Goodbye India… the final Indian blog entry comes from the flight to Singapore. I’ve nothing to do so it may be a bit longer.
The last few days we spent in Mamallapuram – a hippie-esque tourist area near the beaches by Chennai. We saw more tourists in one restaurant than we’ve seen in our entire trip thus far. There’s nothing particularly individual about Mamallapuram, the town itself could be any small town in India, the beaches are nice but not particularly beautiful like the beaches in Goa, and the food caters for Europeans so it’s mostly bad pizzas and mild curries. The sewers stink worse here than anywhere else. Why this place attracts the tourists so much I couldn’t figure out – except that maybe people want to meet other tourists. There were some benefits – Marie didn’t get stared at too much as they locals were used to tourists, and even a bad pizza is a nice change for lunch if you’ve only eaten Indian food for three weeks. It took us a couple of days to find the nice places to eat and drink (unfortunately we didn’t find them until Mam and Dad had gone home). We checked out the temples – carved originally from single rocks – these were hugely impressive, in particular the life-size elephant regarded as one of the best representations in India (it seemed to be a favourite of the local kids also). Then we flew back to Mumbai for one last day.
Mumbai is my favourite of the cities. Its cleaner, has a proper sewage system, doesn’t have tourist touts and has a good selection of restaurants and bars. After landing and discovering it was a dry day in Maharashta, we took the oldest taxi in Mumbai down to the bottom of the city to go to Leopold’s one last time. The journey was non-AC, the temperature was 36C and the humidity was through the roof. We were held up for 15 minutes in the baking sun while some government cars passed by and the driver kept identifying all the things we passed even though we tried to say yes, thanks, we’ve been here before. He also tried to overcharge but we were having none of it.
Leopold’s was a place I wanted to go because it features heavily as the hub of narrative activity in Shantaram, one of my favourite novels. I didn’t expect it to be particularly great – but after three weeks I can say it serves some of the best food we had. Best naans and butter chicken in India.
Our final goal was to have a drink in the Taj – the best hotel in India and one of the leading hotels in the world. Uber-posh. On arrival at the bar we discovered that the dry-day laws do not apply to posh hotels so we ordered the most expensive drinks in India. It was definitely worth the Rs400(€7) for a bottle of amber ale; anything but Kingfisher.
So now that we’re on the flight out we’re thinking about the things we’ll miss and the things we won’t.
Things we will not miss:
1. The litter. Absolutely everywhere in India is filthy with piles of litter.
2. The sewage.
3. Kingfisher beer. It’s muck and tastes of chemical preservatives. I’m sick of it.
4. Butter that tastes like blue cheese.
5. Indian bureaucracy. There are five people to do every one job but it takes five times as long. Every time you order food – even just a Coke – it takes about half an hour. Just now I waited 30 minutes at the currency exchange in Mumbai airport to get rid of my rupees. There was one girl on the till and three managers standing around looking at her. After I finally got to the front she told me they didn’t have any Australian dollars or Singapore dollars. You can’t spend Indian currency in the airport duty-free for some insane reason – so we bought a bottle of wine on credit card to have in Singapore and spent our last Rupees on a relatively expensive but quite adequate bracelet. Then we got to the boarding gate and just as I’m about to board the flight one of the ground staff comes over and tells me that you can’t bring any duty-free on board. Not one of the four people I talked to in the duty-free shop had told me this after checking my boarding card. Cue a quick dash back to the shop with a cabin crew person in tow to get a refund (which took 3 people to process) and a run back to the flight. Then we’re sitting on the tarmac for 35 minutes because the air traffic controllers are notoriously slow in Mumbai.
Things we will miss:
1. The food. In particular the Mumbai Naans and Butter Paratas, Tandoori Chicken, Butter Chicken, Chicken 65 (a South Indian dry-fry bar snack that’s been around for a while but nobody knows why it’s called what it’s called), Fresh Fish Fry – caught that day on the beach in Mamalapuram, Masala Dosa for lunch and Egg Dosa for breakfast.
2. Rickshaws. We love these guys. No more fun or cheap a way to ride in a hot country.
3. Street cows. No city is complete without several hundred thousand roaming cows. Also we like the goats; and the geckos; but not the dogs.
4. The Indian wobbly-head thing to say yes. Also people saying yes to every question even though they have no idea what you’re asking.
5. The evening entertainment of geckos hunting moths.
6. The prices. A pint of beer was about €1.80. Dinner was about €8 p.p inc beer in non-hotel restaurants. One of the nicest hotels by the beach and lake only cost us €25 a night.
eightyfish 
