Luxury, Legs Full of Bug Bites, and Lessons in Patience

This morning I arrived, after an overnight train ride and a early-morning rickshaw jaunt, back to Hyderabad just in time to scarf down breakfast, shower, and arrive to my 9 AM class fifteen minutes late.

But I should start from the beginning.

A large group of my friends here expressed had expressed an interest in visiting Chennai and Pondicherry, two cities along the Southeast coast of India in the state of Tamil Nadu. This looks, on a map, to be very close to Hyderabad, but slow transportation, non-existent freeways, and the whole concept of “Indian Time” can really increase the distance between two given places. There are two options for traveling from Hyderabad to Chennai. One can either take a fourteen hour over-night train, or a one hour plane. Let me reiterate, FOURTEEN hours on the ground versus ONE hour in the air. Something here doesn’t add up. The forty dollar plane wins out in terms of efficiency, but the four dollar train wins for price. Amongst a group of cheap college students, the majority chose to skip a day of school to make the journey by train. My friends Tamar and Laurel and I opted for the more luxurious plane though.

None of us remembered much of the Hyderabad airport, having arrived there in the wee hours of the morning over a month ago following a brutal 24+ hour flight. We were, for this reason, quite surprised to see it again in all of its glory. The airport may well be the swankiest establishment in the city. Our eyes widened and our mouths watered as we saw an Italian gelateria, a REAL coffee shop, and a cocktail lounge amidst the massage parlor and jewelry store. Since we were already being really elitist we got cocktails.

The SpiceJet flight to Chennai was, in the tradition of Indian transportation, a little crowded and noisy, but otherwise quite a luxurious way to travel. The most shocking element of the journey was the flight attendants. With plenty of makeup, fitted blouses, and short skirts, these beautiful girls could have fit in with flight attendants from any other part of the world, but this was the first time since being in chastely-dressed India that any of us had even seen a set of exposed human knee-caps.

We touched down in Chennai and felt the change of climate immediately. Beach towns in southern India are very humid, evidently. We had picked a hotel called Broadlands somewhat randomly out of someone’s guidebook. The description spoke of “chipping plaster walls,” “courtyards,” and “a lot of character.” I knew this meant that it would either be awesome or disgusting. Luckily, it was fabulous. The white plaster walls were indeed chipping, and there was not a whole lot in the way of luxury, but the “character” really made up for it. There were bats hanging from the ceilings of the open-air hallways, the room had slatted shutters for doors, the building could only be navigated by a series of narrow winding stair-cases, and overall, it had the atmosphere of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. We loved it and I’m not even being sarcastic.

As the three of us were walking out of the hotel to find dinner we passed a group of other hotel guests and easily struck up a conversation. It’s hard not to love other travelers. Before we knew it we were sitting down to dinner in a great little restaurant with three British blokes (one of whom was celebrating a birthday) and a girl from Maine. The evening concluded with more socializing and drinking in the chipping plaster courtyard with lots of interesting characters back at the Broadlands.

The next morning we rose early and set out for a little exploration in Chennai. A long, sweaty walk led us to Chennai’s famous beach which was dirty and kind of gross, but somehow still really scenic. Chennai, as a whole is a much more aesthetically pleasing than Hyderabad is.

From Chennai we took an epic bus ride to Mamallapuram. The bus, we imagined would be air conditioned but it was not. It was not as luxurious as the plane. Once passengers had piled in three to a seat, more passengers squeezed into the aisles, and once the aisles were almost full of passengers a group of construction workers loaded down the remaining space with giant burlap sacks of what we can only assume were rocks. After 45 minutes we made it out of the bus terminal and after a draining few hours we made it to Mamallapuram. We found and devoured lunch immediately upon arrival. We also found the rest of our group who had traveled on the train.

I had heard of Mamallapuram from my Asian Art History Class sophomore year at Oxy. I knew it was a cool place and that I wanted to visit it, but all I could remember about it was that it was the last set of monuments that we learned about before our midterm. I remember trying to memorize how to spell "Mamallapuram," but could not remember any of the dates or people associated with it. Oh well. Nice old 7th(?) century elephant carvings...

Mamallapuram was quite interesting as a town because it is the first tourist-trap that I've been to in India. In Hyderabad we tend to get a lot of stares for being white, but in Mamallapuram we were surrounded by large tour groups of aging Americans, and many of the be-dreadlocked, be-birkenstocked spiritual tourist types that I assumed one would find in India. We also had trouble shaking off a group of three eager teenage boys from Yemen who wanted to follow us around all day having political discussions. They did provide some entertainment however. Upon the discovery that I study dance they immediately demanded that I do the moonwalk...what must they think of Americans?

Though Mamallapuram was a neat little town, it was not our final destination for the evening. Laurel, Tamar and I had had enough gross buses for the day so we had planned on taking the slightly more expensive Express bus to Pondicherry. Unfortunately, no such thing exists and we had to stand on a crowded, sweaty slow-as-possible bus for a good three hours. I kept falling over. Laurel, in an act of spontaneity had jumped into the ocean at Mamallapuram and got to stand around with wet hair all that time.

At least, we had a reservation at a really nice hotel waiting for us in Pondicherry...or we thought we did...We FINALLY arrived at the hotel, starving, sweaty, and willing to pay any amount of money for comfort, only to find out that the hotel clerk that we had spoken to on the phone less than an hour before had simply been lying when he said there were rooms available. We called every hotel phone number that we could find with no luck and eventually had to bribe our rickshaw driver to take us around to all of the hotels he could think of. We found one, but it was more expensive than we were hoping for. And though it was air-conditioned, it had neither bats nor character.

We went to the first restaurant we could find that was still open at 9:30 PM, and ordered huge meals. Unfortunately for the waitstaff at the restaurant we were really in no mood to be reckoned with when they told us that they were out of everything we wanted on the menu.

Pondicherry is an interesting and surreal place because it was once a French colony. The streets and buildings all look French, but in front of them you still have vendors selling pineapples or begging women in saris or lazy cows napping in the road. It's like what you might imagine a French town to be if it was built and inhabited by Indians... Like Mamallapuram, Pondicherry is filled with Western tourists. It was fun for us to get away from Hyderabad for a while and eat European food and pamper ourselves a little bit, but it seemed strange that Europeans on vacation would come all the way to India to visit a replica European town.

The day's adventures included a lot of wandering. We went to a used book store where I acquired a recipe book for Indian desserts so that one day I can cook gulab jamun for all of you. We also decided to get pedicures. This would have felt great were it not for the hundreds (literally) of bug bites that I had collected over the weekend all over my feet and legs.

The following day we had to begin our journey back to Hyderabad, but we opted to hire a car rather than take the four hour bus back to Chennai. From Chennai we took the overnight train...and now you know the whole story. It was a fantastic, cultureclashtastic weekend, and I'm sad to have to go to school again...now I've just remembered that I have a test tomorrow. Uh oh.