To the heart of Tamil Nadu

I received an email from my travel agent today, informing me that SA immigration officials are planning a 'crippling' strike, so I should arrive at the airport very very early for my flight, just in case. It seems that it is becoming increasingly onerous to travel internationally these days, what with the baggage restrictions, red tape, psychotic plane bombers etc. We just invented air travel so we could spend more time on the admin......

I will be flying to Mumbai, and then catching a connecting flight to Chennai, where KYM is located. Chennai is the capital of Tamil Nadu, in South East India. As someone pointed out, it is not really near any of the more famous cities. It's fairly close to Bangalore, seat of India's IT boom, but this is in relative terms, India being a rather large place. Chennai is very close to Pondicherry, which is a most interesting place. My interest in it comes from reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, definitely one of my top ten books. The hero, Piscine Molitar Patel (yes, he did get called 'Pissing' at school) lives with his family in Pondicherry, where his father runs the local zoo. This is fiction, but I intend nevertheless to trawl Pondicherry to find out where the zoo may have been. Since it is also the only place the French ever got a foothold on the subcontinent, there will also be coffee and croissants on offer - can't miss that!

Just outside Pondicherry is the Aurobindo Ashram, always worth a visit, and then there is Auroville. Auroville is an anachronistic community of hippies, artists and people who choose an alternative lifestyle, mostly hailing from Europe and North America. It operates much like a large commune, although from what I can gather change is in the air - they even have their own website now! Being too young to have really ever seen anything of the counter-culture movement of the 60's and 70's I think a trip here might be quite educational.