A Delighful Trip - Part III

Continued from Part II

We made our way to another restaurant we had seen and liked called Rendezvous on Rue Suffren (yes, there are many sprinkled around the city with European names boasting of European food - "Santhe," "La Terrase," "L'Orient," et al). The interiors reminded me somewhat of a church with the tables on each side of a long passage; at a far corner was a small wooden altar with an idol of Christ adorned with a lot of flowers, cane furniture and potted plants between tables, there was classical western music playing discreetly in the background, but the Ravi Varma look-alike paintings (there was only some resemblance to the originals) on the walls spoiled the effect (they were for sale too!). There were a lot of foreigners and a few Indians.

Navin and I, in an adventurous mood, decided to try European cuisine (the menu had everything from tandoori to Chettinad and continental stuff). Navin had sweet corn chicken soup and a beefsteak. I had a French onion soup (came with a big bowl of butter and French bread, yumm, but it was so filling that I lost most of my appetite) and macaroni and butter-fried garden vegetables. Navin enjoyed his steak but the macaroni was quite tasteless and I toyed with the vegetables, the 'butteriness' only serving to make me feel heavier. Well, much the wiser about European food, we paid the steep bill and hobbled out.

Next we embarked on a recce of the city itself. We first drove down the entire Mission Street; it had areas ranging from the downmarket to the posh (read pretentious). We went to Casablanca, a 'lifestyle' store (kind of place where you fear you might be asked to pay just to get in - I hear Qwikys has a branch in there now), a Tibetan cloth shop (nothing interesting and staff uninterested in us), Easy Chair (we were intrigued by the name - the shop had chairs and antiques of all kinds - again, there are many of these antiques and craft shops, presumably to attract foreign tourists), Focus, a book shop (a poor cousin of the book shops in Chennai, with a preoccupation with books on India) and Coffee.com, a browsing centre-cum-coffee pub (rather dull, and I just got to see a part of my mails which only made me more anxious about all the things I had left half-way in Chennai).

It was around four and time for some coffee - I insisted on trying out the Indian Coffee House, the address of which I had found on the Net. We found the place on Jawaharlal Nehru Street easily enough but the coffee was very disappointing - it was a biggish place but otherwise it resembled common tea-kadais. Coming out, we saw the street getting ready for the evening - it was the shopping hub of Pondy and there were a lot of pavement shops as well, but we decided to come back after the sun went down for some shopping.

We then went around to other streets and just looked around, stopping whenever something interesting caught our eyes. Most parts of the city were quaint (that word again, but it best describes the place) and we were happy travelling through them. The roads were well-paved and clean, so it was made more pleasurable. We passed the Manakula Vinayagar temple, various Auro boutiques (we did visit one, Aurosarjan Boutique on Rue Bussy but the products and prices seemed a little alien to us!), the Botanical Garden (which seemed to be happily used by people coming to the government hospital opposite it), Pudumai, a Pondicherry handicrafts society showroom (its best feature was its A/c), etc.

In this fashion, we explored Pondy. But we were stopped in the most unfashionable manner on Mission Street - we had a flat tyre. Luckily we found a mechanic on a side street nearby. As it seemed like a long wait for it to be fixed, we took a walk down the quiet, largely residential (not French but very like a Tamil Nadu town) side streets. We also had ice cream in a small parlour. When we came back to the mechanic's an hour later, the tyre was just being fixed.

Suddenly there was a commotion on the main street - a mahout was leading an elephant, stopping to let people offer it eatables. The elephant was attracting attention like only an elephant can; everyone was watching, kids were running behind it screaming and vehicles were having a hard time crossing that stretch. I was wishing we had something to give the elephant so we could get near it when Navin remembered the bag of guavas in our vehicle bought on our way to Pondy. We ran after the elephant which was standing at the entrance of a temple and being pampered by devotees when the mahout spotted us and the bag and brought the elephant to us. There is something fascinating about giving an elephant something to eat and have it 'bless' you with its trunk. It kind of made up for the lost hour and the bad luck with the tyre.

Once the scooter was ready we just had time to return it. We went back to the hotel, had a wash and went in search of dinner. We tried L'Indochine at the Le Club on Rue Dumas. We were the only Indians till some time. We stuck to Chinese food and finished with some good coffee. Apart from the superb meal, the highlight for me was a friendly cat (very rare - if you have any experience with cats, you'd know how nose-in-the-air they are)! It came up to me when I whispered to it and even allowed me to stroke it. I realised why it lost interest in me as I saw it being fed (probably fish) untiringly by a foreigner, probably a regular at the restaurant!

After a good sleep, the next morning we repeated our breakfast at La Coromandale, but we had to do it all on foot. We were to start around lunchtime, so we didn't hire the vehicle. We passed the Gandhi Mandapam, the Joan of Arc statue, a memorial to World War I soldiers and the Church of our Lady of the Angels. We visited the Museum - the building was impressive and some of the paintings, sculptures and Arikamedu finds, but otherwise it was quite boring. Then we walked to the Art Gallery, another government-sponsored centre, but it was in such a sad state we wondered why it was kept open. The building was old and smelt musty and damp, the paint peeling off the walls; the paintings were badly maintained with most frames broken; among the antique pieces, there were some works of some local artists too.

As we walked back and just took the last turn to our hotel, we saw some tourists standing opposite the hotel at the sea front gesturing wildly. We thought somebody had fallen into the sea, but by the time we got near, the crowd had moved away. Then my heart missed a beat as I noticed something appear on the surface and disappear again into the sea. I shouted to Navin and waited with bated breath. Had it been real? Yes, there it was, and now I could spot many more of them. They were indeed dolphins! We stood transfixed watching them wordlessly as they swam in an arc some distance away from the beach, surfacing now and then. Some locals also joined us. Navin ran to ask our hotel manager whether this was common. He was informed that they were dolphins and they have been spotted this near the beach in some seasons. We stood watching them as they gracefully went their way and finally disappeared from our view. They say dolphins are ultra-intelligent creatures - maybe they know we would be watching and put on a show to amaze us once in a while.

Skipping lunch, we left the hotel (still glancing back to see if the dolphins were in sight) and caught an auto to the bus station. Without even trying, we could catch an ECR bus (that goes via the spectacular East Coast Road - we had missed it on a previous trip through Pondy and on our onward journey). The bus ride was a fitting end to our delightful trip to Pondy - we got a good driver, the road was smooth with hardly any traffic, we passed through green stretches of grassy and wooded areas, the sea was on our right all the time, showing blue glimpses now and then, we saw Mahabalipuram for the first time and its innumerable resorts and cottages, then Dakshinachitra, the heritage centre, until we arrived in Chennai without any travel-weariness. Sigh! Hopefully we'll be able to take another break soon some time.