Arrival in Chennai
Trip Start
Jul 03, 2008
1
3
19
Trip End
Dec 07, 2008
Chennai (Madras),
Tamil Nadu,
India
Saturday, July 5, 2008
After our four hour connector, we are safely in Chennai (Madras) a metropolis about 3 hours north of Pondi. While getting off the plane we struck up a conversation with the American couple sitting behind us who were very helpful. Frank and Bridget are both professors at the American International University in Chennai, and it was great to hear advice and customs from Americans who were now Indian locals. My aforementioned comment about airports held true here as well; although it was clean and the staff nice, it was still very much in India: The toilet was a hole in the ground and they didn't even ask for our shot or health records on arrival, so customs took about 90 seconds. (No complaint here J) After meeting up with our driver, who was driving a Toyota Qualis (basically a half-sized Land Cruiser) we were on our way to Pondi, getting our first taste of India, albeit at about 2:30 a.m. The time didn't seem to faze anyone but us; there were still many cars on the road and people roaming about in the night.
The "big" trucks in India have no side mirrors and hand-painted murals and caution warnings on the back, and will sometimes drive directly in the middle of the two-lane "freeway." As such, it seems standard fare to continually flash your high beams and use the favorite Indian tool, the car horn, to get them out of the way. The other thing that I found amusing was that many of the trucks had the words "Highly Inflammable" hand-painted on the tanks they carried, and had official looking labels that said "Extremely Flammable" right next to the painted warning. After some thought, it occurred to me that "Highly Inflammable" really meant "highly In-flammable materials." For instance, a building could be "highly inconcrete" which would mean it had a lot of concrete. Oh the joys of translating grammar.
Gandhi Ji
Indian drivers and their love of chaos seems a little harrowing at first, but I never really felt unsafe even though we would sometimes swerve into the oncoming lane to pass (and many vehicles have no seatbelts) as this chaos seems to have some sort of flow and synergy; accidents are rare, even on streets swamped with auto-rickshaws and motor and normal cycles. Bridget, the woman we met on the plane, said that this has to do with the reaction: someone who is guilty of hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist may be mobbed by an angry crowd upon getting out of the car. In her words, " if you are in an accident, ditch the car and run."
We drove most of the night, coming to a local meditation/proto-utopian community known as Auroville, about 10kms from Pondi at about 5 a.m. We could have slept in the meditation hall, but as our hotel check in was at 8 a.m. and we had an odd amount of energy given that we hadn't slept in almost 24 hours we elected to continue to Pondicherry. We parked along the promenade by the beach and our driver slept in the car while we walked around for a few hours, taking in this new city.
Comments
Welcome to my land!
A hearty welcome and good blogging. Dan Kolhoff, your distant cousin, told me about you. And, I read with smiling interest your explores and exploits of India. Enjoy the sojourn. If you do get into trouble or need a word with someone who's familiar with both sides of the world..write me at .. moviegupta@gmail.com. Cheers and good luck.
Munish