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Published: January 27th 2009
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Admittedly since decided that we would spend some time in India before heading onto Europe, Danielle and I have had moments of anxiety and nervousness about travelling to a country that we really did not know that much about. Our preconceived notions of India was that the whole country would be littered with pollution, smell like shit, be uncomfortably hot all of the time, we would be hassled by beggars 24 hours a day and that we would have diharea within minutes of setting foot off the plane. It is now a week in and we are still yet to encounter any real culture shock.
When the flight attendant on our Tiger Airlines flight TR 638 begun to spray the aeroplane with a deodorisor upon decent into our first port of call Chennai, the two of us began to worry that the next few months would be somewhat more difficult and testing than travelling through South East Asia.
I fully understand how Australia can screen a show like Border Security with our strict customs and immigration standards but at every other international disembarkment we have encountered so far, evidence of any customs control have been non-existent. You can
see how desperate people can be tricked into thinking they could easily smuggle substances over borders to make a quick dollar when in international airports like Chennai's they don't even scan your backpack upon arrival.
After collecting the bag and fighting our way through our first mob of taxi drivers we boarded an Ambassador car and were once again screaming through the streets on our way to our pre-booked guest house. Admittedly our taxi driver did get us there in world record time but we did have our eyes shut for most of the journey and once we had arrived and he pressed us for a tip for his driving we did not know what to do. The lonely planet was right at the bottom of my big backpack so I couldn't pull it out to see what the standard tipping rate was for near death experiences. The driver then said to pay him what we felt was appropriate, so I flicked him 50 ruppees ($1.80ish) much to his disgust. Fortunately the bell boy of our hotel was close by to usher us in to the guest house as the taxi driver started going ballistic. 30 minutes into India
and we had already deeply offended our first local.
We arrived late on the Saturday night and woke late on the Sunday to the chorus of auto-rickshaw horns in a range of tones from fog horns to duck quacks. We booked our room from Singapore without any real knowledge of Chennai's layout and soon after waking up realised that the Thousand light district was a fair hike from the lonely planet suggested areas and for the next two days we did not see any person who was not Indian. We adjusted to eating in the Sub-continent in style eating a few incredibly inexpensive restaurant meals and planned on finding our next stop.
Mamallapuram stood out first because it was only 2 hours away and to give us further incentive the crazy taxi driver from the first night pulled over to the side of the road at one point and insisted that he take us there the day after we arrived. Peer pressure almost always works, especially when it comes from a wild eyed Indian. We found our 20 rupees bus from Chennai courtesy of a very helpful man who introduced himself as Mr Livingston and 2 hours later
we were by the ocean for the first time in over a month.
The town of Mamallapuram is a strange one. Once built on the chisels of the stonecarvers it has since been transformed into a hot spot for hippies and ultra cool, down to earth people. I am not going to lie, there is a pair of fisherman pants in my backpack but I am talking the type of people who have dreadlocks on half of their head and wear so many articles of traditional Indian clothing that the shop owners don't even bother to try selling any more clothing to them. Strangely enough for the first time in the month away we didn't find people to talk with straight away and it wasn't until our second last night in the town that we had a decent conversation with someone that didn't involve yoga or meditation.
The chisels of the locals have been working from dusk till dawn for centuries in this area and while they are now carving pieces for tourists to take home in their backpacks, the true masterpieces of this town date back 1300 years to the reigns of Narasishma Varman I and II
who had grand and elegant temples carved in their honour. We paid our 250r entry fee each to visit the historic monuments of the Shore temple which sits proudly on a point facing out towards the bay of Bengal and then on to the five Rathas which depicts chariots dedicated to Shiva and other Hindu gods.
I am not really clear on what it was that kept us there for 5 nights, maybe it was that our guest house had a swimming pool or that we were eating well for under AU$10 a day for the both of us but the real highlights of Mamallapuram were few and far between however Danielle did get attacked by a monkey with a mohawk so that topped off my time there.
We eventually did leave the town for Pondicherry on Saturday morning and had our first realisation of actually being in India and not just a weird version of Byron Bay. When the local bus pulled up with close to 100 people jammed onto the 60 seater we knew it would be a strange and uncomfortable couple of hours. For the first 40 minutes I stood in the stairwell while Danielle
had been shoved a further 10 meters up the bus, our bags going a different direction over the heads of people to their resting place and my acoustic guitar being angrily thrown into an overhead compartment by a man with a drooping moustache.
Chennai and Mamallapuram has provided us an easy transition from the familiarity of South East Asia into what will be the next few months of our lives here in India but I am certain that things are going to get a whole lot more hectic before we set off for England.
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