Chennai, India

WAS MADRAS, NOW CHENNAI
Chennai is another of India's big cities. Only Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are bigger. The heatwave in Andhra Pradesh hasn't spread as far south as Chennai but the mercury was still pushing well into the 30s when I was there.

I gave myself two full days in Chennai - the first to book my passage back to Kolkata and the second to explore the city. At the Central Railway Station I booked myself on the 30 hour Coromandel Express to Howrah Station in Kolkata and then at the Indian Airlines office secured a flight from Kolkata to Bangkok. Happy with my progress after day one I spent the evening in front of the television watching just about anything in English. Hindi language TV is perfectly awful. The volume levels of the channels are all different so as you surf through you have to turn the volume up to hear the sound on some channels while others almost blow the speakers, especially if it's some tragic Hindi music number. The programming contains about 30 channels of mindless Hindi movies with song and dance routines in ALL of them. The dancing almost always features 100 people doing the same dance but all of them perfectly out of time with each other. The locals love this stuff, and the louder the better.

The next day I took a walk beside the Kuvam River along Langs Garden Road, a beautifully named thoroughfare lined on one side with some of the most spectacularly ugly buildings on earth, made of concrete and tinted glass, overlooking the river. The other side of the street next to river was lined with slums and populated with what the Indian newspapers would euphemistically call 'economically backward people'. I was mobbed by naked children asking for all sorts of things ranging from a school pen or my sunglasses. Women hung washing over the handrail of the bridge as I stepped over piles of human excrement and puddles of fresh urine. I took some photographs so I could remember the scene but what the photos won't capture is the putrid smell of the river beside the slums. For the first time I can remember I came close to vomiting because of the smell.

I carried on towards Marina Beach but it was so hot that I had to stop every 15 minutes but when I did I was mobbed once more - not by children this time but by flies. The kind that want to land on your eyelids and lips and fly up your nose and into your ears. Before I reached the beach I found Chidambaram Stadium (Chennai's cricket ground) found an open gate leading into the ground and made my way onto the turf where NZ lost to India in 1995. The groundsman was preparing the pitch for a game the following day so I chatted with him for a while and he told of all the great games played here in the past.

The beach was an eye-opener; filthy of course but massive. From the start of the sand it took ten minutes to walk to the surf. Grown men in singlets, some in trousers and some in their underwear, were frolicking in the water acting like small children. The grown men were trampling small children while the women sat fully clothed on the beach admiring the men and fearing for the children. No Baywatch here. There were about 200 people in the water, all males save for a few pre-teen girls. Carts filled with dried fish lined the shore and men selling ice cream relentlessly rang their little bells while everyone ignored them. There were also a few ancient looking carnival rides that looked like death traps.

The beach in Chennai

Bored with the beach I walked back up the main street beside the Bay of Bengal past the Fort towards Parry's but it was much farther than I thought. I ended up jumping on a city bus and got off near the High Court, from there I knew the way back to where I was staying on Kennet Lane, near Egmore Station.