Puducherry

Puducherry is four separate districts that do not touch one another. Puducherry town and Karaikal sit inside Tamil Nadu, Mahe is inside Kerala and Yanam is inside Andhra Pradesh, all of it left over from French India. Most people never learn this, because most trips only ever see the first one. The town is a grid split by a canal: the old White Town on the sea side, the Tamil town behind it. That is the whole attraction and you can walk it in a morning. The mistake is booking three nights for a beach holiday. The Promenade is a rock seawall with no sand on it at all. Sand means Serenity, a few kilometres north, or Paradise Beach, reached by boat through the Chunnambar backwater. Two things worth knowing plainly. Auroville, ten kilometres north, is not in Puducherry at all, and most of it lies in Tamil Nadu. And this is not a dry territory, and duty on alcohol is lower here than across the border, which is a real and durable difference rather than a reason to plan a trip. Karaikal, two hours down the delta, is the part nobody sees. The Karaikal Ammaiyar temple stands there with almost no one in front of it.