The roads here are hilarious...

So, I'm further along in my journey through Tamil Nadu. Once again, I awoke to the sound of fierce rain pounding down. I had wanted to wake up early and get some photos of the sun rising over the Bay of Bengal, but I slept in. My cold has wiped all my energy (though I'm still deluding myself into thinking that I'll be better in the morning). Not that sleeping in hurt my chances at getting that elusive sunrise, the cloud cover was constant today. The rain wasn't as fierce as yesterday, but it was far more constant.

I visited a bunch of temples today. Some of the temples here are fantastically painted. I always thought that it was plaster covered in paint, but I discovered that lots of these places are actually painted stone. Some of the stone work is just outstanding. I hope that my photos do it all justice.

Every temple that I find is filled with people wanting to serve as a guide. From now on, I'm going to take a pass. Every temple is the greatest this, or the biggest that. Every city is the central location of devotion and artwork in the region. And at the end of every tour, people always want to know if I enjoyed the temple. To be honest, and bear in mind this is partially being sick speaking, but they're all so similar, it's hard to tell them all apart. Final review of the guides in general, is that they tell you a bunch of obvious things, occassionally show you something kind of nifty, but are rarely worth your while if you can do some reading in advance.

The condition of the roads here are really ridiculous. From Chennai to Pondy, the roads were okay. Some of it was really well paved and very smooth. Unfortunately, as soon as you leave Pondicherry, the roads decay dramatically. Think of a really badly potholed road, now make it worse. Unfortunately, the rain was pretty bad, so I didn't hop out and photograph the immense potholes. Hopefully tomorrow will bring some sun and some more chances to show you the worst paved roads that I could possibly imagine. In some places (I'm talking 100m segments) there were clearly more potholes than roads.

I'm checked into a pretty swish place tonight, a bit of river resort, that's at the end of a 10km road with nothing else on it. I commented to my driver (who has decided to pocket his accomodation allowance and sleep in the Chevy Tavera instead of going to a hotel) that as bad as the road to the hotel was, it was still better than the highway out of Pondy. I think it was the first time that I saw him laugh. (He's appalled at the fact that I'm not married yet... He flat out said that my life was meaningless without a wife and children).

Tips for travellers:

I hate internet cafe's. I never know what kind of software is running in the background logging my keystrokes. So I've found a bit of a workaround. Open up notepad, start typing in gibberish, but use the mouse to move stuff around. Then in notepad you can create a list of your userid's and passwords (or even better store it on an USB memory key if you can). Then when you go to sites, you can copy and paste them from the document to the login screen. If you use the mouse for everything, key loggers are pretty much out of luck. In the future, I'm going to create a webpage for my travels, so that I can simply go to one page and then get a list of links to all the sites that I need (work, bank, email, etc.) Basically, I don't trust any public terminal.


I'd better get moving, but stay tuned for my "Killing the Golden Goose" post that I've been putting together today. I'll polish it off tonight, and then post it as soon as I have a better internet connection (I'm on dialup right now.)