Chennai

We have two days before our driver & tour guide take over, so we are artless & fancy free.

The huge, dense, ever bustling city of Chennai has recalled all our previous Indian holiday experience. Perhaps foremost is the traffic – chaotic use of both sides of dual carriageways with an informal extra double carriageway aside each formal road; think three dual carriageways with direction of channel unknown. And the traffic comprises lorries, vans, buses, cars, tuk-tuks &, of course, assorted cows, goats & dogs.

Our hotel, one of the local Gokulam Park chain, must have been really smart in the 70s/80s. That might have been the last time serious money was thrown at it, now a tired once grand hotel, with not enough guests & unengaged staff. Yawn probably sums it up, but Kath & I have a soft spot for these mausoleums.

Significant construction of concrete pillars & bridges indicates a new public rail transport is coming.

Just need to convince all those road users then to relinquish their fave vehicle. Meanwhile, the traffic chaos is excruciated by all these on-road building sites. Ended the day with a fantastic curry. Of course!

On our second free day, we walk. And walk and walk, eventually taking a tuktuk to the beach. The ocean here, part of The Bay of Benghal, is angry. Apparently murderous, too. So we didn’t go swimming. We found another dark bar in another hotel’s dark corner – it seems they want the income yet pretend they’re all good Muslims – before taking another tuktuk back to our hotel. Very tired. Tonight’s curry was at an Andhra-style “palace” & also really good. Yet to have a bad meal …

Day three begins with our newly connected tour guide, Dominic, & reunited with our driver, Rakesh, we start our fearless 4 tour. First off is the Kapaleeshwarar Temple, an astounding series of brightly painted human & not human creations built into an ever rising archway, aka Dravidian (historically local) architecture.

The creations were astonishing &, like all temples, without shoes. Our guide even managed to inveigle a smile in a photo from Chris. Not be doing that again.

This was followed up with a visit to St Thomas’ Mount, the first arrival of Doubting Thomas in India, where he apparently made good after departure from the last supper stuff. Probably caught the duff location from dividing up the world between the apostles to sell christianity. Looked around his recently made Basilica status church & a museum dedicated to Thomas, who was murdered by a local gentry-type fellow by being speared in the back. From the museum we learned that only Paul survived more than a decade after the last supper & that was despite being boiled. That’s resilience.

An early evening visit then to Marina Beach, second only in size to Rio’s mighty Copacobama / Ipinima, apparently. This beach is huge, both depth & length, indeed some of the food etc stalls look incapable of being moved; and, like the roads, all car parks are bloated with buses, cars, tuk-tuks & motorbikes/scooters.

And then our first poor meal, at our hotel, where a stunning menu in front of us turns out not to be the “new menu”, which is yet to be published for the customers. Need we say more? Another sign of this hotel’s fall from grace.

Our last day in Chennai sees us stuck in lengthy traffic jams to reach St Mary’s Church, a Scottish Presbyterian copy of London’s St Martin on the Field, built on marshland using piled foundations. Daring for late 19th C, but also unadventurous once the foundations had been laid.

Our explorations of Chennai ended with a trip to the huge main market – as in fruit, flowers, vegetables – set in dowdy galleries which nonetheless do the job after 200+ years. And frequented also by cows, goats, dogs. And our last dinner is made of momos, from street food traders, which are delicious & just the right amount of food.

Tomorrow we set off for Pudu/Pondicherry