Mamallapuram
Try and say that five times, try and remember how to pronounce it so you know when to jump off a chennai bound bus – I had a little difficulty executing this last simple task and ended up having to walk from the local motorway (sound familiar, cough cough 😉 into the small fishing village and only true travellers enclave on the eastern coast of india. I was on the antibiotics at this stage so I wanted to find somewhere middlin fast to stay so I could hole up and get rid of the chest infection.
The first place I saw, I took it. I managed to negotiate a price down from 300 rupees per night down to 200 on the proviso that I would be staying there for a week. Now if you saw this room you wouldn’t put your suckler calfs into this place, had enough after one sleepless night and moved down the road to a much nicer place that was just a tiny bit dearer. It had tv, hot water, it was clean and had access to the swimming pool next door – so I decided to make this my home for a week.
To be honest I didn’t nothing all week – the most strenuous activity involved heading to the back of the town to see the caves, the wonderful rock carvings and watch the sunset over the deccan plains. In the town itself there is a world heritage listed temple that lies just on the shore. It was beautiful – I managed to visit it one evening just before sunset and it trully was a fantastic setting.
For the rest of the week I hung out with the two english girls, invariably getting up at about 12 in the morning before going for some porridge, heading to the beach for an hour or so before grabbing lunch reading a book before getting even more food that night. Sounds like pure slothery and it was but I feel that given the condition I was in that I should be forgiven at least a little bit.
There is this really great medical clinic in mamallapuram which I went into 3 or 4 times to get myself sorted. The main doctor there was this young woman called Indira Gandhi who really went out of her way to look after me. Her nurses were gas, they were all tiny, one of them was micro small. They were running around the place, giving out to each other, dramatically putting hands on hips and stomping their feet. At one stage there was one of them putting drops in my eyes, another taking my blood pressure and another one sticking a thermometer under my tongue. Because my eyes were persistently sore the doctor took a blood test incase I had dengue fever which was pretty common in that area, its a nasty but treatable disease so it was definitely better to be safe than sorry. They had the results in a couple of hours and they just showed up a bacterial infection that I had picked up from either a fellow traveller or an insect bite. Back onto the antibiotics this time for 7 days along with various other pills to protect my stomach and drops for the eyes. I was better within a couple of days.
Paying for this kind of service was also inevitably a unique process. There is no fixed price. The clinic was set up in a travellers enclave intentionally so that they could over charge tourists so that they could treat the poorer more needy people of which there are so many in this country. They were completely honest and upfront about this and their service equalled if not totally surpassed any experience I have had back at home – so I paid them enough to cover the costs of my own medication plus the same amount again which I thought was fair and was gratefully accepted.
The poverty is something which just doesn’t go away – its omnipresent – you see such shocking examples of depravity on a daily/hourly basis, from kids defacating on the streets to whole familys sleeping on the poor excuses for pavements, in mamallapuram it is just as obvious as anywhere – you are never allowed to hide away in your travellers bubble for very long and neither should you. In one of the books I am reading about india the author talks about people developing city eyes where they gloss over this pitch black darkest of elements, I find myself doing this time and time again. It frustrates me sometimes but I reckon its just a defence mechanism, to allow yourself to absorb all that is happening in your environment would be suicide, it would drive you crazy? How can you reconcile yourself with the fact that I am probably carrying enough cash in my money belt than they will see in many many years of living on the streets but biving money to these people is not the best way to deal with the situation, there is a dark sinister element at play which you don’t see or consider when a small child is tugging at your hand and pointing at their malnourished mouth. The sad truth is that this child is just being pimped out by its boss, a slave to some gangster who takes all what they can gather and gives them maybe a handful of rice at the end of the day so that they can go back out on the streets again the following day. I try as a result to give them some food instead, an opened packet of biscuits or a sandwich – something that they cannot sell back to the shop owner in order to garner more rupees for their boss. Its difficult to think of a proper solution that could help these people, they are stuck in a vicious circle to be dependent on these monsters, they may have been kidnapped or orphaned and have no other way of surviving. I have thought about volunteering my time to help at some stage and hopefully I will get the opportunity to give back at some stage. I feel I need to learn a bit more first…
I left mamallapuram with the girls last sunday on the way to chennai. I booked my train up north. In order to get to Rajasthan I would have to get 1 24 hour train to Jalgaon in the state of maharastra, north east of Mumbai – there are some funky caves there that are meant to be really worth the stopover. After one night there I will grab another train this time for 12 hours to the city of Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujurat state, before finally jumping on another train to Udaipur which is the southern gateway to the magnificence that is Rajasthan…
Later,
Phil
Tags: India, India, Tamil Nadu
Phil Gill
In fairness I remember cycling home from Buddy’s one night with no light on the bike and coming to an abrupt halt when I crashed into what I thought at the time were some stray cattle but now Olivia mentions it, it could have been an elephant…Rajastan is that the home of the King Cobra & the Tiger or is it further North. BTW was speaking to the Wall last week he’s doing some research project in India for the next six months not sure where exactly but I’ll find out. I remember him telling me that the only real way to stay sane is to disassociate yourself from the poverty to some degree otherwise it overwhelms you…Great Adventures so far..nrnrTalk soonnrnrGerrynrnr
Reminds me of my honeymoon. (Dont worry Auntie Maureen, I wont go into too much detail!!)
Anyway, woke up one morning absolutely dying. Couldnt believe it as I only had a couple of beers the night before but it was like the hangover from hell. And whats more, Catherina put it down to that also. So little by way of sympathy there for most of the day. I was hallucenating and everything. Thought I was rounding up bales at Pat Jacks in the middle of summer on my own with not a sinner in sight, a bad thirst and frightened that the bales were going to roll ontop of me and kill me, only to wake up with this horrenduous head and belly pain. Eventually, at about 10pm that night, Catherina from what she knew of hangovers realised that it had to be something else. The quack was called and I was hauled off on the back of a golf buggy on the broad of my back hanging on for dear life as this little guy did his Michael Schumacher impressions driving me through the compound. Seriously, how we managed to hang on without falling off reamins a mystery. The guy obviously had dreams of being an ambulance driver and this was his lucky day!! In the infirnary, with me in a savagely bad way, the quack confimred that I had a very bad infection caused by eating raw sugar cane up the mountains in the Dominican republic. I spent the night on an introveinous drip. But worse was to follow when I went to the toilet, the drip began to go red with my blood rushing all through the drip. I almost fainted and had that happenend, would have probably cracked my head off the floor and died!! In fact I did faint but Catherina managed to wheel the drip with me dragging behind it back into the cubicle. Comical stuff! But not at the time.
Two things I learned, 1. Dont eat raw sugar cane. 2. I was not going to get any sympathy from my new wife if I woke up any morning dying of a hangover!!
Keep well
Damien
I think Gerry might have crashed into The Bear, on his way home from Buddy’s!