Happy People
Sacred Pond Sacred Pond Temple entrance Cerimonial Chariot in Kumbakonam Another Cerimonial Chariot.. Our day off in Kumbakonam saw us visiting more temples and the grand pond. This either enormous pond or small lake is the centre piece of a 12 yearly festival where 12000 people bathe in it at once. It’s a very impressive lake and is surrounded by steps for easy access, but fenced off for most of the time so you can’t get into the holy waters easily. Although some thinner than us folks squeezed through the fencing for a dip. We have had a fair amount of Indian food so...
Read MoreLive long and prosper..
Leaving Pondicherry on a bicycle at rush hour is an activity only Klingons will truly appreciate. Before jumping on to their Bicycle, Worf would no doubt shout “Today is a good day to die”. It’s certainly the best attitude to have when cycling here. Once you accept there’s no way you’ll survive this madness you can relax and enjoy it. To be fair to the local drivers, they all miss each other and although it looks utter chaos to us rule abiding westerners I think they generally know what they’re up to and if you behave like they expect you to – throw...
Read MoreOutshining the Prime Minister….
Leaving behind the oasis of our beach hotel we headed south on the main road. There’s no choice here unless you want to divert inland a considerable distance. So we hogged the edge of the road and let the cars, trucks, busses and Tuk Tuks do their thing. We saw a mexican standoff, where a bus busily ignoring the oncoming traffic tried to overtake a truck and the car coming the other way had to stop in the road. They were both nose to nose and neither would move whilst the rest of the traffic squeezed past on the outside hooting even more than normal. And then a bus that didn’t...
Read MoreTime for a rest!
And we’re off…. Having had the chance to experience the traffic in Chennai first hand in multiple tuk tuks, we decided the best time to set off on our cycle seemed to be sometime before the invention of the tuk tuk! As this wasn’t an option we opted for getting up at 5.30 and leaving at sunrise, which turned out to be a good plan. The traffic was light and we managed to get out without any difficulty. But it’s hot work, even at that time in the morning and we’d drunk 2 x 750ml bottles of water by the end of the first 20km. The journey itself showed the huge gap...
Read MoreWhat have we done!
Reassembling Tilly Suresh, owner of the best bike shop in the world! Lost its former glory… Kamwaadeswaa Temple Amateurs..!! We saw one with 5 on! Market day Sugar cane juicing Our flight was almost empty, not even enough people for one per row, but pleasant and quiet and as we disembarked we asked each other “What have we done!”. Too late now though as we passed through another high security check on entering the airport – they obviously take security seriously here – the X ray guy was fast asleep! After we collected Tilly, Customs immediately pulled us...
Read MoreAll change
We arrived back at the airport Hotel after a wind assisted cycle that we’ve now done 3 times, feels a bit like being at home! We’ve been closely following the Corona Virus updates for Taiwan, where the CDC publish updates as they happen in English listing every case, where it originated, the contact tracing as well as how the person is being treated. Its excellent and gets 3 or 4 updates a day despite being one of the first counties to get the virus outside China and being only a few miles from the mainland and having direct flights to Wuhan there has so far only been a handful...
Read More
Recent Comments