Weekend at Pondicherry: Part 1

(I wrote this article sometime during last summer. I am posting it on the blog now.)

Last weekend, I visited Pondicherry. It is just a three to three and half hour bus ride from Chennai.

I had Ruchir Dwivedi with me as my traveling companion. He was also the planner and the manager! I had no idea how we were going to go, where we were going to stay…He did all the planning. So all I had to do was accompany him.

We left Chennai from Madhya Kailash (nearest stop from IIT Madras, where I am currently doing an internship) at around 9:30 in the morning. The bus was almost full and we had to sit in the driver’s cabin on the cover of the engine!

There are two problems associated with sitting on the engine-cover in the driver’s cabin. One, the honking of bus horn which may cross 40-45 decibels at times and second, it is incredibly hot! The only soothing thing was the Bay of Bengal which we could see as we traveled along that fabulous road. At 1:00 pm, we got off the bus at ECR circle. There is an YHI (Youth Hostels Association of India) hostel two-two and a half kilometers from there. We were going to be there in Pondicherry on Sunday too. We had to accommodate ourselves somewhere. So Ruchir had already found out about the Hostel and as he is YHI member, we were also going to get some discount! We took an auto and went to the youth hostel. As it turned out they were not allowed to give any discounts to anyone but students! We already had our BITS id cards with us. And we got ourselves a place to stay for the night for just 100 rupees. It was too good a deal. Though they were not able to provide us separate room as such, they made all the arrangements in a spare hall. It was good. We were up from 6 O’clock in the morning and I had slept late on the Friday night. (I was watching Seinfeld!) Also, the Sun had come up and as it is well known, Pondicherry is humid. That is why we decided to take rest for the afternoon.

Oh, what a nice sleep it was! In the meanwhile, I also charged my phone as we were going to need a lot of battery if we were going to use GPS. At quarter to five or so, we came to main town which is two kilometers away from where we were staying. Next task was to hire a bike.

We searched for a good bike and ended up renting a ‘Vespa’. It was costlier than that of an old, ragged ‘Activa’, but it was worth it. Our Vespa was a yellow colored beauty with rounded mirrors. For some reason, that gave us a classic feel. The next important task was to fill the tank with petrol, as fuel does not come under the renting deal. For two days, two and a half liters of fuel are more than enough to roam around in Pondicherry. Once we had the vehicle in a ready-to-go state, we started ambling.

It was already five O’clock in the evening so we decided to go to the Pondicherry beach. On our way, we came across the Government Park of Pondicherry. We roamed around there for a while, saw some monuments and observed people taking selfies. I don’t like casual selfies that people take when they go to a mall or when they visit some tourist place. It is not as if you are on top of the Everest, people! Come on! I will write about it sometime in the near future. There was some information written under the Park Monument, but it was in Tamil and French, neither of these languages can I comprehend. So, that was it as far as the park was concerned.

Just in front of the park, there is the famous Pondicherry Beach. It is not a sand beach. It is rocky. The road alongside the beach bears an apt name: ‘beach road’. There is a magnificent statue of Mahatma Gandhi with eight pillars surrounding the statue. The pillars have been brought there from the fort of Gingee. There are also Ambedkar memorial and French war memorials on the other side of the road.

We roamed around the beach road for a while and once the hunger called for food, we decided to go to famous ‘Le Cafe’.  Ruchir told me that in the times of the French rule, the building was a post office. Now it has been renewed as a restaurant. It has got an amazing view of beach and the food was great too. It is not cheap though. Well, nothing comes for free on this planet.

After a rejuvenating break at 'Le Cafe', we resumed our roaming-around activities. We met some local Police with their interesting, red, French hats. I clicked a picture or two of a stranger couple who wanted me to take a photo of them. Ruchir was on roll with his camera.  He clicked some awesome pictures that evening. Here are some of them.

It was 8:30 pm or so and we were already hungry. Ruchir wanted to try some sea food. So we went to some French restaurant which was famous for its sea food. I, on the other hand am not a fan of non vegetarian food. Though I have tried chicken tandoorie and some variants of chicken, I have not finished a whole plate till date. I had never tried sea food before as I have some issues with the stink and by issues, I mean serious, honest disgust or at the very least, nausea. So I tend to steer clear of sea food. But that day, when we went in that restaurant, all my expected nausea was not there. I do not know how I didn't feel that peculiar unwanted disgust about sea food. Maybe because there were no stinky-fish smells or for some other reasons, I was completely normal around all that sea food. To my own surprise, I tried fried prawns and I liked it.

Once the dinner was over, we had nothing else to do except to go back to our lodge. It was already 11O’clock in the night and it would have been logical to go back. But instead, we decided to go to Paradise beach which is almost 15 km away from Pondicherry. It was thrilling, being spontaneous. But it was also going to be one of the unforgettable experiences ever.

We took out our Vespa and started our journey for the Paradise beach. I had GPS on my phone and that was going to be our pathfinder. We decided that I would drive while going there and Ruchir would drive while coming back.

I have never been to Pondicherry before and I thought this so called Paradise beach would be a crowded place. But, owing to an odd timing of 11:30 pm, it was just a long beach with some fishermen sleeping in their huts. Ruchir and I parked our scooter and went on. I sat on the deck of one of the canoes that were standing there on shore. Ruchir went along with his camera.

It was nice there. There was no noise, no crowd. It was like a private beach!

I was sitting on the deck of canoe, enjoying the placid environment around me. The tides were making periodic splashing on the shore and the sky was clean. In such situations of beauty, everyone starts thinking about life and so did I. I was thinking about all the beautiful things that have happened to me in my life so far. I remembered something that someone once said to me and I had no idea whatsoever that within next ten minutes I would be driving away from that beach just to get the hell out of there.

In fact, while I was thinking about life, I was also trying to absorb what was around me. It was too tender a feeling! But when I gazed around, I saw a flickering light to the far right of me. It was interesting. What was that light? Was someone there? Soon, as I concentrated hard enough on that light, I could see two, maybe three silhouettes. One of them was holding the source of that light. It might have been a mobile phone. But the shadowy figures were too far from me. My feeling of romantic thoughts went down and was overtaken by the feeling of adventure in a moment. There was something going on out there. I wanted to know. So I turned around to take Ruchir with me for investigation only to find him talking to a local fisherman.

I went there and asked Ruchir to come with me. I did not want to mention the silhouettes and the light in the presence of the fisherman, but I wanted Ruchir to know that there is something suspicious going on there. I don’t exactly remember how I managed to convince him but Ruchir tried to say goodbye to the fisherman in order to take a walk along the beach. And the fisherman suddenly changed his attitude. He told us not to go in the far right and quote, “There are big dogs”. That was obviously a lie and we knew in an instant that we were in trouble. The fisherman seemed to know about the thing that was going on and was keen on not to let us go there. The fisherman or the guy posing as a fisherman then started asking us to drink with him a couple of beers. When we said we are not interested, he asked us some money for a beer and some smoke. There were many loopholes in his story. He was not conveying what he wanted to tell us, as he only knew some words in English and none of us could understand Tamil. The only thing that he conveyed properly was that there was some danger involved in going to the far end of the beach. On top of that, Ruchir had a high resolution camera in his hands. He must have thought of Ruchir as a journalist or a reporter or at the very least, an overenthusiastic tourist.

Meanwhile, the shadowy figures that were there had disappeared on one of the canoes. While we were talking to the fisherman, I was constantly trying to look whatever I could look for. I don’t know why but I was getting a hunch that there was something wrong with that beach. In the end, at around 12:00 O’clock, we decided to run away when we could as if situation arrived; no one else in the world knew that we were on the Paradise beach. I guess he must had been on strict instructions about not to let anyone go there. What if there was some illegal activity such as drug trafficking going on? What if the dark figures that might have caught us with a big camera were actually some mafia gang? More probably, it might have been a newlywed couple celebrating a romantic honeymoon on a clean beach, but the fisherman was somehow involved. He had his interests in not letting us go there. Anyways, because we were only two people with no one else knowing our whereabouts, we decided to get out instead of being stupid and investigating. I accelerated our scooter so hard that we almost slipped in the beach sand. The fisherman was still with us. Once we got out, Ruchir was constantly asking questions about the silhouettes. I told him the story and how it all implied us getting in trouble.

Finally, when we reached a crowded town nearby, we changed seats. Ruchir was driving and I was holding the GPS now. I don’t know what happened to GPS, but we lost our way. After a lot of encircling to the same area and going through many odd lanes we reached Pondicherry at around 12:35 am. Finding our hostel was another task that was remaining. It took us 15 more minutes to reach there and while going there, a dog chased us as good as it could. Finally, we reached YHI hostel at 1O’clock in the morning only to find it locked. We had to wake the watchman up and listen to him about coming in before 12O’clock. After all the listening, he took us in and thus ended the first day in Pondicherry.