My Incredible India Discovery

I recently went to an ECO Beach Resort in Pondicherry called - The Dune. I heard about this one from one of my friends from Pondy and he kept saying it’s a nice place to go to! I finally made it there on my anniversary (wow I wrote my previous post here while I was honey mooning and now It’s anniversary). Anyways, our anniversary fell on a weekend and for celebrating we wanted to go to a nice place which didn’t ask for loads of travel, and bingo! We went to Pondy!
What can I say about this place, I initially thought that it was an over-hyped, over-priced place made for the firangs who visit Pondy and I and Vishnu would probably be the only Indians around! I am so glad i thought wrong! - The place was heaven! It had nothing high fundu about it, a place made with simplicity and common sense. The cottages are not luxurious and hep, but cosy and serene. I must say the place is little expensive, but I also think that it is a trade off for being close to nature. The cottage we took was "The Flex House". It was supposedly sea-facing - but after tsunami, they grew tall trees/bushes in front of the cottages (Govt rule). The cottage would be a size of a one bedroom apartment. The wall and windows were illuminated and the bed was placed right in the center of the room (Like a big box in the middle of the room). The windows would open to a sitting area facing a small lawn which had a tiny lotus pond, a hammock and a bench. We were given 2 cycles and were told to feel free to cycle around the place.
I have never driven a cycle in my life (though I have driven Scooty, Kinetic Honda and every other small bike). I took inspiration from my hubby and sat on the cycle, nervous! After a few meters of cycling (and him running after me) I finally got the knack and Yippppeeee!!!!!!!! I could CYCLEEEEEE! We spent most of the evening cycling and exploring the property. We finally parked our cycles near to the beach and spent hours looking at the soothing water. We as usual got into our funny photos mood and went click click click :).
We came back from the beach later in the evening and as we got into the cottage...Tada...surprise!!!!!! We had a beautiful flower decoration done on the floor. This surprise was given by The Dune staff :) So nice of them, I thought! We spent some lazy hours and finally went for dinner cycling :). As we entered the fully lit restaurant, the manager routed us away from the restaurant to the tables outside in the lawn. As we approached, I figured we were in for a surprise again! Yes, I was right; the table was beautifully decorated and specially reserved for the both of us :) We had a nice long romantic candle lit dinner and were waiting for our huge bill to arrive and that's when another surprise struck us! The manager, the chef and the waiters all gathered at our table with a small cake which said "Happy Wedding Anniversary" and a big card with a big drawing and signatures of all the staff @ The Dune! We cut cake and thanked for their surprises! Both of us surely enjoyed that moment and completely fell in love with the place.
I was happy that we went there to celebrate our special day! We completely enjoyed our short stay and we never wanted to come out from there. The weekend went by in a swift and the next day we were back to the scorching hot city called Chennai and were back to our normal routines as well!
Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/sak.adeeb/TheDuneFeb2010?authkey=Gv1sRgCNz36Mmtkc6cAw
About the Dune: http://www.thedunehotel.com

Our drive to Darjeeling was very smooth. Good roads, nice sceneries and frequent chai breaks made the drive easy on us. Most part of the route was adjacent to the “Himalayan Toy train” tracks and we kept singing the Rajesh khanna hit “Mere sapno ki raani…”. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any train on those tracks (the trains run early in the morning and we were on the roads post noon). Our driver had a huge collection of Hindi songs; I specially enjoyed it because most of them were peppy numbers and big time hits of Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna and Shashi Kapoor :) (Don’t bother if you don’t know them, Google if curious)

After a while we started spotting hills which lead to little bigger mountains and to much more bigger mountains. Like a mystery, they were getting unfolded from the dark one by one. As we were approaching Darjeeling we spotted “Kanchenjunga” and we went “WOWWWWWWWW”. I had never seen such a gorgeous and spotless beauty! I had absolutely no words to describe this gigantic creation of nature. We kept sighting the mountain from every possible angle. Our camera just could not capture the white snow capped mountain as it matched with the sky color.
We finally reached our hotel and took our own sweet time to get ready and get set for a small walk in the town.

We are very used to being late :), we come from the concrete jungle where we come back from work late, and we sleep and also eat late. Habitually we got ready at 6:30pm (Which I think was very early for us). When the receptionist spotted us going out, he was taken aback and said “Madam, itne andhere mein kaha jaa rahe ho? Shops sab bandh ho chuke hain??”.. And I went “:-O” (Don’t imagine my face doing that, instead think of the yahoo emoticon version of this ;-)..)Later did we realize that the sun sets early here and people are early to home, early to bed and early to rise. We still took a chance and walked out in the dark.

The town was deserted, we felt as if it was midnight on the roads. A curfew to be precise! We did feel a little scared on the dark roads and felt out of breadth by just walking up a few galis (streets). We finally made our way to “The Chaurasta” - The place is little elevated and acts like a tourist spot as it provides a good view of the town. We could not do much of photos due to scarcity of light and headed back to the hotel pretty soon. Like hungry scavengers, we straight went into the restaurant for a delicious meal. And to add on to the flavor, we had pianist playing lovely all time favorite Hindi songs (Yes, Its Hindi again).. I felt so much at home and enjoyed my supper.

We were finally good to call it a day and were excited for another eventful day. A nice long day came to an end and so will this post :-)

After our visit to the beautiful Merick Lake, our driver took us to the “Nepal Border”. We were initially surprised and thought we don’t have any visa prepared for Nepal and we cannot cross boundaries!. But the good part was, we were allowed to go inside Nepal with just any Identity proof. The Boundary police took down our names and they said, “aish karo” :). the funny part was he asked my name i said “Sakina”, he wrote the same spelling. He asked his name and he said “Vishnu”, the person at the counter wrote “Bishnu”..lol…

Anyways, The way it works that Indians are allowed to go shopping in the Nepal market 1.5kms from the border. There were enough and more cab guys on the other side of the border to take us to the market and bring us back after an hour or so.

Hearing the word “Shopping” did bring a broad smile on my face and we set out to see what we could loot (the shop or his purse..;-)..). I tried to be nice and allowed Vishnu to shop for himself ;)…he tried to buy shoes but unfortunately none of the shops had sizes close to his feet! The shoes for guys were half the size of his huge feet. We finally gave up and went to shop for myself (Yippee!). My first purchase was a Purple pashmina for myself. We bought couple of more stuff from the market and again got back to clicking pics :))..in sometime we were back to India and the driver anounced “Ab hum Darjeeling jayenge“…..and I said “Darjeeling Hum aa rahe hain!!”

We arrived @ NJP next day morning (Nov 1st to be precise). Clueless on what to do next I call my travel agent asking if someone has come to pick us up. After half an hour of negotiation with the wrong agent, I finally received a call from the driver who was impatiently waiting at the station premises to pick us up and take us to our first sight-seeing spot - Merick Lake.

The lake was nice and calm. The water looked clean and did have some small fishes too. The place was well equipped to be called a “tourist attraction” with lots of shops and horse riding too. The lake was surrounded by a neatly maintained lawn and was divided by a bridge at the center.

Vishnu and I started our “photography” skills and took some good pics of the lake and us :). We spent a good half an hour at the lake and enjoyed the breeze and the music of the small ripples which were formed on the lake.

This was our first, but not the last beautiful spot of the trip!…