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Published: December 22nd 2009
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It’s proving harder than usual to find an Internet connection so reports from India could be few and far between this time!
I think it’s Monday evening now (I’m sure about the evening part, so I haven’t completely lost it). Still, since this is the first report, I’d better start at the beginning.
The flight was early on Friday morning. And I do mean early - 5 to 8 take off from Heathrow. I had a taxi booked from home for 4:45 but seeing how the snow was predicted for early Friday, I changed plans late on Thursday afternoon, found a cheap room near the airport and got on the half seven train instead. That worked out OK: I got a reasonable night sleep before the flight and left the Holiday Inn at 6 am for the shuttle round to T3. The Qatar Airways flight was completely full and to be honest, the service was OK but nothing special. After extensive research I’ve decided that the service and food don’t matter anyway. What makes the difference for me is having a spare seat alongside so I can spread out, get up and down when I want and not have
someone else’s elbows poking me when they’re eating. Trouble is, that happens less and less these days - most flights are full.
Doha airport is fairly crappy: better than Bahrain but not a patch on Dubai. But I knew that! No free wi-fi, lousy coffee and my chocolate brownie had a piece of copper wire in the middle. Nice.
The second leg of the flight was only 4 hours but on a smaller plane, so full again. We got in to Chennai about 3 am, and then took an hour to get through immigration, followed by a 2 hour drive to our first hotel after meeting Tony our tour guide.
Most people (me included) crashed out then for the rest of the day and we met up again late afternoon for our “briefing”. The hotel was fairly basic - clean but nothing fancy. Still, on the plus side, they did have a pool and 2 restaurants. So we spent the first evening at the rooftop restaurant where they laid on a buffet. And quite a lot of Kingfisher!
Next day Tony had arranged a guide to show us the town. To be honest there’s not a lot
to see and although this was a nice gentle start, you wouldn’t want to stay more than a couple of days tops. There’s some old rock carvings and sculptures, a group of 5 temples plus one other temple on the seashore. The area was struck by the tsunami a few years back and apparently like many other places which were hit, the first sign was when the sea retreated (like the tide going out but much more). Some people recognized the sign and they were able to evacuate in time - only a couple of people were missing. When the sea was “out”, two more temples were exposed on the sea bed - they had been lost in a previous tsunami about 100 years ago, when the profile of the coastline was altered. Apparently someone managed to snap a few pictures before escaping.
Running out of time and battery so just a quick summary now! We left on Monday morning for a 2 hour drive back to Chennai (Madras) to catch the train. That was fun as usual. Indian trains generally start on time but end up late - this was no exception. Tony had a cunning plan to
save 3 hours from the journey by leaving the train early at an unofficial stop (he bribed the guard!) and arranging for our bus to meet us and take a cross country shortcut. This was his first time with this plan and thankfully it all worked out OK. We reached our second hotel about 7 pm and had a really good dinner in the non-veg restaurant. Today it’s raining, but on and off and not too hard. Anyway, it’s warm rain so who cares!
OK, time to upload and more to follow soon with luck........
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