Puducherry (Pondicherry) or Pondy is one of the seven union territories of India. The place was in our rough plan when I was in Chennai along with my few friends for one wedding function.  After the wedding function, we had one whole day extra for our leisure time. We decide to go for a day trip to Pondicherry.  We booked a personal car for a day and the next morning we started our journey towards Pondicherry.

Pondicherry is around 150 kilometers from Chennai via East Coast Road (ECR).  I was super excited since ECR journey is considered as the one of the best road journeys of India. We were mostly driving through the coastal areas and indeed, it was an amazing road journey though the climate was bit humid and hot.

Pondicherry Beach was the first stop where we stopped.  It offers beautiful seafront.  There is a huge statue of Gandhi Ji at one on the entrances along with long promenade for walking.

Frankly, summer is not so good to visit Pondicherry. Initially, we got a bit irritated by the heat and humid climate like Mumbai.  But later we had a bit relief from heat when we enjoyed swimming time at Paradise beach and we swam for around 2 hrs.  We were lucky to find a Le Pondy resort where in we enjoyed our leisure time along delicious buffet lunch.

Paradise Beach is the most amazing beach I have ever seen. It has blue clean water and it is a bit isolated as well. We had a feel of enjoying private beach.

After Paradise Beach, we were a bit confused about the next place. We had Auroville in mind, but due to lack of time we skipped it from our plan.  We rather prefer to go French colony and Sri Aurobindo Ashram which was on our way.

The French colony has beautiful and colorful houses built in French architectural style. Pondicherry was the largest French colony in India. Walking on the confusing roads in French colony was crazy, but we loved it.

We found Sri Aurobindo Ashram on our walking tour. The Ashram was quiet and peaceful.  We spent some time in knowing about Sri Aurobindo and his teachings.  Just to mention, Photography and mobiles phones are not allowed inside the ashram.

I want to share about an interesting experience I had when we were walking on the street of French Colony.  We came across an elephant which was giving a blessing to people who were feeding or offering money to him. It was simple, for getting a blessing, we just have to put money in the elephant‘s trunk and he’ll give a blessing by putting his trunk on our head.  Initially, I was a bit afraid of doing it but I tried it and it was terrific.   (Must try, something really different). 🙂

Pondicherry is an amazing place, there is so much to do and see in it. As per my experience, two days should be fine to cover all of the major places in Pondicherry.  Try to get a personal car and drive through scenic ECR. I would recommend every traveler must visit Pondicherry at least once.

So, Have you ever been to Pondicherry? What were your first impressions?