Chennai

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After travelling through the night, and sleeping fairly comfortably we arrived in Chennai Central around noon! As soon as we departed the train, we were immediately hassled by taxi drivers. The first offer he gave us for the short journey to our hotel was 350 rupees but every 50 metres further we walked the price dramatically dropped!

By the time we exited the station, the price was down to 150 rupees but we still decided it would be safer to book a couple of rick shaws at the pre-paid stand! After establishing where we were going we filled the rickshaws with our bags and ourselves ( a task which we were now pretty efficient at!)

In our experience, we had thus far not enjoyed Indian cities and Chennai was no exception. The smell was one of the worst we had experienced and had hit us as we had stepped onto the station platform. As the rick shaws weaved their way through the traffic, the levels of rubbish and street poverty seemed to be far greater than what we were used too! We checked into our hotel, a reasonable room but were shocked to find out there were no sports channels on the TV. (well mark and dale were, ollie didnt seem to care!)

After quickly settling in, we entered the streets of Triplicane, a region of Chennai and searched for lunch! We stumbled into quite a large restaurant and ordered the meal of the day! This was an interesting experience! First we were given a large banana leave each which became our plate and then followed pots of curry and sauce and a mountain of rice! We ploughed on through the food, only to be given further refills! The bill came to 100 rupees, just over 1 pound and this had included drinks too!

Feeling stuffed and quite tired from the train we went to an internet cafe! This would later prove to be a mistake as the computers gave Mark and Ollie a virus which caused some of our photos to be lost!

In the evening we went our for a cheap meal in a local restaurant before putting on our best attire and heading out to a 5 star hotel complex on the outskirts of Chennai in the hope of finding a TV. Our efforts were rewarded with a fine hotel with wonderfully soft toilet paper, a posh bar and a large Plasma TV.

After watching Man Utd smash Liverpool while enjoying some very cold beers and wonderfully tasty nibbles we made our escape! It seemed quite ironic that our largest bill for the whole of India was spent in a few hours simply on beer! It was a great escape from some of the places we had visited and was defineitly worthwhile as Mark's bag was now filled with frictionless, double ply toilet roll!

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