India!

18 March 2009

After over a week over wrangling and winding our way through indian bureaucracy, we have finally freed the wombat from the port of Chennai. I cannot even begin describing the amount of pointless formalities that was necessary, but what I can say is that without the help from our friend Ramesh, I would have probably lost my mind and my calm several times!

The week we spent in Chennai has been useful though. I find that it has helped us get accustomed to the way things run here, as well as get accustomed to India itself, its cities, its roads, its food, and its people.

The city of Chennai is extremely lively, with crowds everywhere you go, and touts asking you to change money or take a ride in their rickshaw. The roads are a cacophony of horns and sirens with motorcycles, rickshaws trucks and buses competing to get to their destination the quickest possible. All this seems to happen in a completely disorganized fashion, but I find there is a loose logic to the way they drive here.

Sadly, the first thing you notice straight away is the garbage. It’s everywhere, and it seems like nobody really cares about it. People don’t use bins, they just chuck everything on the side of the road. And then, you notice the smells. The rivers are the worst. There is a foot of black gunk on the edge of the river, with the water itself having a repulsive colour, and the smell..well you can imagine. You have to learn to accept it, as the Indians do, and just learn to clean your hands twice as often as you usually do.

There is no doubt about the high note of our first couple of days here: the food. Many people are vegetarian here, and that has made MC quite happy. We can have a delicious veg meal, with drinks, for 80 rupies, which is under 2 USD. Paratha, dosai, poori, idly, are all different forms of pancake/bread that you dip in dhal or various chutneys, and i have never been once disappointed. This is only the south indian food I am talking about, there is more to come! I would say that on the food level, India has blown all the other countries away, with maybe the exception of Thailand.

As I mentioned earlier, we have met a very friendly gentleman named Ramesh here in Chennai. Ramesh happened to be at the Port Pass section when MC and I were trying to get a pass issued so that we could access the port. A necessary step to get a port pass was to get immigration clearance, but the immigration office was ironically located inside the port. Talk about a catch 22! Luckily, our guardian angel Ramesh helped us get around this.

We were quite excited that Ramesh invited us over to his house for lunch last Sunday, and we got to meet his lovely wife and two adorable girls, had some food, and chatted about everything and nothing. It turns out that Ramesh works two jobs, he works for the Chennai Port Trust, maintaining the container cranes during the day, and at night he puts on his uniform and works as a police officer. I was quite surprised to learn this, and later on he admitted that this detail had helped us when dealing with the port bureaucracy.

Now our plan is to drive to Bangalore, and from there we are going to head north towards Hyderabad and through the centre of the country. And eat more indian food. yum yum.

One detail- we ran out of batteries for the digital camera, so that is why there are so few pictures of our first week.

JD