Pondicherry - Puducherry

If you click here, you can see pictures from my Labor Day trip to Pondicherry, a former French enclave which, since my trip, has been officially renamed Puducherry.


No matter which way you turn it, Pondicherry, a former French colony on the coast, just seems cleaner and classier than Chennai. The French quarter is laid out on a grid (shocking), and I'm sure we're all surprised that the colonizers separated themselves from the locals--the Tamil quarter is actually about four times larger than the French area. But rolled together, it still is a refreshing reprieve from the precarious traffic and choking pollution of the overgrown village of Chennai. You can take a walk down the street and not worry about getting hit by a truck or stepping in something unhealthy.



Staying at a nice former French villa near the beach, we rested well, and so I would wake up not long after sunrise each day and walk down to the jetty where the fishermen were untangling and sorting their catch, with the help of their whole families. The boats are usually made from about four boards tied together, and the families live in make-shift huts built behind the tsunami-stopping wall of black stone. The fishermen usually teased me to join in the work, but the handful of other gawkers--some Indian parents with their kids, college students brushing up with summer French classes, and, one morning, a group of teenage Arabic students--and I usually just kept out of their way.


We also got a day in at the temple of Chidamburam. Temple visits here usually involve lots of looking up at scripts and ceiling paintings of epic scenes of the Hindu gods, peering through doorways and down long rows of pillars to see plain idols ornately decorated, smells of incense and fruit offerings, getting a tour guide you didn't seek out, burning your feet on the granite stones, crowds of worshippers, and the tall pyramid-like gopurams, carved with figurines on every square foot.