Today we leave Chennai, at least as far as accommodation is concerned. We're heading for Mamallapuram, which is 30kms south of the city, where we're meeting up with the tour party from the UK who we'll be travelling with for the last three weeks of our trip. We've hired a car and driver to take us there because there's no direct rail route, and in any case our rail passes have now expired.

The Temple Bay Retreat at Mamallapuram has been arranged by the tour organisers, and it's immediately apparent that the standard is a few notches up on what we've become used to in our travels over the last eight weeks. In fact it's five-star luxury! The bed is soft and the water from the shower is hot. The TV works and there's a fridge in the room. Best of all, there's a large attended pool which has its own bar! We could easily get used to this after the indifferent places we've stayed over the last eight weeks. However there is a downside - a bottle of Kingfisher is Rs150, three times what we were paying in Goa, and the food prices are similarly high.

After a suitable period of time getting to know the pool, we take a walk down the beach to Mamallapuram village. The main highlights here are an ancient shore temple and some large rock carvings which were uncovered some 200 years ago. The place is quite touristy, with beachfront restaurants and shops, but not on the scale of Colva or Varkala. The beach itself is the base for the fishing community, and as well as a large number of fishing boats pulled up on the sand there are nets, pots, hooks, rotting fish, and general rubbish to step around. It gets noticeably cleaner just a few hundred metres from the village though.

The tour party don't arrive until the early hours of tomorrow morning, so there's nothing left for us to do but laze around the pool and succomb to this unaccustomed luxury. However, given the price of beer at the hotel we're not going to eat there, so we stumble down the beach to a rooftop restaurant and order a cold Kingfisher. "Certainly sir" replies our waiter, and a boy is immediately despatched on a bicycle to collect some. Ten minutes later the glasses have arrived but no sign of the beer. When it does finally arrive it's warm. "Sorry Sir, there's been a run on beer due to Pongal and nothing cold available." Oh well, you pay Rs150 to get cold beer immediately, or Rs70 to get warm beer within 15 minutes and an experience of the real India. You also get an amusing story to tell.