A french taste of India

Madame Santhe, Great Restaurant!
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We had to go out of mamallapuram to get the bus to pondi. There we remet two english giorls that had dinned in the same place we did the night before, Amy and Hannah were their names. Although the bus was crowded the journey felt shorter due to nice travellers experiences sharing!

As soon as we got there a man approached us, nothing new here, people are doing that all the time in India especially on bus-train staions. The thing is he negotiated the price, all is well, but then he tells us to wait a minute, and then goes around the corner and fetches a rickshaw, not an autorickshaw! We immediatly saw that this was not a good idea, the thing looked like it would cramble to pieces if we got there and don't forget it's the two of us and a large bag... We got an autorickshaw instead.

the thing looked like it would cramble to pieces if we got there and don't forget it's the two of us and a large bag... We got an autorickshaw instead

French India...
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We had our eyes on this nice place but it was full so we ended up in this nasty place (at that time it didn't look that nasty, but at night we would find out how bad it really was...)

We walked around quite a lot, it is a nice quiet village with definitely a french taste. Lunch was superb. Madam Santhe is really good, excelent service, good food (a nice break from spicy indian food) and the atmosphere is fantastic.

Later we went to this cool ashram, very peaceful and beautiful. People there were not very amiable, though always telling us where to go... They had loads of books to sell in everykind of language (well notin portuguese but...).

Marques de Pombal in Pondi?! (sorry Portuguese PJ)
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Because we were thinking of staying one more night in Pondi, we decided to look for another place to spend the second night. Here we got to know another thing about indian accomodation. We walked a lot to get to this farely nice hotel, one of these called business hotels for indian business men. These tend to be nicer and midrange in price so a lot of the problems with low end budget joints are not there. The thing is that when we asked if they had rooms they clearly checked us out and saw that they wouldn't wantus staying there so theysaid it was full. This was a greater problem later in Trichy...

So we returned to our hostel, getting used to the ideia that we would stay there. Dinner was a problem and after ordering pancakes with chocolate in this really expensive place (thank you lonely planet, this used to be a pretty affordable place but now prices have sky rocketed!) we ended up eating good pizza (a rarity in India I've heard).

This nightwas reallyterrible, I got lost with how many cockroaches I crushed, they weren't really big, but big enough to discust us both.

We would go to Trichy by train the day after.