Pondicherry – Wendy's Out of Station

Chronologically you’ve already had the next episode embedded in 2017 so if you missed The people in the restaurant aka Murder in the Mansion pop over and read it here.

I’m struggling writing to you about being a Temple Junkie this last few days so I’m just jumping up to today. Patience is a virtue and you’ll get your temples in due course. We arrived in Pondicherry about lunch time. This once French colony does still have a very French feel and look and it’s not just that the policemen wear caps that make them look like they’re straight off the set of Casablanca! Anyway the hotel’s on a dingy road down the corner from the bazaar and I nearly didn’t get out of the car. Lucky I did because inside this heritage mansion’s grotty exterior is a beautiful boutique gourmet hotel – best yet this trip even without a roof top pool.

After lunch of BBQ prawns and lemon rice followed by chocolate pudding (it is a French colony remember) and sending off my washing, I decided on a walk. Karthik decided I needed company and he also needed a walk. Continue reading “Eventually everyone comes to Rick’s”

So before the temple junkie diversion I had already taken you to Pondicherry where I was kissed by an elephant. What happened next? Damn I keep getting behind. Apologies for any confusion or repetition. The next day in Pondicherry started early walking with Karthik up to the big Sunday food market at 630am: a riot of fish, fruit and veg and flowers. I photographed the cauliflower man. He told Karthik that everyone photographs him. In my best Hindi I told him that is because he is beautiful. Half the market cried laughing. It was huge.

Then it was off with Joseph the guide to a commune and ashram. I’m of the view that “the Big Golden Golf Ball” is a cult and a scam so we’ll leave it at that.
Continue reading “The rocky town with the name I can’t pronounce”

About Wendy’s Out of Station

Wendy's Out of Station

I write as a way of processing and reflecting on experience, and as a way of sharing that experience. When I travel I used to write email journals back to friends, family, anyone who’d read and risk immersing themselves in my reality for a while: writing for them was a way of writing for me. Borrowing from Graham Greene in a flip of Travels with my Aunt, I imagined writing letters to my nieces, as their travelling aunt. Crafting the sentences became a way of extruding the experience, giving it birth, drawing its meaning from my soul, nurturing it into something tangible with a life of its own. The aim of my blog is to open the world to my thought-children, to let them out of the safety of my friends and family and let them experience the world. And in the process I get the honour of taking a larger group with me when I’m wandering around India and beyond, or just reflecting on parallel truths, thinking thoughts that take me to new places new beginnings. Please journey with me