Mar 03, 2012 03:08 PM
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Ocean spray is located 14KM before Pondicherry at "Manjakuppam" on the ECR road. We had planned to travel by the luxurious bus service Olivea from Bangalore which drops you at the heart of Pondicherry. If you are planning to take a bus from Pondicherry bus-stop to Ocean spray on ECR road, beware that there are two places with name "Manjakuppam". One on the far south and other on the northern side. Ocean spray is at Northern part of Pondicherry. We had taken bus to the wrong Manjakuppam, but thanks to the GPS we quickly realized this and got down from the bus and decided to take the reliable Fast track taxi service.
Ocean spray is a new property which is well maintained, I have broken down my review into various parts,
Rooms - The rooms are exactly what you see in the pictures. We stayed at the heavens that has an awesome looking Jacuzzi in the balcony. Bed is very comfortable. Bathroom is well equipped too. Some of the other things I liked were a centralized control for all electrical appliance and a safety locker. The room is also equipped with a minibar, which we never used. However, we were not happy with either the quality of TV channels or the variety of channels on TV. TV shows an overwhelming number of Tamil channels and minimal non-Tamil channels.
Restaurant/Cafe: Ocean spray has one restaurant and one 24x7 cafe, both of which are quite expensive. Restaurant has a good spread of buffet for breakfast, but the Indian food doesn't have much of "Indian" in its taste. We felt the chutney, dosa, sambhar were bland everyday that we had breakfast there. However, the north Indian food is absolutely delicious here.
Service: The staff of ocean spray are very courteous and helpful. We felt the service was very good at the resort. Anything we needed, we didn't have to tell them twice.
Recreation: The recreation area is good and equipped with TT, electric air-hockey tables, carrom and Foosball tables. However, as we couldn't find a staff to turn on the AC in the recreation room, we felt this place was very hot and stuffy. The resort provides facility to use bicycles which is a very pleasant ride around the property. Not to mention that the resort has an awesome pool which is really big with good facilities. We also noticed a kids play area at the far end of the resort filled with toddlers and moms.
Disco - The resort has a very good disc with a fully loaded bar. This is very well maintained the only drawback is that when we went, there was no crowd at the disc. The disc is exactly how they show on the website pics.
Resort: The resort is surrounded by artificial lakes which are quite clean. The man-made lakes are very clean and have beautiful fishes in them. The property has beautiful rooms which are very well maintained. However, we felt everything that you could buy within the resort is unbelievably expensive. So if you are planning to use the pool, make sure you take your own swimming gear instead of buying it in the resort.
Boat ride: Resort provides a Catamaran boat ride(Catamaran is a fisherman's motorboat) which would cost you 2000/- bucks for an hour's ride. We felt that for this price, kind of boat provided this was a rip-off. However, our ride was worth the money as we ended up seeing a school of Dolphins passing by, which is very rare. One of them also did a full length dive near our boat. The fishermen also allow you to swim in the ocean after going to some distance.
