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"No matter how determined you are, you'd be pretty hard pressed to find much to gush about when it comes to Chennai" -- Lonely Planet.
A day to kill before the tour starts - what to do? With such a glowing introduction from Lonely Planet, I decided to eat, sleep, and sort out money. Awesome. A wander up the main road to the ATM at the train station involved dodging rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, piles of cow dung and leering males (as with every city in India), passing a shed with four horses in it (yep, on the main highway), and getting absolutely squashed in the subway to cross the road to the station.
The streets are clogged with dust and smog, and combined with the humidity, a comparison with breathing mud isn't too far off - I had a sore throat from the moment I arrived!
After lying fairly low the next day, sleeping in, vegging, watching movies, going for a bit of a walk, and reading the trusty Lonely Planet only to find that nothing there really interested me except Marina Beach, I met up with the tour group in the hotel dining room. 9 of us, two kiwi couples, an aussie couple, and two other aussie chicks. Unfortunately most of them had just come off a three week tour of North India - so much for my idea of meeting people I could do the north with! All seem nice though, as does Ruby, our tour guide.
After the introductions and housekeeping, we headed off to Marina Beach, a 13km stretch of sand absolutely chock-a-block with market stalls, food and drink vendors, and people selling balloons, glowsticks and whistles. Caryn the kindy teacher had her fortune read by a parrot who picked chose the cards (she's going to buy a car, and she'll do good deeds but not necessarily with good results), we laughed at the people standing knee deep in the water wearing their jeans, then after hearing that there was a fair in Chennai, headed off to have a look. Turns out it was Chamber of Commerce type fair, so there were plenty of stalls for local businesses and government departments, not overly exciting. But there was a whole lot of music and lots of dancing on the stage, which we could only see by standing up high on one of the displays - turns out a line of white people standing in the spotlight on a stage is invitation for lots of photos, laughing, and parents encouraging their kids to shake our hands!
We're still a novelty - I don't think many whities go to Chennai - and I can see why!
Move along, nothing to see here.
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