Road Trip – India (Part 2)

First Night – Pondicherry

Being on a road trip like this one, it’s impossible to tell where we are going to be when night falls. Therefore making hotel reservations was out of the question. Therefore 2 hours of our night in Pondicherry was spent driving around, looking for a hotel to stay. Most hotels were full for two reasons – 1) Pondicherry is a kind of a party town where young Chennai natives go for a wild weekend of drinking and partying and 2) Because of the political meeting, even more people decided to leave the city and Pondi is the nearest destination.

By 9:30, we still hadn’t got a room and I was beginning to panic. I know how Mary and Joseph felt, not that I was about to have a baby, but the part of being tired and stopping at every inn and not finding room to rest. Finally Malar called one of his friends, who told us to try a place called Shanti Inn. It was on a street that we had already driven by twice, but we didn’t see it because at the street level, you only see the door. The rest of the hotel is on the 2nd – 5th floors. The rooms were clean and air conditioned, the bathroom looked recently washed and the bed was comfortable. We decided to stay.

Dinner was room service, although no one had much of an appetite from all that traveling. Ok, honestly, that was not the reason. Pondicherry is apparently some kind of tax haven for alcohol. A bottle of Smirnoff vodka only cost SGD$16. So everyone decided to camp out in my room and have a few bottles of the stuff, “to help to relax”. They were so relaxed, I had a hard time kicking them out, because I wanted to sleep. Tomorrow we go to Sirkazhi, a big day for me. I needed to sleep.

Before I end this post, a word about Indian TV. Firstly, I love the fact that every channel has people who look just like me – beautiful Indian girls endorsing products in ads and good looking men reading the news. And the ads are really a lot more creative and sometimes risqué then what we get in Singapore. There is this one ad where the opening sequence is a medium shot of a woman, waist up, squatting on something and bouncing up and down with her eyes closed. The next shot is a long shot of her rinsing out the pair of pants she had just washed by hand, and turning to show it to the camera. It was an ad for washing soap.

And these people had a problem with Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty? What the…?

Sex and nudity is not really an issue in India. People are bathing in public places all the time, the men wearing a little less than a thong and the women a sheer sari or cloth that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. The problem was probably that Richard was an old geezer, kissing a young nubile woman. Yeah, I think that was probably it.

For pictures, click here.