Lightning striking twice!

"Lightning never strikes twice..." as the internet search engines will tell you, is regrettably not true. Moreover, my own sad experience will vouch for it. On my second day in India, an electrical power surge blew the wiring in my laptop adaptor, and on my last day in Mattindia, a week ago, the same thing happened again. At least I knew now to resolve the problem; I would have to buy a new DELL accessory from eBay India, and have it delivered to Pondicherry. More of that later. 

The journey across India from West to East was pleasant enough, apart from the weight of my luggage. I was beginning to regret the decision to make primitive knives the subject of my next collection of authentic artifacts. Then there were clothes. I couldn't bear to start shedding old clothes yet, and hadn't thought through my decision to have half-a-dozen shirts made (£2.50 each) which weighed little but took up a lot of space.

All in all, it was a painful struggle to haul my backpack and my hold-all most of the 24-coach length of the platform to find the approximate position where I would board.

4 berths are set across the width of the carriage
and two in line with the direction of travel

 I then struggled along the narrow corridor and collapsed into my "2/AC" compartment, relieved to find that berth 55 was on the lower lever and would not require me to negotiate the iron ladder to get upstairs. 

"2/AC" stands for 2-tier air-conditioned. 3-tier is rather claustrophobic; you feel you are lying on a shelf, but 2-tier is comfortable and provided with fresh linen and warm blankets.

Working in the paddy fields

The train rattled along for 12 hours, stopping at occasional rural stations that appeared to be totally deserted, then we travelled for the last couple of hours through mile upon mile of paddy-fields.

Suddenly it was Pondicherry and to my relief, a young man burst into the carriage looking for a customer needing a porter. I felt sorry for him, and although I refused to pay him more than a fifth of what he demanded, it was probably five times what he would normally make from one passenger. 

Auto-rickshaws awaiting customers

The auto rickshaw rattled along into town, and I began to see this former French colonial outpost revealing its unique character. While India became independent in 1947, Pondicherry remained separate until 1954. But Pondicherry wasn't so "unique" to me because it reminded me of the visits I used to make from Aden to Djibouti almost 50 years ago as a young management trainee with the global BATA shoe company. Tree-lined streets with the familiar blue and white street signs, boutiques and cafés and the indisputable flavour of a certain je ne sais quoi.

MANTRA - the villa in a garden

My studio-apartment is on the upper floor of a villa set in a garden. The owners have bought the adjacent plot and are building more accommodation, but they will keep the traditional style of architecture. For the moment there are just a couple of other guests. There is a fine swimming pool - I can have an hour a day in it, and there is a flat roof and a terrace where I can catch the sun. 
But . . . I came here to write, and the lack of a functioning laptop was the first problem I had to address.

All I wanted to do was repeat the order of 2 months ago, with a different shipping address. But last time I had persuaded the proprietor at Mattindia to use his Indian-registered credit card, and I didn't have that option now in Pondicherry.

Nor did I have a functioning computer.

I consider it a significant achievement that I not only ordered the adaptor on my iPhone, I also negotiated two levels of credit-checking and anti-fraud measures, before getting to grips with the customer service division who didn't seem to want to work weekends.

My eagerly-awaited replacement

I tracked down a phone number last Tuesday, (no small achievement as you will know if you deal with online companies who like to avoid human contact whenever possible,) and was assured that everything was happening. However, I continued to send EMAILS IN BLOCK CAPITALS until I finally received the assurance that the delivery would be completed on February 11th. I persevered with increasingly forceful communications, and yesterday received confirmation that the item had been despatched, and would arrive on Monday, Feb 1st.

It didn't!

It arrived today - January 30th . . . and I am happily writing again, after the agony of a week when I tried to communicate by using an iPhone that got overheated and phoned whoever, whenever it liked, in addition to inventing its own language for text messages.

All part of the fun of travel. And, when it comes to being a dinner-party guest, my future diatribes can be guaranteed to bore my fellow guests until they quickly top up my glass to subdue me!

Meanwhile, there's always the swimming-pool.

The swimming-pool : exclusively mine for an hour per day