We arrived in Chennai on the 8th, and planned to use the time doing boring stuff like arranging visas for Thailand. We did not book anywhere in advance as we planned to arrived quite early in the morning, but some late night shopping the night before (we just couldn’t help ourselves) meant a trip to the post office in the morning. On the way we got some advice to get a rickshaw to the junction outside of town as more “express” buses stopped there instead of going into town, well there is a good reason that they are express; they don’t bloody stop for anyone, especially two westerners with massive backpacks! Eleanor started to get quite vocal with the bus conductors waving their hands at us in the universal sign of denial (flat hand waving side to side, not a birdy!) So after an hour wasted standing around in the midday sun off we trotted back into town to the bus station as we should have done in the first place.
As a friend just emailed to say, we tried to perfect the “Bus standing sleeping position” or in my case the “Trying not to fly out of the open door position” (great for the upper body strength) for the hour or so into Chennai. The bus station at Chennai is amazing; it looks more like an airport than a normal Indian bus station, absolutely massive.
Chennai is surprisingly clean for a city, which was a surprise as someone from work (William), said that it was disgustingly dirty, so we must be fully desensitized to India by now or Will needs to go to Mumbai to see dirty!!
We discovered that the worst thing about this city is the rickshaw drivers who charge an absolute fortune (well, a relative fortune) for even the shortest journeys, and also make you go to their shop “very cheap, very nice, madam, looking is for free, madam.” Unfortunately for us, getting our visas for Thailand involved a very long and tortuous rickshaw drive with a man who didn’t even know where Chennai was, and resulted in not getting our visas. To be fair the embassy people were very helpful, just not helpful in giving us the visas we wanted.
So to get over the disappointment we spent the rest of the day in therapy; yes, retail therapy! Shopping till we are dropping is a favourite pastime, and having 3 for 2 beers at the hotel certainly made us more optimistic about the next day. We visited another typesetters in the morning and did some sightseeing in the afternoon (plus the obligatory visit to the silk shops), although to be honest Chennai hasn’t really got any sights which is surprising as it is a huge place.
Still, distant climes beckon as we get on a 32-hour train to Kolkata tonight (ouch) and everyone here warns us that the north is dirty, unfriendly, thieving, cold, conservative and to be constantly on our guard, although as far as we can tell the northerners say the same about the south (except the cold) so we shall see.
No comments:
Post a Comment