Bus hopping

After meeting with RT & Revathi and visiting their farm in Aliyur, we wanted to get to Auroville, about 150 kms away. The first round of bus hopping started. From Aliyur to Nagai was about 10 kms or so. We got a bus as soon as we got to the bus stop in Aliyur. From there we found a bus already on the roll towards Karaikal. In the Karaikal bus stop, we found that the next Pondicherry Transport bus was a couple of hours away. So we asked around and to our surprise found a TN state transport bus ready to leave for Pondicherry. It was a good two hour route and when we got off in Pondicherry it was almost 9 in the night. Auroville was another bus ride and an auto-rickshaw ride away. Not wanting to be stuck in Pondicherry, we decided to impose on our hosts and asked them to keep some food aside for us. As we were asking people to guide us to the right bus, a conductor shouted out that the bus rolling out was going to Periya Mudaliar chavadi, our next destination. We covered more than 150 kms, changing 4 buses to reach our destination in one piece the same day. All this without waiting for more than 5 minutes in any of the bus stops!

The second experience of Tamil nadu’s public transportation system was when we set out to visit the mangroves near Cuddalore while we were in Auroville. We cycled up to a small town on the highway called Thiru. Koot road. From to Pondicherry and then to Cuddalore and then on to Muttalur and then to Parangipettai, a village by the coast, cost us about 5 minutes of waiting. We decided to have lunch at Chidambaram, which was further south of Muttalur and a couple of minutes we were on a bus to Chidambaram. We started back at around 2:30 PM and were back in Thiru. Koot Road by 6 ! We had set out to see the mangroves, but ended up seeing just a couple of mangrove trees from a distance in Parangipettai. We had chickened out of venturing to Pichavaram another coastal village close to Chidambaram. But we did get to experience the amazing Tamil Nadu state road transportation service in the region another time!