India

This past week I traveled to Chennai, India and made a side trip to Pondicherry. I am on an airplane now, the trip takes roughly 24 hours, 18 or so hours in the air, the rest standing in various lines so we could get x-rayed, probed, examined, and interrogated by one nation or another. On a scale of travel hospitality India scores a 9, the British an 8 and the US continues to push the boundaries and approach absolute 0. Amazing how important a timely smile can be. India has them in abundance.

Certainly the biggest initial shock for me was the driving style. This is a quick shot out of Vijay’s car . Here is another movie I didn’t make that also gets the point across. I speak with people in India on a daily basis, and I often notice a lot of horns sounding the background. I was astonished to discover that the reason for all this honking is that no real rules exist for driving in India. You don’t pay attention to lanes, there are no “no passing zones”, and I never saw a speed limit sign. Roads are for all of traffic: from pedestrian to commercial buses, with at least half the traffic made up of bikes and mopeds.
Head lights? Completely optional. Bikes by the way are frequently used as a family automobile. Dad driving, mom sitting behind him, side saddle, and the baby nestled in the mothers arms. I saw this a 100 times. There is a pecking order that can be quit disconcerting. You definitely get the hell of out the way when you see something larger than you coming your way, and everyone gets out of the way for buses. The bus drivers are a deadly bunch. At one point while driving down a major highly one bus was passing another on a 2 lane road and coming towards us. Our driver was forced to pull into median.

The second biggest shock is the food. Having grown up watching India Jones and Temple of Doom I had anticipated a challenging culinary experience. Fear ye not. It may well be the best food in the world. I didn’t find the food terribly hot, or completely strange. I found it good. Damn good. Lots of curries and breads and coconut milk. You just can’t go wrong, or at least, you can’t go wrong when you have a team of dedicated people at Lister Technologies pointing you in the right direction.

I had the amazing opportunity to have breakfast with Stanley Henry’s family on Sunday morning. Stanley comes from a Christian home. We ate at 9:00. I ask if they were going to church and found that Stanley had already gone and that the parents would go later that evening. It is so hot there they tend to go to Mass at the fringes of the day. I got a chance to see Stanley’s home and meet his parents and brother who were all extremely hospitable.

In Pondicherry I walked the beautiful beach there and spent some time visiting a Hindu temple. Outside the temple was an elephant who would bless you by rubbing it’s trunk on your head. I would say that it took some courage to let him do that, but it didn’t. The animal has the largest most peaceful eyes I have ever seen. Impossible to fear.

In addition to bikes and mopeds, the streets are thronged with motorized rickshaws. All the same color, all the same shape, at any moment you can walk into the street and count 10 or 12 of them. These drivers can take you all over the city, but beware, they always negotiate a price, there is no standard fare. You have to work it all out ahead of time, otherwise they will get you someplace, then negotiate on getting you back. Not a good place to me.

I took a ride in a ricksaw a few miles up the road to the Ocean. The beach in Chennai is long, easily a football field in width. Beach goes tend to show up in the early morning before it gets too unbearably hot. The beach is filled with fishing boats, some of which look like graciously sized cannoes, others are hand made, built of rough hewn beams gently warped up and in and held together with rope. There was easily a hundred of these boats gathered together near the fishing village at the end of the beach. Scattered among these boats where the tangled balls of fishing net. At the far end of the beach is a area the government built for these fisherman – a series of concrete apartment houses. Between these buildings and the water is a fish market and I was able to stop and take several pictures which you can see here, here, here and here. The population overflows the concrete homes and builds a number of thatched homes which you can see in many of the pictures above.

We went to see a movie in Chennai called Jodhaa Akbar. Chennai, though an enormous city, does not have many diversions within it’s boudaries. One of the few ways to get out is to go to the movies. And wow do they ever go to the movies. Just one of the 3 theaters in the multiplipex we visited could sit close to a 1000 people. With a screen a 100 feet across and sound you would expect to find at a large rock concert it was breathtaking experience.

Outside of Chennai you can find a number of tourist destinations. Among these are a crocodile park, a heritage museum similar to the frontier culture museum in Staunton (but much larger and focused exclusively on India), and a little farther out is Mahabalipurum and ancient (600 BC) site with unbelievable rock carvings and temples.

On the way to visit Pondicherry our driver stopped at the side of the road and we ran up to a point where they were harvesting sea salt. We got a number of excellent pictures and I felt like a seasoned photographer, dashing into foreign lands and gathering rare shots no one has ever taken. My ego was a bit squashed when they started demanding money from us for letting us take their picture. They seems to know they were a tourist attraction.

All in all it was a wonderful experience. There are many many more pictures, all of which are available here. Please feel free to come talk to me about it, there are ton of things I didn’t mention here.