chennai to pondicherry on cycle

dec 8th 2006
set on for a trip to pondicherry from chennai. its about 135 kms. and we thought it would be cooler to cover that distance on cycles. the guys whom i went with on the trip kiruba and shyam. they had done a longer trip a few months before from bangalore to chennai and yes on cycle. but for me it was the longest ever. the longest one before this was mahabalipuram which is about 45 kms from chennai.

so we started at 0500hrs from thiruvanmiyur bus depot. first 40 or 50 kms were no big deal and we werent feeling tired at all. we had breakfast somewhere before mahabalipuram. and only after riding about 70 or 80 kms did i began feeling tired. but we took frequent stops every 6 to 10 kms for 5 minutes or so. in the afternoon we had lunch and had a siesta for i think about an hour. and then kept going again. finally we reached pondy at about 1800. shyam had a speedometer on his cycle and it said our average speed while riding our bikes was about 20kmph. covering about 135 kms with about 6.5 hrs of riding time and about 5 hrs of rest time. which is quite slow that wasy but we werent in any hurry coz e had all the time. and besides it was jus for fun and not a race.after reaching pondy we stayed at a place about 7kms before the main pondicherry city. had a great dinner. then a nice sleep.

day 2 woke up and started for auroville a township just outside pondicherry city and about 8kms from ECR (East Coast Road, the chennai pondicherry highway also known as new mahabalipuram road). plan was to spend a day roaming after reaching there and take rest and start next day back to chennai. but after going auroville we couldnt come out it was quite big and too beautiful to leave. the architecture, the peace, the vegetation which was so dense and hard to believe that every single tree over 2 million of them was planted by hand one by one over past 30 years when aurovile began. and most importantly the people. you can talk to them whole day and never run out of things to talk about and their energy to talk never seems to decrease a bit. its hard to describe auroville, theres jus so much to tell about it . u can learn more about it from here www.auroville.org and here anyway so we were supposed to spend one day roaming there and come back cycling the next day. but it was so beautiful there that we decided to stay another day and after that we decided to stay yet another day and then finaly ended up coming back by bus after staying 3 days in auroville. met many people some of whom have lived from the start of auroville from past 30 years. there are many tiny places in auroville. and pathways connecting them. some of them are even non motorable. but our cycles can go anywhere so we didnt have any problem. someone was even kind enough to lend us a map of auroville. and it turned out to be most useful thing and we took it whereever we went. hard to go anywhere without it.
in the afternoon we went to a place called solitude where Krishna who mainatins tht place grows 95% of the food they eat in his beautiful organic farm. and we helped them in cutting grass for the cows they keep. and he showed us his farm and all the things he grows and techniques he follows. one of the things he said was tht the soil should be touched to minimum and trying to till it often only spoils the soil and takes longer to recover. he also showed us human waste decomposing tank where the wastes get deposited and are acted upon by bacteria and kept for about 6 months and then all the waste turns into manure. we even held it in our hands and it didnt even smell, it was jus like plain mud. then i climbed a very tall windmill. which was one of the scariest things i ever did in my life. it was almost 90° vertical and about three or maybe four storeys tall. was scared to hell climbing it but somehow successfully reached the top. Krishna came 12 years before to aurovile and built that place solitude. and plans to keep staying there for long time. he even invited us for dinner and we cooked on firewood using the vegetables from the farm. it was really nice spending time with them. the pics are in the album below. next day Kribs and I spent some more time exploring many new places and meeting new people before finally deciding to leave the heaven we'd staying from past few days. but we were out of time to come back on cycle so we put our bikes on top of bus and came back. it took us only about 3 or 4 hours to come back. but it was nothing like the 12 hour journey on day 1 :)

lots more info and pictures in the album below.

Pondicherry trip

"A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." -Lao Tzu