Bonjour de Pondicherry

We arrived at this French conclave yesterday after a lovely morning drive along roads green with new rice shoots filling the rice paddies. The traffic was very low compared to other trips we have taken and we made it the 98 km in only an hour and a half - that's an average speed of 60 km an hour which is a record I'm sure. The edge of town and through the centre is just like any Indian town, people, traffic, animals, shops, crazy-town, but once we hit the Beach Road, everything had changed.

Here where we are now the streets are wide, the buildings old French colonial style and in their way quite lovely, if moldering quietly in the heat. There are also very few people around the neighbourhood during the day - we have to head across town to find the hordes. Last evening though when we went for a walk on the seawall we were surprised to see how many people had made their way down to the area to walk - just like the passegiata in Spain or Portugal. Or should that be Le Passee in Nice?


French is on many of the signs, the area was only ceded back to India in the late 50's I think, (that's the 1950's) and is now called the Union Territory of Pondicherry. And the restaurants show the French influence with croissants, French bread, dark bitter coffee, and cane furniture (well, maybe that's French-Indian). That's good for us - I do like chocolate croissants and a good cup of coffee.

We are booked for a week here - it's going to be a challenge - since our "hotel" is actually a guest house with four apartments, no common area and no resident staff. The people who run the place are across the street in an antique furniture shop. The four aparments are all rented out, but we've only seen one other couple who are staying here and that's because they walked into our place yesterday afternoon, lookking to book a room. At that point we weren't even sure how things worked so we could only point them off to the shop across the street.

We had dinner at a Pizza place with a wood burning oven - they made a valiant effort and in fact the pizza was close to the real Italian style, except that the cheese was not quite mozzarella and the flavour of Italian herbs was missing too. But the crust was thin and the topping was tomatoes and mushrooms. Breakfast this morning was at a place recommended in Lonely Planet that didn't quite live up to its potential. The food was fine but the odd woman trailing red scarves and bumming smokes from one of the customers was a little off-putting - she walked by at least five times, once carrying her toothbrush, once her comb - which she did not seem to have put to good use and then plonked herself at a table to finish the cigarette she'd cadged. The good news is that we did get a generous amount of toasted baguette with our omelet which is what I was hoping for.

On another tack totally unrelated, we got a message from one of our fellow travellers this morning, Joanna from Australia, to let us and the whole group know that her illness, which started while she was on our trip was in fact Dengue Fever. We are fine, honest and if we had contracted dengue we would have known it by now. It runs its course in about two to three weeks, and since we have been just fine it's obvious we have not contracted it too.

Mind you, right on the beach there is a big humonguous insect-like thing that is displaying information about another disease which is obviously of concern. It is Filiariasis and the display is promoting the drugs which one can take to combat it. I am thinking we need to go in and see if we are at risk and to see if they are passing out the three pills required to keep the disease at bay. We do have insect repellent and there are good fans in our place, as well as an insect repellent electrical thing that puts repellent into the air - but, there was a mosquito or two, let's hope they didn't land on us last night.

Oh, one final note which is a correction. I got updated by friend Terry in Calgary that the planet I saw on Christmas Eve was Mars not Jupiter. I suppose for posterity I have to go in and correct the information in my post, so I will, later. In the meantime, I can explain that what I remember from the newspaper was that the planets Jupiter and Mars were aligned with Earth, or the moon, so I got the wrong planet up there in the sky. I didn't want to leave everyone with the wrong info. And has justice would have it, Terry learned the correct information from The Times of India when he googled for the facts.

Nuff for now. Hugs to all as we count down to New Year's.