Last Days in India

It is the afternoon of Wednesday the 28Th of January, we leave for the airport to fly back to the US in about seven hours, our plane leaves Chennai Airport at 3:15 AM,  so I thought I'd better get caught up before the trip back takes over and I never get around to it.  As it turns out the hotel we spent a night in in Chennai was worse than we thought, Adam was the favorite food of some local bedbugs - we will send an update on this place to the guidebook publishers.  After getting packed up and out of that bug trap we caught a city bus to the bus park from where buses left for surrounding towns.  After asking a few times we found our bus, a brand new air conditioned model, and within a few minutes were on our way 55 K south to Mamallapuram, a beach town with a several thousand year history of stone carving.  One thing about India, time lines are never short. In Mamallapuram we ran into the beach resort overbooking problem, the hotel where we thought we had a reservation said they were full but took us to a second hotel that would have room for us in a few hours, so we went for a walk around town and the beach for a few hours and returned to find that the room availability was again postponed.  After an hour or so we asked more questions and got the impression we were getting a real run around, finally they told us the truth.  Friends of the owner were in a room and the staff couldn't throw them out and they wouldn't leave.  We were fed up and started looking for another place that had rooms, which we found just across the street, and for about the same price; it felt good to move in and get settled.  Adam laid down to rest while did a bit of Internet stuff, when I got back to the room Adam was still exhausted, not like him at all.  At this point we had been fasting for over a day, we had eaten way to much at Rainforest Retreat, it hadn't bothered me at all but I guess my metabolism has slowed a bit, but Adam was dragging way to much for someone that my friend Paul calls the energizer bunny.  We talked about it and agreed to go get some fruit juice and see it that helped; we had the juice and an hour later Adam wasn't feeling much better.  This situation called for quick action, so we went to a restaurant a few door from our hotel run by a Frenchman for an excellent dinner.  By the next morning Adam was feeling more energetic. 

The next morning just after breakfast we went to the beach for a swim, neither of us can sit on the beach for very long.   So after a long swim and a little walk on the beach we went back to our hotel, all or two or three blocks away to change.  After lunch we walked around parts of the town we hadn't seen the previous day.  There is a beautiful old temple very near the beach and many examples of the carvers skill in a rock quarry a few blocks inland.  Specialists believe many of the carvings  in the quarry were done as examples for prospective customers of what the local carvers could do.  A lot of stone carving is still done in the town, both large statues for temples around India and lots of small pieces for the tourist trade.  The south of India, by this time of the year starts getting hot again and by the time we got back to the hotel we were hot and ready to hit the beach again, so off we went for a cooling dip in the ocean.  Later that evening we went to another excellent restaurant for dinner, really fresh fish, and then ambled back to our room. Except for a night in a fancy guest house near the airport in Chennai this was to be our last night in India and it was hard for us to believe that it had been two months.  After we both get back to the states we have promised ourselves and each other to right some reflections of our experiences during these two months, so stay tuned.  We will probably also update our 30 hour trip back to New York City, which includes a 6 hour lay over in Hong Kong.

The next day Adam was up before sunrise, he is feeling his old self again, to go to the beach for early morning pictures; I slept in till he got back.  Then it was breakfast, a swim, packing and catching the bus back to Chennai.  We had a bit of an adventure finding our guest house, but nothing awful.  We have a beautiful room in the owners house in a place called the Pleasant Stay guest house.  The owner and his family are very nice and the name of the place says it all.  So, in a few hours we will eat a bit, pack up and head for the airport to leave India behind but we will be bringing with us a boatload of memories and impressions that will take months or years to sort out.