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Published: August 7th 2007
We got into the train station in Chennai, the closest city to our next destination, Mamallapuram, in the early morning of March 15th. We had intended to take a 2-hour taxi directly to Mamallapuram, but I got sick in the train station (in front of plenty of staring people, with a little accidental splashing of Jeff… not my finest moment of the trip) and instead we made a dash to the nearest hotel in Chennai so that I could spend the next couple of days in bed and in the bathroom. When we left Chennai to head to Mamallapuram two days later, I literally hadn’t left the hotel, so I can say nothing about India’s fourth largest city.
Mamallapuram is a small seaside town known for its long history of rock-carving. The road from Chennai to Mamallapuram ran along the coast of the Indian Ocean through flat fields scattered with palm trees. Surprisingly little of the oceanfront property was built up, most of it undeveloped but dotted with clusters of palm-thatch huts. Occasional spurts of commercialism appeared along the road—enormous tourist resorts and even a few amusement parks, catering to anticipated hordes of future tourists. On the way into Mamallapuram
we passed through the center of town, where locals crouched in the doorways of shops or walked slowly down the dirt roads with enormous bundles balanced on their heads. Our chosen hotel, Greenwoods Resort (which was hardly a resort), was on a road crowded with guesthouses, tourist shops and restaurants, a short walk to the beach through narrow alleyways between buildings. The hotel was a scattered jumble of unique rooms built seemingly randomly around a central courtyard filled with plants, flowers, and a shrine to Ganesh. On our first night only a simple, characterless room was available, but the second day we moved into a charming corner room with a writing desk, a small porch, a hanging wicker chair and two large windows accented with red flowered curtains. We hung our mosquito net and slept comfortably with the windows open at night.
We went to check out the beach soon after arriving, and were slightly disappointed to find it littered with trash and nearly empty except for the occasional local sitting on a fishing boat staring at the waves. The sand was soft and white and the waves looked alluring, but no one was swimming and there was a
slight stink of rotten fish and trash. We walked back into town and found the roads lined with shops similar to those found in Goa, selling cloth bags, cheap cotton shirts, overpriced silver jewelry and an endless assortment of Hindu statues. In this case, due to the stone-carving history of Mamallapuram, the statues were mostly of stone instead of the commonly found brass and silver molded statues found elsewhere. The steady “chink chink” noise of carving stone crept out of stone shop doorways, and grey stone dust settled in the dirt of the shop doorways. Tourist-oriented restaurants and tourism operators lurked between the shops, and taxi drivers waited in their seats, leaning out the window to shout “Where going?! Need taxi?!”
Soon, in our wandering, we ran into a woman we’d met on the roof of our hotel in Madurai. Her name was Kerstin and she was from Austria, traveling alone for a few months through South India. We sat with her to have a drink and discovered that she was staying at the same hotel. That evening the three of us decided to go swimming under the stars, when the darkness would prevent local fishermen from staring too
much at the westerners in swim suits splashing in the waves. Like our first night in Goa, we found the water sparkling with photo plankton, which illuminated the crest of each wave as it broke around us. A little ways down the shore we could see the silhouette of the nearby shore temple, its pointed roof a dark triangle against the night sky. We ended up swimming almost every night, always accompanied by the photo plankton to mirror the stars above.
A few days into our stay the three of us decided to take a day-trip to a nearby crocodile farm, where thousands of crocodiles are bred and eventually re-released into the wild. We took an auto rickshaw down the same road to Chennai, a mid-speed participant in a chaotic race of wandering cows, overflowing bicycle carts, honking taxis, brand new SUV’s and enormous brightly-painted trucks. It was only 20 rupees (50 cents) to enter the surprisingly large crocodile complex, where pen after pen held varying types of crocodiles and alligators. The cement walls separating the many-teethed predators from the curious tourists were, in many cases, terrifyingly low. Signs warned “crocodiles can jump!” and “stay back!” but the too-short
walls made the warnings somewhat ridiculous. We took pictures but kept our distance. Near the entrance, for a small extra fee, was an area where venomous snakes were “milked” to produce anti-venom, and we watched as two seemingly fearless handlers taunted the cobras with sticks until they raised their hoods in anger. The handlers grabbed them by the head and shoved their fangs into a cloth-covered vial, letting the yellow poison drip into the glass bottle. One handler told us he’d been bitten twice, and last time had spent a month in the hospital. After a quick look at an array of poisonous and enormous snakes—these, thankfully, safely behind glass—we left and climbed back into the rickshaw to head back to Mamallapuram.
A few days into our stay in Mamallapuram we went to the train ticketing office in town to buy our onward tickets to head up to Varanasi. The office was open from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1:30 to 4 p.m. We waited from 10 a.m. until noon in the sticky, stuff room, while the line crawled forward. At 11:58 we finally made it to the front of the line, and handed the boy our request
form, which was fully filled out and ready to be quickly entered and printed. He punched in the train number, checked the screen, told us our seats were indeed available—and then said “time for lunch” and shut the window. We spluttered with exasperation, but he was gone and there was nothing to do but wait until after his hour-and-a-half long lunch break. We finally got our tickets that afternoon, for the following Saturday, which gave us a total of a week in Mamallapuram. It was longer than we really wanted, but the train only ran Saturdays and Mondays. Kerstin ended up deciding to join us in Varanasi, despite originally planning to stay only in South India, and she bought tickets for the same train a few days later.
Since there wasn’t a whole lot to do in Mamallapuram, and since the beach wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to spend a day, we ended up spending a few afternoons in the swimming pool of a nearby expensive resort, which allowed non-guests to swim all day for 150 rupees. On Thursday we went back to the crocodile farm with Kerstin in hopes of seeing them fed, which supposedly happened every Thursday
at 4 p.m. We arrived at 3:30 only to find out that they’d “fed them early,” for no particular reason. We did get to see the tail end of a feeding, where already-full salt water crocs munched on bloody bones. Not quite as exciting as we hoped, but crocodiles are interesting close-up even if they’re not particularly hungry.
During our daily wanderings through town Jeff and I met a local guy, Jack, who invited us into his house for chai. His house was a tiny one-room rectangle made of cement and thatch, with a twin bed, a small shrine, a wooden shelf piled with clothing, a few pictures of gods on the walls, and, somehow, a small working television and ceiling fan. His wife crouched on the floor, punching small holes in mussel shells with a metal spike. She spoke no English, and even her husband wasn’t able to fully explain what she was doing or why—it seemed to be for jewelry, but he said no to that and gestured to the doorway, indicating something we never did understand. Regardless, it was kind of him to invite us to his home, and fascinating to see the place where he,
his wife, and two pre-teenaged sons lived. Poverty seems to have no effect on kindness except perhaps to augment it, and we have been offered gifts of food, tea and even money by some of the poorest people we’ve met here.
Also in our daily wanderings, Jeff and I were informed that the many rock-carvers in town would happily make custom carvings for very cheap. After a few jokes about having full-size busts carved of ourselves, we decided to have custom-made earrings carved. We picked the designs and stone types, and for 300 rupees ($7 U.S.) each we each had a pair of one-of-a-kind stone earrings made in 24 hours. As we hear so often here—anything is possible in India.
On our final full day in Mamallapuram, Jeff, Kerstin and I went to see some carvings at a park in town. The park also contained an enormous quasi-spherical boulder balanced precariously on a rock cliff. The park grass was actually green—not something we’d seen much of during the dry season in India—and goats wandered the grounds. The carvings weren’t quite as exciting as they might have been without seeing the Ellora caves, but one relief in particular was
"milking" a cobra
Photo by Jeff @ eyeballimaging.coma very impressive depiction of a story from the life of Arjuna, the hero from the famous Hindu text Mahabarata, which Jeff and I had both read in school. A kid attached himself to us, as often happens in tourist places, swearing he was “not a guide, just practicing English” but proceeding to explain details about each carving. It’s usually nearly impossible to lose these “non-guides,” since they swear they don’t want your money. As always, once we’d seen the extent of the park, he invited us to see his “school” where they learn carving skills. The “school” was, of course, a small shop across the street from the park, and as always it was a challenge to escape without buying anything. He followed us down the road as we walked away, carrying a box of small carvings and begging for us to buy. I’ve been in India for over two months now, and I’m asked for money on a nearly hourly basis—either by beggars or vendors—and it’s still sometimes hard to walk away. Two separate women in Mamallapuram, both with babies on their hips, stopped us to beg for “Pepsi for my baby.” Horrified, we bought them bananas and
hoped they might take the place of Pepsi, at least for the day.
On the morning of March 24th we packed up our bags and left Mamallapuram, taking a taxi with Kerstin back to Chennai to catch our 40-hour train to Varanasi.
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Claire
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Hey lady!
Oh my - Pepsi for my baby huh - I think the banana was a good option. Just wanted to say hello and once again tell you how much I love your blogs! Im in New York right now for Spring Break exploring for the week - fun, fun.... How much longer do you have left? Ive lost track... I miss you!