Trip to Mahabs & Pondicherry - Day 1

Hubby woke up at 6 and headed to the beach for photo shoot of sunrise at Bengal sea and I was nicely cuddling Anvith and sleeping on bed. We were supposed to leave resort at 9AM for local sightseeing after finishing breakfast but got delayed by an hour and could start only at 10AM. Naveen, Anvith and me did a quick visit to sea shore and clicked some photos before my friend's family joined us. You can see a tourist spot called "Shore temple" at the private beach of the resort. Few pictures below -

Just before we headed for local sightseeing

At private beach of the resort we stayed

You can see shore temple at the backside

Group photo with shore temple at backside

We headed out of the resort at 10AM and our first stop was shore temple. There was no entry to the temple premise from the resort area and we had to drive around 1 km and take entrance tickets. The temple was pretty small but was has very beautiful sculpture work. There was a huge crowd at that spot, lot of foreigners and also kids from some school picnics. We spent around 45 mins there. It was too hot and humid weather and we all were sweating badly. By the time we came out of that place, we were feeling so thirsty and decided to eat some Amul ice creams to cool ourselves. It was just the first place we covered but we were damn tired already. Few photos taken at the shore temple -





Our next stop was at Arjuna's penance which was again just 1-2km from shore temple. This was again a very good place to visit but it was a huge spot. To see the entire place, one needs to climb on the rocks etc and with small kids and the noon sun on top, we just decided to see only the front easily accessible portion of the unit. There was one spot with elephant sculptures at the backside and by looking at that I remembered about my visit to the same place when I was just 6 years old. It was in 1987, our family (dad, mom, sis and me) along with dad's collegue's family had made a trip to coimbatore, mahabs and some more place. I have vivid memories of that trip since I was just 6 at that time. We were a group of 10-12 people with 4-5 kids and it was a very memorable trip. Sometime in future, I want to make a blog post of that trip from whatever I remember and will scan those photots and upload. Following is the spot in which me and my sis were holding hands and gave pose for a photo. I so wish I had it right now to post it here but the photos are in udupi currently. Anyway, below is the photo taken last week and other photos taken in the spot -





By the time we came out of this place we were totally drained. We had one more place to visit called "five rathas" which is a monolithic rock architecture of the time of Paandava's but we decided to skip this place since we were tired and also running out of time since we had to get back to hotel and checkout and head to pondicherry which is around 100km from Mahabs. We checked out of the hotel at 12.30 and headed to Pondicherry and soon as we got into the cab, all of us fell asleep. We had not had lunch and decided to have in Pondi. But by the time we reached Pondi, driver had to get another round of permit and had to go to tindivanam bypass road which meant another 1 hr extra time before we get inside the city to have lunch. When all this was done and we found some hotel for lunch it was 3.45PM and I had started having vomitting sensation due to staying hungry for a very long time and had a bad headache too. Upon that the meals was closed and we only had dosa's and upmas for lunch but somehow I just couldn't eat any of them beyond 2-3 spoons. I generally get this nausea feeling if I don't take meals on time and wont be able to eat food beyond regular times if I am on empty stomach. I wanted to have fruit juice but that was also not available. Luckily kids had chapathi and milk and finished their lunch. I wanted to head to resort soon but we again did some shopping in the closeby area. I bought a pink short and Naveen some 3/4th to wear in the beach. We also bought some T-shirts for Anvith. We wanted to spend the evening in the beach side but again that day, when we reached the resort it was about to get dark.

We stayed at the beach in the dark for an hour. Anvith was refusing to get into water nor get his feet on the sand. He is a very big cleanliness freak and missed out of lot of things during the entire trip. He never once got into water in the beach nor ran on the sand wearing no chappals, nor got into the pool at the resort, nor played in the sprinkler. We tried a lot to persue him to do this but the fellow kept on saying "dress will become chichi (dirty)" and refused to join us and cried non-stop when we forced him to.

That night we had dinner at the resort (St James). The food was good but the service was hopeless. We had to wait 20 mins for giving the order and it took another 30 mins for the dishes to arrive. But kids had a lot of fun at the beach facing open top restaurant and so we didn't mind having to wait long. It's always fun to watch kids playing around all excited and curious inspite of being tired.

Leaving with some more photos -





More to come soon :)