, then we had our dinner at a restaurant called Juice Wagon and returned to our room.

We were just in time to view the delayed start of the World Cup final. I fell asleep immediately, while Harish saw the full Australian innings.