Pondicherry is a really nice place; our hotel was opposite the sea. It had a nice boulevard and the old town had pretty old buildings. After a while in India we got used to Indian food, got used to the spices and other ingredients we don't use that much, such as cumin and coriander. We eat Indian food a lot, also because the Western food isn’t always that good. In Pondicherry we went to a restaurant and it was really nice to eat something you know.  The next morning I went to the train station to try to get Tatkal tickets from Trichy to Kanyakumari. A little less than one hour before the counter opened I was there, it was really busy and I first had to find out how the queue worked. After 15 minutes an old man explained I that I could put my application form under a pile other forms, I got number 37.

I hoped that was early enough to get the tickets, but after another hour I reached the counter and the only thing the man could tell me was that there were no tickets anymore. I really felt sad; I waited such a long time for nothing. I needed to change my plans because it was not possible to go by bus to Kanyakumari.  The train to Trichy had a delay that is why we arrived Trichy at 11:30 in the evening. The first hotel we visited was too expensive and really dirty with a lot of cockroaches, so we searched for another one. We walked around with our backpacks until 02:00 o'clock in the morning; we finally found a place to stay.   In Trichy there is the biggest temple of India, it is a Vishnu temple. When you enter you pass a 73 meters Gopuram.

We went on top of one of the buildings and as far as we could see, we saw temples. It was amazingly huge. It was too bad we could not visit everything, because we were non-Hindus. We also visited a church and the Rock Fort Temple. For this temple we needed to climb very high stairs, on top was a Ganesh statue and the view over the city was great!   Trichy was a really hot city, that's why we decided to go to Kodaikanal that afternoon. It is a small mountain village and when we arrived in the evening it was even cold. This is one of the things I really like of India. You could drive for, for instance, four hours and will reach a total different climate.

There is a difference in temperature, environment, people, food, everything could be totally different. There is such a huge diversity in India. In Kodai you could walk in the mountains, some places even got no cars and almost no people. I really enjoyed the smell over there, it was so fresh. There was not much to do, but you could walk around a lake and see some nice waterfalls.  The next day we went to our final destination of the trip, Madurai, where we had to get the plain to Mangalore again. Like everywhere we had one day to spend in Madurai, we went to the Timurmalai Nayak Palace. Which had a nice architecture, but had further nothing to show. Luckily we paid the price of an Indian visitor, because we showed our Manipal identification cards. The same was for the Sri Meenakshi temple.   So eventually we did had a little advantage of being a non-tourist. By the time I will visit the Taj Mahal and pay for an Indian adult, I would have already forgotten I couldn't get the tourist train tickets and will enjoy the advantage of being a student instead of a tourist.

Article Posted By : prajwal316  On March 17, 2013lView All Articles

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http://www.veethi.com/articles/aloha-pondicherry-article-1784.htm

Keywords :
seafood , travel , Pondicherry