Ooty to Bangkok


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March 25th 2012
Published: March 26th 2012
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19th – 25th March: Ooty to Bangkok




George: On Monday we go back on the train to Mettupalayam we get on an overnight train to Chennai. Mum books first class. On Tuesday we arrive at Chennai at 5 o’clock in the morning and a taxi takes us to the Full Moon Guest House and it’s great. It has a terrace, that’s where we have breakfast. Pondicherry is very hot. It’s Wednesday and we are going to the Ganesh Temple because it was closed yesterday. It is very nice inside and it has lots of different pictures of Ganesh in different poses, shaking hands / meeting other gods and with different numbers of arms. The following day we go to the paper factory and we see how people make handmade paper. I never really knew what an awfully wet job it was. As we come out we see three big monkeys drinking the water from the garden hosepipe. On Friday we have to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to catch a plane to Mumbai. (Of course Dad isn’t too happy!). When we get off at Mumbai we find out that our booked flight to Thailand had already been sold out. Dad gets in an awful row with the lady and eventually we have to wait in Mumbai until the next flight tomorrow.
Carla: The last week in India and it occurs to me that I have become slightly habituated to the almost constant sound of distant drumming. Will I miss it as we travel away from the sub-continent? Maybe I’ll have to get George to buy some bongos and play them a couple of streets away at all times.
We left Ooty on Monday and travelled back down the mountain considerably faster than we had travelled up it, despite an incident with a goat on the track. We shared a carriage with a touring family from West Bengal whose itinerary round South India closely resembled ours. I spoke to the younger woman who appeared to be travelling with her husband and parents or in-laws. She was lovely but her husband had a T-shirt with a pig getting drunk on the front of it and he behaved in a way that you would expect from someone wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a drunken pig on it. So I was rather pleased to see that, although they were going onwards to Chennai like us, they were not in our carriage on the overnight train. Arriving in Chennai Central Station on Tuesday morning was a good reminder of where we were in the world; in the large passenger hall every inch of available space was taken by someone sitting, sleeping or milling around. Once outside we were assaulted by shouts from taxi drivers and some followed us up and down the pavement despite Alex saying we didn’t need a cab. Eventually we found the driver sent by our guest house who sped us the 140km to Pondicherry obeying not one single traffic regulation along the way; although to be fair, he did stay mainly on the left-hand side of the road.
The Full Moon Guesthouse was in a Muslim suburb of Pondicherry which seemed to suffer more power cuts than the rest of the town; we were glad we brought our head torches! On Wednesday, despite what appeared to be a general bus and everyone else strike, we made it into the French Quarter and visited the colourful Ganesh Temple there. There was a ‘bonus’ Temple Elephant outside the front door, which was nice. On another occasion in Pondicherry we visited an enterprise run by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram; a handmade paper factory. It appeared to have seen better days but there were still a handful of workers (volunteers?) working in the factory and we were able to wander in unguided, watch the process of making the waste cotton pulp into paper and inspect various piles of drying paper that lay around the slightly run-down looking workshop. The intent is clearly a good one – they take an agricultural waste product, cotton that isn’t used by the textile industry, and make it into an artisan product, beautiful handmade paper. The slightly creepy thing for me was the ‘ashram’ aspect of the place. The factory is part of one of the largest ashrams in India which was set up by Sri Aurobindo in the 1930s and attracts lots of westerners and therefore quite a lot of money. An ashram is wherever a guru sets up a house and spends time with his or her followers. A guru, as far as we could make out, is anyone who has the confidence to tell people how to live their lives and obtain ‘fulfilment’; if you ask me, that is one helluva lot of confidence! This ashram practices ‘extreme yoga’ and has rules on drinking, silence etc, but nothing too harmful. The sinister aspect is the reverence in which the guru and his ‘heir’, a Frenchwoman called ‘The Mother’ are held in the ashram and all its operations (which include a bakery, a dairy farm, a beach hotel, three guest houses and an education centre). At the paper factory there were a large number of pictures of The Mother visiting the factory and one had the legend underneath, “the light shone from her like a spiritual glow”. There were also letters from her to the workers in the factory (many years old now as she died in 1973) basically telling them off for not working hard enough and letting her down with regard to deadlines and quality standards. If you ask me she was a charismatic leader but one with zero people management skills.
Overall my impression of Pondicherry was of a pleasant but slightly mismanaged town, completely dominated by the ashram but worth a visit for the novelty of seeing the French colonial legacy in India, which included great baked goods. The architecture and streets in the French Quarter were charming, with plenty of impressive mansions and civic buildings surrounded by quiet, tree-lined streets frequented by bicycling yoga fanatics.
On the journey to Chennai airport, I felt a sort of pre-nostalgia for, what I thought was to be, our last car journey in India for a while. I was wondering whether I would miss the particular smell of diesel fumes, effluent, dust and heat as we went East into the West towards Bangkok. However, I was being a little bit previous! It wasn’t going to be our last car journey for this visit to India at all.
Alex: We checked in at Chennai, but as there was a fault with their systems we were told we would have to check in again at Mumbai for our flight to Bangkok. When we got off at Mumbai at about 11am we were met by a representative of Jet Airways and told that they had oversold the flight and because we hadn’t checked in yet we were being bumped onto the next flight at 1.55am. I was tired and was determined NOT to put up with this. What is the point of booking a flight, confirming on-line and then turning up on time, if Jet Airways can then just say “sorry, we sold more tickets than there are seats”? Idiots! We had done everything we were supposed to do, and yet they could just bump us to a ridiculously inconvenient flight – 2am is not a time you would usually think, “Yes, that’s when I’d like to fly”. Useless, incompetent buffoons. I tried to put these points not so calmly to the representative from Jet Airways, who apologised but couldn’t do anything about it. So we got the manager out and I told her what I thought of Jet Airways. By now George and Ruby were crying (I’m usually so mild mannered I think it was a bit of a shock for them!) (Are you kidding? Ed) so I toned it down a bit. In the end they couldn’t get us on the flight, but gave us a hotel until we had to return to the airport and some money to make amends. I still can’t believe they can get away with this kind of behaviour.
Carla: But the upside of that little bit of corporate mistreatment was that we actually went to downtown Mumbai which we had studiously avoided before what with the children being new to India earlier in March. I was very pleased to tick off another World Heritage Site – the Chatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus building (formerly known as the Victoria Terminus) a brilliantly neo-gothic extravaganza of a place with a ticket hall that was designed like a modern cathedral. Following that we trotted round the Gateway of India which was newer having been constructed for the visit of King George V in 1911 to Mumbai. Then we went for a splurgy afternoon tea at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel which was paid for by some of our Jet Airways compensation money; the glacial air-conditioning, light ‘dinner jazz’ piano tinkling in the background and ancient but faultless waiter were all welcome and comforting after our slightly traumatic morning.
Ruby: At Chennai we got a taxi to Pondicherry. We were staying at a guest house. When we got there we had to go to a shop to get breakfast. We went to the beach and then we went to the playground. We went to the swimming beach and then we went home and then we went out for dinner. We went to sleep. Next morning we went to the Ganesh Temple and saw an elephant. Then we bought an ice cream. Next day we went to the paper factory. We saw them making paper. We saw some cheeky monkeys. Then I bought a hairclip made out of paper and note pads. Next day we got into a taxi to the airport, we got onto a plane to Mumbai. When we got there our plane to Bangkok had no seats. We booked it first but other people got the seats so we had to stay in a hotel. I liked the hotel but we had to wake up at 12 o’clock at night to get to the airport. This time we got onto the plane but both times were stressful. We got to Bangkok we had a company waiting for us at the airport, they showed us the hotel and we had a lovely day.
Alex: Arriving in Bangkok, the first thing we noticed was how quiet driving around was compared to India – with the constant horn honking – and how much richer the city seems. There is much less litter and although there are some slum buildings, there are far less than Mumbai. It all felt remarkably civilised. It was very welcome to arrive in our air-conditioned hotel room, our first for a while. We spent the morning sleeping (after our 1.55am flight) and in the afternoon I went to the weekend market while Carla, George and Ruby went up to the rooftop swimming pool. The market is absolutely immense, with 1,500 stalls offering mostly cheap clothes and footwear, food, Buddhas, silks, iPods, luggage, leather etc. It went on for miles – a bit like Camden market times ten with more Buddhas. It was packed despite the very heavy rain. I had to shelter for 15 minutes under an awning with about 100 other people before venturing in. Once I’d decided to leave, it took over twenty minutes to get back to the entrance. We were leaving the next day for Chiang Mai, but not until the evening, so in the morning we took the sky-train to the river and then a river bus to Wat Pho, to see the giant ‘Reclining’ Buddha. Even though I’d seen it before it was still amazing, the sheer size of it. We took lots of photos trying to get a sense of the scale of it, but it’s difficult to catch. Ruby wasn’t feeling well. She had a bit of a gyppy tummy, so she rested with Carla while I went round the rest of Wat Pho with George. It’s one of the most stunning things I’ve seen: lines and lines of big golden Buddhas, massive shiny golden Buddhas inside pointy roofed temples straight out of a ‘The King and I’ set, intricately decorated conical towers, and bizarre statues. It kept George’s attention gripped and mine as well. That doesn’t happen often.
George: We arrive in Bangkok on Saturday morning; we get a private minibus to the I Residence Hotel Silom. We go to the Home Bakery for lunch but I’m not allowed to eat anything because I have a tummy ache. Bangkok is big and good, because it has the Sky Train. I like the Wat Pho, which we visit on Sunday morning, because of the massive, humungous, enormous, huge Buddha which has feet made of Mother of Pearl and they’re bigger than Dad’s. It’s painted with gold leaf and it is lying down which most Buddha’s aren’t. Dad and I go round the rest of the temple on our own, Mummy has to sit with Ruby who isn’t feeling too good. The temple has all sorts of statues including hundreds and hundreds of amazing Buddhas, mainly gold but one black one in each line.


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26th March 2012

Ah...Bangkok
I wonder if where Pondicherry is where my friend's wife Nell grew up? I know she grew up in some sort of idealised community. I will ask her. Her parents were out and out hippies who travelled there in the 60s and true to their hippy ideals the mother now makes a mint from exported crocheted goods. Dad just drinks on a boat I believe. She does pay a lot more than the usual wages but still turns a healthy profit for them over in UK and Europe, and lives very nicely there, thank you very much. I imagine there's a fair amount of that, ho hum. You know I didn't know you were going to Thailand - my cousin's widow Lemon would have come to meet you I'm sure, she speaks beautiful English and would have shown you some things you might not otherwise have seen. She lives in Rayong, which is in the gulf, some 1 hour 30 minutes by car. I will see her in August, I'm going out to my friend Tony and his fiancée's wedding. I imagine it's lovely weather for you now, not too humid as yet. I wonder if you've heard about the fabulous Susan Boyle moment on Britain's Got Talent? A not too prepossessing looking lad of 17 comes on with his duo partner, and opens his mouth to sing like Pavarotti, a totally show stopping moment. Cowell's chin was on the floor and his eyes full of dollar signs. Look for it on YouTube when you get a chance. Gordon was in tears as usual, such a big softie. Ruby, you look terribly relaxed in the hammock - are you snoozling? It looked most comfortable. And George, I love your Ganesh elephant - such a joyful trunk that elephant has in the picture, keep them coming please. It's been glorious here, Gordon was working and Saturday was full of admin and chores so only made it to the beach for an hour or so. Yesterday our friend Paul came with his two, Josh and Emily and we spent the whole afternoon there, we had a great time and I have caught the sun. Off now, I'm on the train to work and I want to get this in while I've still got a connection. Looking forward to the next instalment, George xxxx
26th March 2012

Thailand way hey
What an interesting journey so far. We were sorry to hear about the air flight fiasco. But Bankok seems a haven of peace after Mumbai. Enjoy it. Nice piccies. We hope Ruby gets better soon. lots of love Len and Marion (Nanny and Grandpop)
26th March 2012

Ashram
I recently worked with a Pole (from Poland) he was a temporary worker in the exam invigilator role. We got into a heated discussion about Ashram and their power. He was trying to convert those who definitely did not want anything to do with his views into believing in their ways. I took your view some confidence! But we all need guidance at some time in our lives!! Sounds like your guide Alex is taking his turn well ! So could one sit down in first class? I must get back to reading the second half... bye for now
26th March 2012

Buddha
That is one impressive golden statue. Hope you, George and Ruby are feeling better. loving the drawings George. Ruby what a stylish hair clip. Hope you don not get caught in the rain. x
26th March 2012

I loved George's opening statement "Mum books First Class", no nonsense there, I'm certainly with you on that one Carla! Sounds like you had a lucky escape from the dubious "Paper Factory" aka Cult... and Jet Airways makes Ryan Air sound like a reputable business! Looking forward your next installment!
27th March 2012

Loving the blog...
Just discovered the link at my other email address and think the trip and the blog look fantastic! Still jealous...but inspired. Enjoy and take care...and keep them coming xxx
29th March 2012

armchair traveller
Am absolutely loving your blog - particularly with the story being told by each of you. I hope you manage to keep it up - you have a loyal band of followers! Enjoy Thailand... Trisha :) x

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