Blogs from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, Asia

Day 2 – Woke up at 5:30 am. I couldn't fall back to sleep so I laid around until 6:30. It was extremely hot in our room because our air conditioner was broken. I couldn't take it anymore so I got up and started to wander around the guest house. We had a nice balcony on our floor and I got to see some of India for the first time in the daylight. For being so early it was pretty hot already. The high for the day was around 95 degrees. I wandered around a while and headed back to the room to take a shower and try to get ready without “waking up” Jess who really hadn't even been able to sleep yet. I made it downstairs around 8 and met up with Dave, Megan ... read more

Day 1 – One the plane We all arrived to campus early and eager. We weighed our luggage and by some small miracle we were able to fit all of the donations that we collected. At campus we got to meet Raj's wife and daughter who came to say goodbye. The drive to Newark airport was pretty uneventful. Although there were jokes here and there, people were pretty quiet during the drive. Probably lost in thought about the fact that this trip was real and actually going to happen. It didn't take us too long to get through the check in and security screening at the airport. Once everyone was settled, groups broke up in search for a place to eat. The only place was a small bar/restaurant where Ashley, Jess and myself split some awesome ... read more

The drive from Mallaparum to Chennai was not a particularly long one, but we had left early as the truck needed repair work done on it in a garage in Chennai and thus needed to get there as early as possible. This normally would have been fine, but given that we were (most of us anyway) hideously hungover from the previous nights farewell party, an early start was most unwelcome. Already this was starting to be a bad day. Today was always destined to be a sad/bad day however as it was leaving day for many great people whom I had come to know and love. Today we would be saying a sad farewell to the legends that are Sally, Sarah, Bill, Carol, Colin, Marge and Luciana, as well as my very good friends Peter (room ... read more

I realised that I have to hurry up a little bit because my friend Sepp from Kiel wants to visit me in Chennai in about 3 weeks, and if I want to fulfill my plan of going to the very South of Inida it are still 1500km. Because the days in India are quite short also the distances I make are not so big. Before India it was no problem to ride more than 100km a day. But here I havent made more than 100km in one day except the one day without luggage where I took my MP3 player. After the night at the beach in Goa I decided to make 100km again. And I made it. I was going to the Cotiago Sanctuary in the South of Goa. And it was really nice. I ... read more

The monsoon rain was falling and we made ourselves to the bus station – which is about 7km outside of Chennai. So a bus there taking over 40 minutes and picking its way through the huge puddles that had formed from the nights rain fall, it was a total pain. Arriving at the bus terminus and finding out that there was no busses to Mamallapuram because the drivers didn’t want to drive along the roads – even though they were still going another 2 hrs further along the same road to Pondicherry??? After waiting for about an hr and talking to a few French travels – we boarded the bus. After seeing the sign for only 7km left of our journey – the bus pulls over to review a totally flat tyre and NO SPARE!!!??? The ... read more

During my time in northern India other travellers told me that the north and south are so different. Really, every state in India is different. They all have their own language, their own governing bodies, their own ethnic culture. This makes travel within India, even for native Indians, particularly challenging (of course it's also what makes this diverse country so fascinating!) Can you imagine if all the states in the US used a different language?? And yes, overall the north and south are also very different. It can be likened to the various regions in the US, where there are certainly different cultures between the north, south, east and west. In India, the north is known to be "real India", which from my experience means more crowded and dirtier. I found the south to be greener ... read more

Well If I'd thought I'd escaped significant illness, I'd thought very wrong! Maybe I'd become complacent, maybe I was getting a little too comfortable in my surroundings, maybe my body just couldn't take another curry. Regardless of how it happened, it definitely happened. We had gone to dinner on thursday night, a relatively dirty place but no less dirty than any other dirty place we'd been to! I'd stuck to my usual dousing hands in hand sanitiser routine, but I guess this time it didn't matter how much hand sanitiser I used, things were about to go pear shaped! I woke up a few times in the night, stomach cramping, sweat dripping from my forehead, but it didn't seem any different to any other minor bad belly. But by the morning, it hadn't subsided and by ... read more

Following what felt like a traumatic series of sari relates events, I thought the sari itself would stay in the bag and I would pull it out every once in a while, look at how pretty the material was, then put it back in the bag so it wouldn't crease in the wrong spot or something dire like that! Little did I know, the sisters that are staying here at Mithra had other ideas. We'd had quite a long weekend. We'd visited Kanchipuram where we completed a crash course in 'How to visit 5 temples in under 2 hours', been blessed by elephants, taken thousands of photos, eaten delicious meals, visited Keralan cultural events, eaten the best ice cream and shopped up a storm. The sisters would have no complaints of being tired or sweaty or ... read more