Mallalapurum and Pondicherry.

We took a bus to a little beach town called mallalapurum. It was just fantastic! Very quaint town that makes its liveliihood from carvings. Every litle store has carvers at work and a single carving the size of a fist can take 10 days to finish. Its pretty amazing seeing how skilled they are. The town also has a huge bunch of amazing temples which we biked around for the day. We also attempted to bike 28kms to another temple, but made it about 6 and then turned back. Lucky for us it was also the Pongal festival in Tamil Nadu and when we woke the streets and sidewalks were littered with amazing drawings made from chalk in powdered form, mostly of trees or cows (the festival is of the end of harvest) and saying HAPPY PONGAL 2008. Women walked down the street with candles and let them out into the ocean on coconuts. All very special indeed. Aside from that eating lots of fresh fruit and juices aplenty, and lots of seafood too - yummy! We even got treated to some pongal (ghee with rice stuff) by the indian family that rented us the bikes. aw. Caught another bus to Pondicherry a couple days later and to be honest wasn't that IMPRESSed with the place. Its nice, it has a nice promenade down the beach front and some reasonable places to eat, but it definately didnt touch me in any special way. Theres lots of french influence and a great handmade paper factory which was just up my alley. Ended up buying stuff and my pack is getting reallllly heavy despite trying to send some stuff home (sorry mum for all the packages you must be receiving!). Not much more to say about Ponders really, apart from that its nice and quiet and people think you must be french if you're foreign, so lots of oui ouis etc.