Pondy has a split personality: the one side (closest to the ocean) has a French heritage, with wide tree-lined streets (nice shade!), with little traffic, French street names (even using “rue” instead of road
), a central park with big trees for shade, and quite clean; the other side of the canal (away from the ocean) is typical Indian.
There is no beach in Pondy itself; however, there is a nice promenade which is lit up at night thanks to the double-street-lights on top of each lamp post along that one road next to the promenade. Moving inland from the water’s edge, you have a big rock wall, then a flat sandy area (about 5m above sea level), then the cement promenade, then the road. And a nice breeze on the promenade (though still brutally hot in the sun).
I did hear quite a bit of French spoken here, including an Indian waiter at a French tourist resto.
Highlights include:
– meandering through the main market (fish, fruit & veg, flowers) – which my middle-class barista said she didn’t go to as it was too dirty and time-consumng, and she would rather pay a few more rupees at the supermarket (I was asking about prices to see how I had been doing on my fruit haggling)
– watching the locals on the promenade and the food vendors on the beach near the huge Gandhi statue
– watching an Indian music video being filmed in the park (though it wasn’t one of the outrageous big dance numbers, just one guy who I actually think I recognized from the videos I had seen in my room in Chennai)
– the elephant outside a temple dedicated to Ganesh
– the beautiful flower-festooned samadhi (tomb venerated as shrine)at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
– eating breakfast “beachside” on a shaded marbled patio at the government tourist development corp’s Le Cafe (and seeing dolphins one morning) along with a good cappuccino as a treat
– good cheap local food (actually, it was North Indian food) at a resto facing the “beach” and sea
– the quasi-French restos were “overpriced” and not really that interesting (and full of tourists of course)
– actually, most of the sites in my guidebook were disappointing, including the Heritage Walk (I couldn’t find a guide for it as it was being reprinted, so I was left to walk the streets and see some buildings)
All in all, a peaceful stop on my way down south. But not a must-see town, except for the French nature of it making it different.
The only reason I had heard of it was that it is the starting point in the book “The Life of Pi” about a boy and a tiger escaping on a lifeboat.