Southern India Revisited

February 1-3, 2013, Mamallapuram, India

“Ray, that woman who just passed me looks an awful lot like Jetja, from the OBC in Ottawa. I think a group of bicyclists just arrived and one of them had a Canadian flag luggage tag on his backpack”. We went racing after the group who were walking next to some of the Cave Temples in Mamallapuram, a small tourist town about 2 hours south on the bus from Chennai. Sure enough it was Jetja (pronounced the Dutch way ‘Yetcha’). We had flown from Colombo, Sri Lanka, the previous afternoon and taken the bus to Mamallapuram that same morning. The bicycle tour group had just spent a few days in Chennai and had also arrived in Mamallapuram that same day. The bicycle group was only staying one night in town before starting on a tour of Southern India by cycling to Pondicherry the next morning. Jetja introduced us to some of the others in the group, mostly from Ottawa and Vancouver. The word spread that fellow Ottawa cyclists were around. Paul Meisen, a fellow who used to bicycle with Ray until his job moved him to Montreal, came running up to us to say hello. We walked and talked with them to the top of a the Cave Temple Hill to see the sunset before wishing them a safe journey. It doesn’t matter what country of the world you are visiting anymore. The chances are high you may meet someone from your home, or at the least, someone within that magic seven degrees of separation.

Mamallapuram, population just 12,000, is the biggest tourist town we have been in for a long time. Ray said it reminded him of the Backpacker Quarter of Bangkok. Apparently it was on the Hippy route during the 70s and has stayed popular. You can buy lots of clothing favoured by backpackers and lots of stone carvings, from small Hindu icons to huge lawn ornaments. The town has a long sandy beach, shared by local fishermen and lines of restaurants and guesthouses. It didn’t appeal to us as a swimming beach as the water was less than clear and the surf can make swimming challenging.

I had my first run in with an Indian cow in Mamallapuram. A garbage truck passed us as we walked down a narrow street. Instead of watching my feet, I watched where the truck was going and stepped in a big pile of very fresh cow dung. What a mess. I had to return to our room to wash all the muck off my shoe. I should be in for several days of good luck after that incident.
 

We are finding out that the transportation system in India is not much better than our experience on our last trip to India in 2000-2001. Our bus trip from Chennai worked out well only because we got a taxi part way to get a direct bus to Mamallapuram. Otherwise we would have had to transfer to an already packed bus and stand for the 2 hour ride. A reserved seat on a train sounded good for later in our trip. We thought we would be proactive and book ahead of time. The two routes we inquired about were both full and had long wait lists. We have websites to try to get one of the few last minute tickets that are released one or two days before departure, otherwise, it is back to the buses.

On everybody’s must see list is Arjuna’s Penance, a huge tableau featuring elephants, a series of snakes filling a crevasse once flowing with water representing the Ganges and hoards of celestial beings floating in space. The hill we visited the first day to view the sunset has a collection of cave temples and tanks to store water for bathing and drinking, cut into the boulders strewn over the hill. They honour gods to protect all their worshippers. There was even one boulder, called the Butter Ball that everybody likes to pose under like Hercules lifting the world. We managed to visit most of them over the course of the weekend, snapping lot of photos that you can see on Picasa.

The Five Rathas, shrines representing chariots used in festival processions, are a favourite of everybody. The monuments, each carved out of a single rock boulder, have a life-sized carved animal next to them that is the mount of the Hindu Gods.

One of the changes we have noted is the increase in Indian tourism. Bus loads come, especially on the weekends, to visit the same towns that have enticed foreign visitors for years. We were in the minority for our visit to Mamallapuram on Saturday and Sunday and the Indian tourists were just as curious about us as we were about them. We ended up chatting to several groups and were even included in a few of their souvenir photos.