Pondicherry finally!!
Hello folks,
I am back after a long time with yet another travel article. I love to travel and write on the journeys though most of the time what I do is armchair travel which means I watch lot of travel shows. Forget Pondicherry. There are lot of places around us waiting to be explored which we may miss out seeing in our lifetime. For me, during my school days, the erstwhile French colonies meant Pondicherry, Mahe, Yanam. Pondicherry or Pudhucherry was in my bucket list and it was so near yet looked far off. We had been to Chennai from our childhood times but never to this quaint little place. We had to go to Chennai for an event last month and after that, we headed to Pondicherry which was a smooth 138 km drive on ECR road or East Coast Road from Besant Nagar. It is a very scenic drive with small towns and greenery all the way. On suggestion of our nephew, we booked a room in Gratitude Heritage homestay which was housed in an attractive 200 year old French colonial structure. The ambience of the homestay was too good which makes me want go back and stay there again. The foliage in the centre courtyard with a big Ganesha idol, the wooden swing or jhoola, a dining hall with beautiful European styled ceramic items, a library room with impressive high ceiling and Mother's black and white photo adorning the wall. One can sit there for endless hours lost in that room!!
I will be talking more about the homestay in the end. May month is off season as it is peak of summer there. We had to endure lot of sweat and heat while going round. Nevertheless, the cool breeze from the seaside was soothing. Walking on the beach sand, having lunch in a restaurant facing the beach were our initial activities. The sun headed further west and the walk on the well laid beach street or promenade was an experience by itself. Of course, one will find hard to miss the homeless people at different places of the streets. A visit to Manakula Vinayagar temple which is more than 500 years old was not to be missed. Inside the temple, the history of how the temple was saved from colonizers was written. Since renovations had happened over a period of time, I did not get the feel of an ancient temple. If you are a compulsive shopper, head out to Nehru street which is 2 to 3 kms away. I was surprised to to discover so many branded shops and other normal shops sprawled over 3 to 4 streets. Shopping streets and markets are the places where we can find local people and devoid of tourists. As we were wondering where to have dinner, the old and impressive India Coffee House caught our attention. The cutlets, which are almost the trademark of India Coffee House was the very 1st one in my mind to be ordered. Then what followed were tasty Podi dosa and a plate of puri-masala. Needless to say, this mouthwatering items were 'washed down' with 2 tumblers of filter coffee.
In the world of Auroville!!!
Our next day started off with a small run of 7 kms on the beach promenade. I wanted to run in tougher weather than in Bengalore to increase my endurance levels. After a tasty complimentary breakfast, we headed out to Auroville which was situated about 15 kms from our place. That was a different world by itself as it was established by Shri Aurobindo and The Mother in a forest. It is home to 3000 people of different nationalities who were engaged in some activity or other. There was a small museum, a coffee shop, and some shops selling clothes, accessories, food items. The presence of trees around makes us feel in the midst of the nature. Matrimandir, a domelike structure in Auroville which was opened only a few years back, unfortunately did not allow general public to go inside the structure to spend few quiet meditative moments and also experience the beauty of the structure by going inside it. The public were allowed to see it only from a distance. Even the pre-bookings were not there when we visited the place. That was, in a way, a dampener. Did they consider the Indian public to be unruly? The reasons are best known to them!! Before heading to the room, we visited a Botanical garden on the way which had nothing much to offer as it was made uninteresting and poorly maintained. All through, it was hot and sweating a lot.
As if it was an icing on the cake to our trip and a relief from the scorching heat, we had to welcome those unexpected mango showers after 7 o clock in the evening while walking on the Promenade beach. All the walkers scurried back to escape the rain. We made way to a pizza outlet and it was a memorable dinner amidst those heavy thunderstorms and power outage inside the pizza outlet. Even the generators could not withstand those power drips and we had a delicious medium sized pizza with the help of the light from the mobile phones!! It was a cooler night to end the scorching heat.
The next day, it was time to bid goodbye to the erstwhile French colony. As long as those few colonial buildings are preserved well in some of those streets with French names, the charm will be alive for tourists to come there. Gratitude Heritage does a good job in recreating those old days through the rooms with high ceilings, high cots with bedposts, a common living space with a gramophone, a typewriter, board games, old black and white photos. This homestay is situated in Rue Romain Rolland.
Pondicerry or Puducherry keeps beckoning me to visit, but I don't know when I will go back another time.
Deepa.
P.S. There are very few blogs I write which do not have photos, but I can't help posting photos when related to travel. A proficient writer will be describing a place in 1000 words, but I feel I still do not belong to that category. And as always, when I wrote about Pondicherry, I felt I traveled there again!!
Comments
Post a Comment