Bangalore to Pondicherry
December 24th 1995
Bangalore was cold when the train got in at about seven thirty the next morning. For the first time since i'd arrived in India i had to put a shirt on over my t-shirt. It was too late for the fast express to Madras, which i'd thought about catching, and in the end i decided i'd have to grit my teeth and catch a bus. It wasn't a pleasant prospect, but it seemed to be the only one out of a limited range of choices that would get me to Pondicherry by early evening.
However, it wasn't going to be quite that easy. The bus station was just over the road from the railway station, which was nice and handy, and there was a bus to Pondicherry which was due to leave at half past nine. But it was fully booked. However, for a fee a seat could be found. I don't know who the man was who sorted it out for me, he was in and out of the ticket office like he worked there, so he probably did, but he took a hundred and fifty rupees off me and came back a few minutes later with a ticket. The fare on the ticket was eighty rupees, so it had cost me almost twice as much as it should have, but it was worth it to not have to go through all the hassling involved with normal booking - not to mention the fact that i couldn't have got a seat anyway as the bus was "full".
The journey took a little bit over eight hours, including a stop for lunch about half way. When we'd had lunch, we had to swap buses with people travelling from Pondicherry to Bangalore for some weird reason. Maybe the buses don't like being away from home after dark!
We passed through Senji on the way, which completed an interesting and varied circular diversion on my journey from Madras to Pondicherry. It was nice to see Senji again. Although i doubted i'd ever have a reason to go back there, i'd always remember that little town with affection.
The disgusting materialistic excesses of the christian festival of mammon didn't seem to have penetrated into India, not surprisingly i suppose. But nevertheless a lot of people had christmas holidays - which meant all the hotels in Pondicherry were full the night i arrived, which was a bit of a problem. However, although Pondicherry is supposedly a city, it's a very relaxed place, with none of the deranged hassle of the larger Indian cities, so i wasn't particularly distressed by this problem. I'd taken a cycle rickshaw from the bus station and the driver went round a lot of hotels and guest houses without any success or any sign that there might be somewhere with a bed. In the end, he took me to the youth hostel, which was next to the beach at Muthialpet, right on the northern edge of Pondicherry.
The driver asked me for a hundred and twenty five rupees, which was an extortionate ammount for that journey in a cycle rickshaw, and i doubt he expected me to agree to it. But i didn't argue, in fact i gave him a hundred and thirty, as i didn't have any other change. I always overpaid cycle-rickshaw drivers because they did a lot more work than an auto-rickshaw driver, although their value was set a lot lower. And i enjoyed travelling in a cycle-rickshaw much more than an auto. It was quiet, it wasn't polluting the air and you could see a lot more. Autos were really noisy and smelly and you had to bend right down to see anything from the back of one of them.
Pondy youth hostel was a very strange place. I think i encountered the first unfriendly Indians i'd met up to that point. The staff were fine - just as friendly as everyone else, but the other guests were weird. I tried to say hello to a couple of them but they just ignored me. And the two other people who had beds in the dormitory i was in moved out into another one i think - anyway, they didn't sleep in that one that night.
At the front desk there was a list of rules as long as my arm - in English and French. The whole place was generally quite weird, but then youth hostels usually are, i think, and i wasn't really bothered by it. All i wanted to do was sleep. And that's more or less all i did do.