Puducherry

Date arrived: 18th January  2024

Date Departed: 23rd January 2024

Favourite sight: Steak!

Average Cost: £36.28 PPPD

Persistently and unapologetically French until 1954, Puducherry still retains much gallic charm, especially when it comes to the cooking. It's just a shame I didn't really manage to get many photographs from here.

18th January 2024

After an un-planned (and expensive) 320KM taxi ride, we arrived in Puducherry and pulled up to our moderately expensive hotel, only to find that it was genuinely charming, with a big room, super-comfy bed, and very freindly and gracious reception team. This did wonders for my mood, and put us in a good place to start exploring this former French enclave straight away!

And by exploring, we meant find a launderette. Obvs. This required a little more leg work than we expected, but tat the third time of asking we found a launderette that could wash our cloths and get them back tomorrow, although it was well over twice the price we've paid on the trip so far.

From here we went out for some dinner, and started to enjoy the variety of menu options available to us. We also enjoyed some well-priced beer, apparently with a far lower tax buren than in neighbouring Tamil Nadu.

19th January

Today we explored some of the sites of the French part of Puducherry - Pondy to the locals - and in particular the White City. We started off by gathering together all of the excess bits we have picked up on the trip and taking hem to the Post Office to ship home. Tis was a moderatley tedious process, but only because it seemed about half of the things we were trying to post weren't allowed - wires, wooden ornaments, etc. We did manage to shift a reasonable amount though, so lightening our loads for the next 8 week.

Having spent an hour at the post office (and trailing back to the Xerox place round the corner twice) we went to a nice little beach front hotel for some lunch. We enjoed a plate of bruschetta covered in tomatoes, olives and cheese, as well as excellent Lattes. We then walked up and down the promenade - amazingly quite peaceful and closed to vehicles - and treated ourselves to an ice cream in the sunshine.

Looking up and down the promenade at Pondy

For some reason the pictures above are my only shots of Pondy, which is a little disappointing. The sea front was quite lovely, and there were clearly plans in place for some kind of celebration, as a load of stands of some type were being erected around the Mahatma Ghandi statue that marks the middle of the strip.

Full of Ice cream and coffee, we retreated back to our lovely hotel for a little bit, still quite tired after the previous days travelling. Julie had a brief nap whilst I popped to an ATM, and picked up our laundry; oh the exciting life I lead.

We identified a good looking restaurant for dinner, and it was superb. I relished the opportunity to devour a steak that I could order with some confidence, and we enjoyed a beer once more, before retiring for the evening.

20th to 22nd of January

After two lovely days in Pondy, I woke up with the dreaded lurgy on the third. The net result is that we didn't really do very much for the next three days :-( I mean, not nothing - we did manage to get out to the government museum, and go for a couple of short wanders, including looking at some suits and dresses - but that was about it. For three days. Didnt eat very much either, and slept a lot, particularly on the 20th.

23rd of January

Today we left Pondy to take a four hour bus drive up to Chennai. After checking out of the hotel (where I'd managed a little more for breakfast, but not much) we got a tuk-tuk to the bus station, and managed to quickly find the Chennai bus. ENtirely through good luck, we'd managed to find one of the fancier air conditioned busses, so the trip up the coast was not actually that bad, which was just as well as I was still struggling a bit with my internal systems, shall we say!