We are now a week underway in India. After the first week well spent in Chennai, we moved on to Nagercoil. This is the place where Liny’s grandparents life and also her uncle (Jeyanth) and cousin (Keny). To get there we took a bus. This bus journey is an adventure at its own. The busses are very modern and equipped with AC and flatscreen. However, the drivers are less “modern”. The driving style is basically the same as in the city centre as of what I have been seeing. Only on the motorway it goes a bit mental. Lorry’s are driving with a speed of around 50kmp/h, the bus around 90 (before 12am). The lorry’s and cars on the motorway are driving wherever they like. They don’t look in mirrors, the don’t listen to horns (massive horn on the bus though), they don’t react on flashing of big light. So what basically happens all the way through is that as soon as the bus has a bit of space in front of him he hits the peddle to 90 kmp/h and flashes his big light to out, dim and back to big, combined with horning all the way through to let the driver in front know that he is coming. And still the lorry’s pretend like there is nothing behind them. Turns out that lorry’s keep right (what should be left) that once a lorry has overtaken another lorry, he still keeps right. It works out in the bus swinging (from lane to lane) horning and flashing. This goes on untill 12am. After that the road gets gradually more quiet. The thing that happens next was unbelievable for me. I always believed that busses can’t go faster than around 100kmp/h. The opposite was proven in this bus. After 12 o’clock it hits almost the 170kmp/h, which is amazingly fast for such a piece of metal! Through these fast busses and a better road, the travel time has been reduces from 16 to 10 hours.
Once arrived I first took a little nap because I hardly slept in the bus. Once awake I was served by Liny with some breakfast. After the breakfast had reached my tummy, I went with Liny’s uncle for a little motor ride. This turned in to the following pictures.
As the look of the pictures If been driving a bike. And so I did! I drove for around 6km with as well in the village where I participated with Indian traffic. It all worked out fine.
Once back I wanted to sleep a bit more. I woke up at around 3pm after a two hour sleep to go to the Kanyakumari (means virgin goddess) on the way I took some pictures.
This beach (Sanguthurai, Sangu means shell, and the whole word means a pathway of shell’s) is one of the many that have been affected by the Tsunami. The beaches are plane and abandon, I even saw some pieces of boat laying broken and scattered along the shore line. The local villages we saw needed to build up their houses all over again. So now you see where all you’re donation went too.
We also crossed a bay “ Manakudi,” which is an estuary (the place where a backwater meets the sea) where the remains were still present of a bridge that should be there. The bridge is broken into four pieces, where two are to be seen on the pictures and the other two are somewhere in the sea.
And the temporary bridge:
And the construction of the permanent bridge ov
You can see “ Mangrove” plants, which grow only in marshy land (slushy soil). The roots are above the land and hence they get the air supply from above the marshy soil. This plants prevent soil erosion in the area and are also useful for shrimp farming (Prawns).
Next we drove along a plant that makes ropes from coconut fibers. The site looked like this:
Next we drove through a little village where I took some random shots out of the car:
Keny got a bit bored of driving so he entertained himself on the backseat:
After that we drove by some nice scenery: ponts, loads of coconut trees, rice fields:
The picture below shows “Salt Pan” where salt is extracted by slow drying process of salt water by evaporation.
Close after these pics we arrived at Kanyakumari. Kanyakumari is a place where it is possible to see a sunset in the evening and a sunrise in the morning at the same place. It is also a place where the India ocean, Bay of Bengal and Arabian sea meet. Which nowhere occurs elsewhere in the world. Therefore you will also find three different colours of sand (red, black and white). I bought a souvenir from there which shows the three types of sand.
Here some pics of the sunset and the scenery. We also went climbing a view tower
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The picture with the statue “Thiruvalluar” a famous Tamil poet. The statue is 133 feet tall. The building next to the statue is “ Vivekananda Mandapam” which is place which has the things that belong to Vivekananda a renowned philosopher.
After which I wanted to drink something, so I was suggested sugarcane juice, as they do not mix water in it. Sugarcane is a kind of plant which is used to make sugar. The sugarcane’s are squeezed with the help of a simple machine and the juice is strained. The juice tasted nice and sweet and that from a plant.
Then Liny, her uncle and cousin went to have some Banana and Chilli Bajji. Which I was not allowed to eat as the place looked a bit dodgy. Therefore I ordered a pack of “Orange Cream Cookies” and Sprite 
While we were eating, the sun was going down (of course) only the pace is went was a bit quicker than expected. So we ran out of our seat when we found out that is was almost prime time for the sun to sink into the sea. So we needed to run a bit to get a spot. All the places around the shoreline where almost taken so we need to fiddle in somewhere. It all worked out fine in the end and this is the result of the sunset pics.
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