Lakshmi and other animals

The animals in India deserve a mention.  My favourite to date is Lakshmi the elephant at the Ganesh Temple in Pondicherry.  She is a beautiful creature with a lovely nature.  For a carrot or just a bow of your head she will bestow a 'blessing' by gently tapping you on the head with her trunk.

Lakshmi

bestowing a blessing

 Then of course there are the cows in the middle of  city streets. They just amble down the streets or congregate on street corners totally oblivious to humans.

But sometimes they do serve a purpose - like cleaning up some of the garbage.

Or pulling heavy loads - note the painted horns.

Then there are the other grazers - goats. Interestingly in Ft Kochi in Kerala we have seen very few cows on the street but lots of goats.

Can't forget the monkeys but as cute as they are we stay clear of them as they are notoriously naughty and carry rabies.

There also are dogs everywhere but I couldn't take pictures of these as it was a bit sad.  Although they all seemed healthy enough - only one or two had any evidence of mange - they are neglected and let to roam and I am quite sure full of parasites.  There is no de-sexing so all the bitches are lactating and having too many litters. They also carry rabies so as much as we would like, we avoid patting them.

What also is of note is what animals there aren't.  Although we spent a lot of time on the Coromandel Coast and now the Malabar Coast on the Western side, we have not seen a single sea gull.  Instead they have these crow like birds, I think called a House Crow, that seem to fill in the ecological niche of the gull, ie live by the sea side scavenging from the fishermen and generally making a pest of themselves, but dd not have webbed feet.

House crow on the beach

There are also no vultures.  Bob remembers in the 70's and 80's that every city had vultures soaring over it.  Now there are none.  Apparently they have been wiped out to near extinction by poisoning from a commonly used veterinary drug used for treating arthritis in cattle.  Old cows are given the drug to extend their working life, then die and are eaten by vultures who in turn die. The farmers are suppose to stop using this drug as there are alternatives but rebuilding the population will take a long time.

Oh and I almost forgot the cute chipmunks that run around everywhere - also rabies carriers so we keep our distance, plus Eileen has a scar on her first finger when a chipmunk bit her when she was a child.

Pondicherry or Puducherry

So far Pondicherry is the nicest place we have been to in India and we are a bit embarrassed to admit it is probably because of the French influence.  There are plenty of cafes and restaurants, we can easily get good coffee, and with dinner a G&T or beer while being served by pleasant staff - sure beats surly waiters and being blanked.

Pondicherry or Puducherry as it is now called is an ex-French colony.  During the 1700s the French and British vied for command of this port and it changed hands half a dozen times until the French finally took control in 1815 until 1954.  The French influence is everywhere.  The architecture, the uniforms of the police, presence of cathedrals and nuns and there are still a lot of French tourists and shop owners hence nicer hotels and restaurants.

Great restaurant

Old colonial house

Puducherry Policeman

Interior of cathedral

This influence however seems confined to a small area near the waterfront called White City.  A few blocks from the waterfront is a canal running north -  south, really just an open sewer.

Canal in Puducherry

This divides the French Quarter from the Tamil Quarter.  The architecture here is known as Creole and a lovely mix of French, Moorish and Tamil.

Old and renovated buildings in the Tamil Quarter

Rubbish is definitely a problem in India but there does seem to be some effort being made to make people aware - unfortunately failing abysmally.

Litter in the streets

Attempts to control litter

In the evenings the water front comes alive and it seems the whole city comes out to stroll along the waterside, meet friends, have a snack and just enjoy the cooler breezes off the sea.

Waterfront Gandhi statue in the heat of the day

 

 

 

 

Waterfront in the evening

Enjoying the sea breezes

There is a lovely practice here of decorating the entranceway to one's house with beautiful chalk drawings.

doorway decorations

more doorways

Mamallapuram or Mahabalipuram

Ever since seeing the Rick Stein BBC series in search of the best Indian curry we planned to visit this lovely fishing town to try the best fish curry Rick ever tasted.  We found the restaurant and had the fish curry and agree it was a pretty good curry (beautifully fresh red snapper in a spicy gravy. They brought a tray of fresh fish for us to chose - went away and cooked it up).

The Rick Stein discovered  restaurant with the 'best fish curry'

 The location can’t be beat – right on the beach of the Coromandel Coast with a lovely cooling breeze off the Bay of Bengal surrounded by colourful fishing boats.  The area was affected by the Tsunami a few years ago but seems to have recovered (though hard to tell in India were even things not damaged by natural disasters are looking pretty run down).

 

Bob relaxing over a beer

 However the next night we had a mixed fish masala from the Moonrakers restaurant and I think this was even better.  This was a whole red snapper, prawns and calamari cooked in this spicy masala paste.  Fantastic.  The fish just doesn’t get any fresher than this.

Fishermen tending their nets with an 8th Century temple in the background

Heading out into the surf

Mamallapuram is just beginning to grow as a tourist town (frequently a mixed blessing) but for now it is very nice – enough nice restaurants, shops and guest houses to keep the Western tourist happy (though finding a place for sundowners is a bit difficult and only a few of the restaurants sell beer, and surreptitiously at that).  The town is still a quiet fishing town with minimal touting from the trinket sellers and tuk-tuk drivers.   

Its main attractions are the ancient temples, rock-cut caves, stone Rathas (monolithic sculptures) and bas-reliefs from the Pallava Dynasty of the 7^th and 8^th Centuries. The whole area has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.  The carvings are very impressive.  We spent two mornings exploring them 

 

Shore Temple build in early 700

Ajuna's Penance - carved from a single rock

Krishna's butter ball

 

Bas relief

two of the five Rathas

 By 11 am it really is the ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’ time and we must head back to the hotel for a shower and siesta, only to emerge again around 5pm when it is slightly cooler.  

Mamallapuram gets power outages every day for about an hour or two in the middle of the afternoon.  All the shops and guest houses have back up batteries or generators to accommodate this but the circuitry is such that only essential items are maintained.  So the fan stays on but the air conditioning and internet go off.  This unreliable electricity happens despite having a nuclear power plant within sight just down the coast.  The locals tell us that things are much better as last year they would have power outages for about 10 hours every day.

Attempts are being made to make Mamallapuram a bigger tourist destination.  Off the beach is an old Indian submarine that is being made into a museum.  It is a Russian made Foxtrot submarine named Vagli, one of the Vela group submarines, made in the 1970's.  It will be brought up on the beach to a specially made complex.

INS Vagli

The Great Indian Blanking

After 27 hours of travel, with a great 12 hour stopover in KL, Bob and Eileen arrived in Chennai.  The airport was relatively quiet and orderly and the driver from the hotel waiting for us patiently.  Where were the hoards of people and chaos that Eileen was lead to expect?  Mind you the trip in the taxi through the Chennai traffic was fairly hair-raising, but no worse than HoChiMihn City.  We have learned to not look at the driving while in the traffic, just look at the street scenes – much less chance of a heart attack.  So Eileen is thinking travel in India isn’t going to be as challenging as everyone was telling her.  

That was before The Great Indian Blanking. We arrived at hotel reception and there was only one other customer ahead of us with three staff behind the counter.  We waited there for at least 20 minutes before they would even acknowledge our presence despite repeated attempts.  There was no eye contact, they shuffled around behind the counter, straightened papers, made phone calls and looked at the computer screen.  We had to admire the artistry of this blanking, really superb. 

Hotel in Chennai

Finally they gave us a registration form in triplicate carbon paper.  Who uses carbon paper these days?  Then someone wrote some details in a hard bound registration book, another found our reservation on a loose piece of paper in another folder while another person took our passports to photocopy.  This might sound like efficiency once they started but none of these activities were done in any organised manner.  The photocopying of the passports took about 10 minutes while the person came out several times jabbering to the other staff.  Filling in the registration form was done in a minute or two by Bob but the staff didn't acknowledge the completion for about 15 minutes despite pushing the paper their way, another bout of blanking.  And so it went.  The whole process took an hour.  There were two computer screens behind the counter but everything was paper based and done in triplicate.  But even then when all the bits and pieces of the process were finally completed, we asked for our key and were told the bell hop had it as the room wasn't ready yet.  So despite having made a reservation, the hotel sending a driver to pick us up, the plane being an hour late and the registration taking an hour, they didn't have the room ready.  All we could do was laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

We probably did not give Chennai a fair chance but it is not really a great tourist destination.  We stayed near the Egmore railway station, a beautiful old building from the days of the Raj.

 

Egmore Railway Station in Chennai

 Near a railway station one would usually expect cafes and restaurants and other amenities for travellers.  These were hard to find, or at least not in the form one sees throughout South east Asia.  We went to the beach front and there were lots of Indian tourists and locals enjoying a day out.  The beach was very wide, probably 500m of sand but absolutely filthy.  

Chennai Beach

 

Still this didn’t stop the locals jumping into the water and enjoying a splash, taking a ride on a horse or enjoying some fresh fish.

Bathers at Chennai Beach

Horse riding for city slickers

 

 

Fisherman clean freshly caught fish