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Published: June 14th 2009
From Madurai we took an overnight train to Pondicherry - a lovely coastal town, which was once colonised by the French. As a result, there's lots of French style houses and restaurants, and the locals all speak at least basic French. It was a nice place to relax, and finally eat some non-Indian food!!
We hired a moped for a couple of days to explore the area, and travelled north by about 15km. We hoped to have a dip in the sea, but the whole coastal area is still completely devastated from the 2004 Tsunami. The only thing still standing was a school, and there's now a newly built orphanage. As we drove past, the kids were waving like crazy, and running out to try and get a glimpse of us. Really sweet!
From Pondicherry, we took a daytime train to Chennai (Madras), where we needed to stay for one night so that we could get our connection train the following day to Varanasi.
Chennai was about 45 degrees, and wasn't a nice place - lots of rubbish all around, and a horrible smell of open sewers! Every city we've visited in India has had a huge problem
with rubbish, and Chennai was no exception. There doesn't seem to be a refuse collection system in India. Rubbish is simply thrown out onto the streets, where poor people rummage through it, and take away and sell recyclables. The government doesn't seem to help the situation at all - there are very few bins around, and no organisation to deal with the piles of rubbish.
After 1 night in Chennai, we left for our mammoth train journey to Varanasi - 42 hours....!! We were in 2 A/C, which means a bunk bed, with 6 beds in a dorm. The beds were hard and uncomfortable, and the train was old and grubby! Fortunately we made friends with the Indian family staying in our dorm, and they kindly shared their food out! The journey was long and unfortunately the scenery was pretty dull too!! We passed the hours by playing cards and backgammon - which we're getting pretty good at now!! :-) There was no cleaner on the train, so as the hours passed the toilets and corridors became more and more dirty - to combat the rubbish situation, the train guards simply threw the rubbish out of the moving train
and onto the tracks!! Lovely!!
After 42 very long hours, we finally arrived in Varanasi....
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Rui Miguel
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Varanasi
Hehehehe...! I am waiting for your comment about Varanasi..... You must be very strong to walk and visit the city of the Ganges River... Let me know about! Once again Amazing Indian experience!! Hope you will have time to visit Rajastan PUSKAR a must comercial exchange place in the Montains near Paquistan... Visit Sunset Coffee (Inglish onwer). Cheers