God and country - the deep south, part 1

---

This blog covers the time approximately Sep 11 - 15.

So in the last blog I left off in the train from Mumbai to Chennai. I think I mentioned most of it already, but one thing I forgot to mention is some of the beggars. I don’t know if it was because I travelled sleeper class - the cheapest class where you still get somewhere to lie down - because on the other train rides later I never saw this. Anyway, at every stop there’d be lots of beggars coming through. There was the normal sort you’d expect - old people, children, midgets, people with missing limbs, blind people, etc. The less serious their physical ailments, the more miserable they try to look. It’s part of the game. No-one wants to give money to a beggar who looks like his/her life is going just great.

---

you might remember that I keep saying how terrible, technically, Travelblog (my provider) is. In this blog you'll see that nearly all my photos are captioned "Trichy". I actually gave them meaningful titles, and they're by no means all from Trichy, but it changed them, and it would take me at least an hour to change them back. So ignore the title (but not the comments - some comments might be meaningless without the titles, but ah well). Also the pics are out of order, I think that's more a fault of my camera (which names them inconsistantly) than travelblog, but again that was too hard to change.

Also remember you have to scroll all the way down to see the extra photos.

---

Near the start of the trip someone got on dressed in a sari. However “she” looked more male than female, albeit very effeminate. She was joking with the other guys in my compartment, but in some other language (I can’t tell which one) and touching them playfully on the arms or head. She got more coins from them than most of the other beggars did. I tried to ask the others, after she’d gone, what the story was, but they all avoided the question. Much later, a group of probably about four beggars got on, dressed in saris, but these were clearly male, they were much younger too. On one, his hairy back was visible through the open side of the sari. They had the same strategy, perhaps even more boisterous. After they left, I again asked, this time more directly, what was going on. “Umm, he was drunk”, explained one guy. I later found out that these are hijrahs. In a country where (at least until a couple of months ago) male homosexuality was theoretically punishable by life in prison, hijras are the “third gender” and are usually referred to in English as “eunuchs” but seem to include various intersex and transvestite people as well as actual eunuchs. Apparently very few careers are open to them, so most make their living from begging or prostitution. In begging, apparently, their common strategy is what I saw on the train - making use of society’s aversion for them by embarrassing people into giving them money to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Anyway, I finally got into Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. I ended up staying in a rather nice hotel, although a bit on the pricey side at over $20 a night - getting close to $25 (Rs 1000) by the time taxes and suchlike were added in - which looked quite fancy. It had the trappings of a real hotel, I think their slogan was “three stars for the price of two” or maybe it was “a two star hotel with three star service”, but this didn’t mean that the staff were at all friendly or could speak English well, or calculate the bill correctly. They speak Indian English, which is like real English only five times faster and with half the syllables missed out, so that “would you like any room service?” becomes “woliaromservs SIR!”. Anyway, I stayed there for a few nights, for the luxury. By this stage I was getting sick again from the food, so I didn’t do much. South Indian food is incredibly spicy. Urban legend is that spicy food is healthier because the spices kill the bacteria. If have no idea if this is true, or if it’s like that thing about Eskimos, but if it is true, that may be the problem, as presumably the spices aren’t able to determine between good bacteria and bad bacteria. Without bacteria you die, and even without enough good bacteria in your stomach you can’t digest food, which as I learned in Egypt is the problem with taking broad-spectrum antibiotics targeted at your stomach. Or maybe it’s just the lack of hygienic food preparation practices.

The other thing about Indian English is they have different words for some things. The pronunciation thing I mentioned seems to be more in the south, and more with the less educated people. But even the most professional news reports from the most reliable broadsheets never talk about, for example, “five million rupees”. They’ll always say “fifty laakh rupees” (and numerically it would be written “Rs/ 50,00,000”. You’ve probably heard of laakhs and krores if you know any Indians, but don’t know what they mean. A laakh is 100,000 and a krore is 10,000,000 (“1,00,00,000”). Some Indian English words are British (“lorry” for ‘truck’ or the constant use of “gentleman”) and some I don’t know where they came from (imagine later at a temple being told to leave my chappals - I found out later that “chappals” are sandals, nothing to do with chaples)

A day or two later I took the train down to Trichy, officially Tiruchirappalli, but always called “Trichy” including on most road signs or businesses in the town. I was headed here to meet up with my sister Liz and her partner Marty, who’d found cheap flights, I think because it was a new route for Air India. There’s not all that much to see in Trichy so they were pretty brave flying straight into a small (< 1 million) city in the rural heartland of one of India’s most traditional states, so I think they might have got a bit of a skewed impression of India. I got an airconditioned seat on the train, so there were no beggars this time. I had rehydration formula mixed in with my water because I’d been ill, and the gentleman on the train next to me asked what it was for. I tried to explain. “So it’s medicinal?” he asked. “I thought it was liquor”. It’s hard to get alcohol in Tamil Nadu, which is a very traditional and religious (all sorts) state.

At one of the intermediate stops, an old man asked me to help him lift his bag down from the rack. As I did so, he asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Australia he said “Oh, have you ever been to ?”

I repeated it to make sure I got it right. “No, I don’t think so”

“it’s near Cootamundra” he said, “where Sir Donald Bradman was born. Greatest Australian ever.”

“Ah yes, Bradman. Great bloke. Oh ok, I’ve driven through Cootamundra a few times. Not much there.”

“Ah never mind”.

A few minutes later he walked past again, just before the train actually stopped. He turned to me with that ‘I’m-going-to-tell-you-a-secret-young-man’ look that old people sometimes have, he told me “And the second greatest Australian ever was Ned Kelly.”

“Ah yes, Ned Kelly”. Then I muttered quietly: “I’m not sure all the policemen he killed would agree”

He stood in line waiting to get off the train. Then as he finally left he turned to me - “Well, say hello to Ned Kelly for me when you see him”

“If I see him I will. Hopefully it won’t be for some time”.

(Strangely enough I did once meet a man, years ago, in Australia, who claimed to be Ned Kelly and Hitler and Jesus Christ all at once. He also claimed to know the cure to AIDS and cancer, which both seemed to mainly involve smoking a lot of dope. I don’t think he was the real Ned Kelly though, although he was insane and had a beard, so you never know.)


Anyway I had a day in Trichy before Liz & Marty arrived, and wanting to wait with seeing the temples for when they arrived, I decided to go for a bit of a walk. Most of the day I stayed in my hotel as my stomach was still not too great and Trichy has no places to get normal food. As I mentioned, all the food in Tamil Nadu is spicy. Only the sweets aren’t spicy. Some places advertise “Chinese food”, at one place a few days later with Liz & Marty I was going to try that, I asked the waiter about the “sweet and sour chicken”.

“Would you like rice with that?” he asked

“Umm, it’s Chinese, right? Chinese food comes with rice.”

“No, no rice” - in the more rural areas they don’t speak much English (or Hindi) either

“Oh. Well, it’s not spicy, right?”

“yes, it is spicy”.

I decided not to try the sweet and sour and spicy chicken, and went for something they might actually know how to cook.


Anyway, my walk quickly took me away from the noise of the bus station which had kept me awake all night, although not away from much of the bustle. Trichy has no real town centre, although two different areas about 6 km apart could each be called that - one where I stayed, and one near the temple. I was trying to walk to the temple area but I got a bit lost and it got a bit hot. But along the way I passed plenty of hovels where people who couldn’t speak English were all clamouring for their photos taken, people of all ages, but mainly older people, often using their children as an excuse. Shades of East Timor. A group of teenage boys stopped me and when they found out I was Australian, asked me to join in playing cricket with them, which I declined.

There were beggars too, and one family sitting out on the footpath, not asking for money but wanting their photo taken. I don’t know why a family sits out on a footpath in the busy, hot, afternoon. About 20 metres away lay a scraggly old man with a full beard and tattered clothing, not begging, not doing much of anything. A mess of blood-soaked bandages lay next to his head and more blood-soaked bandages were caked in the front and back of his head. I thought he might have been dead. On the way back I saw his lips seemed to be moving. About 100 metres down the road was the Trichy Obesity and Diabetes Research Centre.

There weren’t too many other beggars, of course they like to stay where the middle classes hang out (there’s few tourists in Trichy) particularly where they pay money for stuff (it’s harder to refuse a beggar a few rupees if you’ve just spent several hundred rupees on a nice meal, and they know it). I passed a small but very pretty Catholic church. A beggar out the front hardly said anything until I went past, when it suddenly registered with him that I was white. He jumped to his feet like one possessed and placed his hands together like in a praying gesture and placed them on top of his head. “St Anthony” he cried out loudly. “Praise Jesus”. Oh yes, praise Jesus. I gave him a 5 rupee coin for effort.


I’m a little bit disappointed about the number of cows. Everyone talks about the cows on the streets in India, and given that everyone has a photo of cows in India you get the impression that cows are as abundant as, well, as abundant as rats at night, or guys peeing on the side of the road, or underemployed auto drivers, but really there weren’t that many cows. There’s a little bovine street-gang living on a rubbish pile next to our hotel, and of course you see people with cattle pulling carts, or, in the rural areas, helping with the farm work, but it’s not like there’s a plague of cows swarming in through your windows or anything.


So the next morning I took an auto (“autorickshaw”, like a tuk-tuk) out to the airport, bright and early. Since it has a number of international flights, I assumed it’d be like a real airport, with a somewhere to get some safe food. I tried to walk into the departure lounge but was stopped by armed guards who told me that it was only for passengers. There’s actually no building at all for waiting in, it’s just a departure lounge and an arrivals lounge and that was it. I think they thought there was something suspicious about me trying to walk into the departure lounge, or perhaps because I was the only non-Tamil person there, but I had a plain-clothes security guy and a couple of armed guards constantly looking over at me for the next hour or two until the flight arrived. The board out the front tells which flights are due, but not when they land of if they’re on time. There are quite a few flights, all from KL, Singapore, or Sri Lanka, I think. All those are places, of course, with large Tamil minorities, so everyone I saw getting off the plain looked, to me, ethnically South Indian.

We headed back to Trichy for breakfast. People seem more friendly when there’s three of you. The waiters ushered us into the special air-conditioned part of the restaurant, and a number of waiters hung around to serve us. We went back to the same place for lunch and one of them recognised us. Marty struck up a conversation with him and he told us about how he was fasting for Ramadan (being Muslim, obviously). He invited us to celebrate Eid with his family the next week, which would have been pretty cool but unfortunately we were planning to be nowhere near Trichy by then). Liz asked something about arranged marriages. He pulled out his phone and played us an audio, of his “lover”. He then went on in English we couldn’t completely understand, about how they weren’t allowed to get married and they had a pact that they were slit their wrists and set themselves on fire if they weren’t couldn’t get married. Apparently this was because she was his first cousin once removed (ie. the daughter of his first cousin).

Not fully understanding his English, I tried to recap ... “So you want to marry her but your family won’t allow it? Or is it her family?”.

“No!! I don’t want to get married, I’m only twenty!”

So I still don’t quite get it.

Anyway, we went up to the temple complex that afternoon, which was a bad idea. Firstly the temple was shut as most of them are in the heat of the afternoon, so we saw a little, but not much. What we did get to do though is climb up the solid rock hill which is part of the temple, to the top where you get a good view over the city and the dead flat countryside covered in palm trees as far as the eye can see. The fun part of this is that since it’s part of the temple, you have to do it all in bare feet, and of course the rock is pretty hot. We then took an auto across the river to the north side where there’s a cluster of temples. Again, the main parts were shut, so someone led us up to a deserted concrete roof-top where there wasn’t much to see but we could get a bit of appreciation of the size of the complex with all the various spires (not sure of the proper term) rising up everywhere). Again though, it was too hot to walk around without shoes. There was a little bit of what looked like hessian or very decomposed carpet, on bits of the roof, so we put that under our feet and by shuffling could get around the roof without getting too badly burned.

The next day we arranged a taxi to take us to Madurai, a larger city maybe 150 kilometres away. It’s easy to get there by bus, but Liz and Marty were on holidays, not poor backpackers like me, and also split three ways it came to only about 800 Rupees ($20) each, and this way we could visit places that we couldn’t get to with the bus. Lonely Planet suggested rather vaguely that there were some things to see along this route.

The driver took us to a large colonial mansion in a little town of Pudukkotai. We thought this was open to the public, but after a bit of wandering around, a government official told us that it wasn’t. Apparently it was some government building. Oops. Still, it was fairly pretty from the outside and had big gardens and we made the day of some of the lower staff there who didn’t seem to have seen terribly many white people taking an interest in their building.

So we headed back to the Pudukkotai museum, a dusty little museum with a fairly extensive array of miscellanea. None of it was very well explained, and some of it was weird. Probably the largest sections were stuffed or preserved animals, but all sorts of other things including some modern art, ancient art, musical instruments, drawings of some of the colonial administrators, and suchlike. Staff members went ahead of us turning the lights on and behind us turning them off. At 100 rupees ($2.50) per person, it was about thirty times as expensive for foreigners as for Indians. In fact I think we had to pay extra for cameras.

We drove a bit further and visited the Tirumayyam fort, a fort with several concentric walls around a small stone hill, with, again, views over the surrounding countryside - even though the stones aren’t very high, the view was good because everything is so flat. We walked up it, talked to a bunch of technical college students who didn’t get to see many foreigners, walked down, wandered around town a bit to get back to the taxi who’s dropped us off at the wrong place, and headed off. Standard stuff.

I forget where this fits into the sequence of events but somewhere in one of the small towns we ended up at some other temple. It was quite large but it seemed to be a bit shut, at least htey didn't look like they wanted tourists wandering around. We had a bit of a look from the outside, and, like many other Hindu temples in the South of India, had an impressive gopuram with masses of colourful figures. Only walking back we realised that at the lower levels at least, many of them were basically pornographic, although I guess the term should be "erotic". Unfortunately I didn't get a photo as I'd already put my camera in the car by then. This is of course common in other parts of the world, for a couple of reasons.

The taxi driver knew another temple that we hadn’t asked about and took us there. I don’t remember whom it was dedicated to but I think it was one of the less common gods. Unfortunately it was closing for the afternoon when we got there, so we only got a few photos from the outside. We saw the large water tank/dam in front of it - lots of the temples seem to have a pool of water in front of them, I think water is somewhat sacred to them, as to most religions, because they believe in a kind of circle of destruction and creation (or lives, worlds, universes ...). The water was green. Someone was bathing in it, someone was washing clothes in it, kids were swimming in it.

Part of the journey involved travel on a freeway. That might seem save, as of course the back roads are like in most of Asia, where you need to be incredibly skilful to drive, and the horn is the most important part of your car. I forgot to mention that as our driver swerved to avoid a motorcyclist, another motorcyclist behind us who was going very slow overcorrected and fell off his bike. He was going slow and landed on his feet. Our driver didn’t stop. Further along the way Liz and Marty saw a motorcyclist who’d apparently been hit by an auto, being dragged off the road with the help of a bus driver, although I totally missed that.

Anyway, on the freeway, the driving is similar, but at a faster speed. There’s still no guarantee that you won’t suddenly come across someone heading directly towards you. The motorcyclists (whom you’d think would be more careful, not being cocooned in metal) are the worst at this, perhaps because the freeways have virtually no turning bays. They’ll just drive down the wrong side of a freeway, usually in the small shoulder, but often right up against the traffic aisle. Sometimes cars do this also. There was a large amount of roadworks, so often the traffic was diverted so that what looked like a four-lane highway would in fact be a two-lane highway, with no signs to that effect, so you could expect trucks and busses heading towards you. Busses and trucks seem to have the right of way because they’re bigger - in one of the merges across to the other side of the road, i clearly saw a bus driver see us, have the option of stopping or of forcing us off the road, and chose the latter option. No-one was particularly surprised, that’s how driving in Asia works.

So we arrived in Madurai safely. I think I’ll stop here, although that’s not the end of the week in fact it only takes us up to the Tuesday I think, but I see I’ve written too much already, and not much happened the next week.

---

I know this one is a bit late. Most places in Tamil Nadu didn’t let me connect my own computer, and were incredibly slow and virus-riddled, so I haven’t been able to upload much (as I keep harping on about, Travelblog, which hosts this blog, doesn’t play well with slow connections).

---

Photos

Trichy - random people
one of the kids that insisted I take his photo

Trichy - random people
a group of guys who insisted that I take their photo

Trichy
main road near the front of the Rock Fort Temple

Trichy
view from the top of the rock fort temple

Trichy
view from the top of the rock fort temple

Trichy
view from the top of the rock fort temple

Trichy
I think this is the gopuram from one of the temples on the other side of the river.

Trichy
from the temple on the other side of the river

Trichy - random people
one of the temples on the north side of the river, whcih we didn't go to because it was too hot

Trichy - random people
the government mansion, completed in 1929 as the governor's mansion I think

Trichy - Rock Fort Temple
the remains of a stuffed bird in the museum. There are heaps of stuffed animals, some, particularly some of the birds, are about to fall apart

Trichy
freak cows (two heads, or one head with two bodies, etc.) in the museum

Trichy
one of the dams/tanks (not sure what to call them) in front of a temple

Trichy
temple which we didn't go into

Trichy
outside the temple with the ancient porn, we found this huge iron shed. Crawling into it I found a massive wooden sculpture looking like a gopuram, on wheels, clearly not used in ages

Trichy
(see notes on previous photos)
.. or this

Trichy
see notes on previous photos

Trichy - random people
what a cute little god.

Trichy - Rock Fort Temple
or this

Comments

[Arvind]

Use of spices in cooking is good for digestion and general health; but spicy food isn't actually good. Too much of any good thing is bad.