A Winter of Travelling : Partie Un

Disclaimer : I'm not a Saarang volunteer / coordinator / organiser.

I took "Live life large" a bit too seriously last sem. Made a bunch of huge plans for the winter, one of which was AIESEC programs, got selected, but then everything crumbled back to the earth. I was free.

My first instinct after my last endsem paper was to sleep. Eventually, I did wake up. And made my way to Mahabalipuram with 9 mates for the very first time together.

The start of the one day trip was of very typical fashion. We got delayed. It was nearly nine, an hour late from our planned departure, and we were waiting for the ever-busy, Yellow Pages, at the bus stop. He turned up, which in itself was a surprise for us; how had he made time for this!

Fun is an understatement

We took out bus passes for an entire day's travel and reached the tranquility of Mahabs only when the Sun was already high up in the sky. The tranquility was crushed by a bunch or rather a horde of middle school kids who I imagine had gotten out of school in pursuit of mischief.. Understated. Understandable. They didn't pull in all our attention though. Mischief was on our agenda too and unlike the poor kids, we didn't have overseers!

That day, we learned the Sun was hotter than our Maami and hence had to buy a hat. It didn't stay long though. All of us wanted the shade, and look funny.

Our first planned visit was a lighthouse for which we had to go via a rock temple on top of a huge cliff face. That did not stop KD though, he climbed up the steep face  with ease. Monkey see, monkey do. #Beach almost fell back as KD helped him up. The others and I on the other hand chose to take stairs cut in the rock a bit ahead.

4pointer was with us. So photos and profiles were going to be obvious. Everyone was taking everyone else's pictures. It is silly how we were posing and jumping around, but what did we have to lose. It was fun. And if you were wondering, we did climb atop the lighthouse. 

Then we made our way to the famous Krishna's Butterball, the boulder that stands atop a not-too-steep yet slippery surface of rock and miraculously stays there. We were so dehydrated by the Sun, the rock didn't even amaze us initially. Our only motivation to climb up it was there was shade under the rock. I was among the last ones to be going up, and I began to lose my grip. Gopi tried hard to keep up from falling, but I had other ideas. I slipped and slid down the face of the humongous rock structure. Except the ridiculously difficult stain I had to remove from my pants, all was okay. I did rekindle everyone else's juvenescence and  to the age old time tested activity of sliding down smooth surfaces. In short, we slid down. For a fun video of us sliding down the rock, text me.

Then we made our way to the beach and to food, The restaurant was literally on the beach. Catering often to the foreign crowd, most of the food on the menu was either miserable or overpriced. But we were near the sea. All would be okay.

We walked along the beach to the rocky part which was the highlight of my day. I felt so much at ease there that I didn't even take a good picture of it. If you've never been there, it's time to go now. It's a lovely place to lie down, feel the time slowing down with the calming reverberation of the eternal waters hitting the rocks, and write poetry.

This was the hat BTW

We saw the Sun go down toward the nature-struck eroded rock temple very appropriately and simple named the Shore temple. And then we were on our way back. Tired. And planning about where to go the next time.

Check back here tomorrow for a bunch of free verse. Bye.