Chennai revisited

I thought I was tired of India. Then I went to Mumbai. After Mumbai, thought I’d seen all of India that I wanted to. Then I was sent back to Chennai. I didn’t want to return – there’s a big wide world out there waiting to be explored. I done Chennai, surely?

I was wrong.

It’s always less daunting, but much safer and to my mind a bit boring, to return to a place one has already been. But I doused my itchy feet in a bucket of financial realism and off I went. It had been three years since my last trip to South India, and I wondered if Chennai would have changed. It has, in part. But then so have I. India has taken on a normality after spending a quarter of every year there since. No longer do I notice the noise, the hooting, the traffic, the stares, the haphazardness and lack of personal space. I barely even notice the smells.

So, what had changed? The metro line which had resulted in multiple road closures and traffic chaos had at least been slightly finished, and it could be that I’m a bit immune to Asian traffic but the melee on the roads didn’t seem quite as bad. The car:motorbike:tuc-tuc ratio had definitely increased. There were some shiny new pavements, the rubbish dump I used to clamber over on my way back from work, vanished. Starbucks had arrived. A couple of organic health-food stores had appeared. More cafes, with decent coffee easier to find. The Mall had even spawned a wine shop, with proper doors, not just an illicit-looking hatch.

One thing is for sure, though, I’d done the sights of Chennai on my last visit and they didn’t really tempt me again. One could unkindly say that one of the great things about Chennai is the ease by which one can escape it. Easter weekend was looming, and it seemed a fine idea to use those extra days off to discover the tea stations in the hills around Ooty. Properly called Ootacamund, the town was set up by the British as a respite from the sweltering summer in the city. At 7350 ft above sea level Ooty is about twice the height of the top of Mount Snowdon, and it certainly seemed that way as we wound our way up the twisty narrow road up, up and away, narrowly missing brightly painted lorries and buses which regularly performed standoffs at narrow junctions, forcing all other traffic to a standstill. It was good to get up into the clean mountain air.

Tea plantations and fabulous views aside, the highlight of the weekend had to be the ‘Toy Train’, a narrow gauge railway that puffs (or in our case toots – the steam loco in only used on the first train of the day, so ours was a diesel) up the mountain past utterly gorgeous scenery. As with everywhere else that Easter weekend, the train was immensely popular, and we were ever so grateful that we’d succeeded in bagging some first class tickets.

Ooty even boasts a chocolate museum – an exhibition of handmade artisan chocolate - and of course, tea producers. Sadly the visit to the tiger reserve, which was signposted as being 37km away, took rather longer than expected owing to a sneaky diversion taken by our driver, on a minimum km payment and keen to exceed it. The safari on offer once we had finally arrived rewarded us with the sight of a couple of slightly uninteresting deer but, obviously, no tigers…or anything really. We insisted our driver take the shorter route on the way back, which he wasn’t keen to do, and we soon found out why as the road became one hairpin bend after another with the hapless man unaware of the correct gear required. When he inevitably stalled with a sheer drop behind him, he was unable to execute a hill start and announced that the handbrake wasn’t working. Cue much frantic leaping out of the car.…

Another weekend offered up a jaunt to Pondicherry. I’d been before, but the affectionately-named Pondy is a place worth revisiting, if only for the lack of traffic in the peaceful French quarter and a plethora of lovely courtyard restaurants, not to mention the car-free promenade at night, best experienced with an Italian gelato. En route we stopped off at The Farm, an organic farm/restaurant where a tour introduces the free range chickens, the buffalo (for the mozzarella) and the organic gardens, growing palak (spinach), bitter gourd, chillies, beans and mangoes. A lovely place.

Just down the road from Pondy is Auroville, It’s difficult to describe what Auroville actually is, but it made for an intriguing morning. It’s a kind of commune, made up of folk of many different nationalities co-existing in a self-sustaining community. The entire place was reclaimed from barren scrubland, and now produces its own organic food, candles, incense (of course!), medicinal herbs and clothing, which are all sold in the rather flashy and faintly incongruous large shop near to the visitor’s centre. For a community that does not believe in trading with money it seems to be making rather a lot of it. The concept of Auroville was conceived - naturally - in the 1960’s, by a lady known as ‘Mother’ whose portrait, perched on a lotus flower, smiles beatifically down from every wall, much in the manner of the Pope in Rome. She took up with a fellow called Sri Aurobindo who is described as a spiritual visionary and she was the driving force behind Auroville. ‘Mother’ rather autocratically decided its principals and ideals. She was the author behind the creation of the Matromandir, a huge golden golf ball type globe which is used for meditation and rather resembles the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so incongruous is its positioning. Aurovillians do not practise religion, stated the visitor’s guide, yet the God-like lifestyle prescriptions of ‘Mother’ made us wonder where this life philosophy ended and religion began. I did muse whether the huge golden dome rounded up any stray Aurovillians intent on escaping the place, little like the big round ball in ‘The Prisoner’. Food for thought indeed.

Further afield, a weekend trip out of the state of Tamil Nadu led to a few days in Calcutta, where Bengal and Hindi replace Tamil. The city boasts superb colonial architecture including some leafy wide roads reminiscent of New Delhi, the splendid marble Victoria memorial, dedicated to the memory of the late monarch; and the Park Street cemetery full of ornate tombs, largely commemorating British notables from the late 1870s, most of whom had perished very young. Calcutta itself is buzzing, restaurants serve alcohol, food and market stalls dominate and the traffic is crazy, from iconic yellow ambassador taxis to hand-pulled rickshaws, gaudy horse-carriages and even trams. On our first day we passed the shocking remains of the collapsed flyover where sixty-nine people had been killed just a couple of weeks previously, just a gaping hole remaining where a road – and many people’s lives – should have been.

The highlight of Calcutta for me was most definitely Mother Theresa’s house. A simple little, free, museum displayed her knick-knacks, from her leather sandals, grey sweater, walking frame and prayer books, along with an incongruous and amusing display for children involving Barbie Dolls (and even a Ken) dressed up to represent scenes from her life. Barbie dressed up as a nun is certainly a sight to behold, but the scenes depicting Mother Theresa’s early life, with the young religious Albanian girl dressed in a sparkly Barbie outfit sporting long golden hair, did make her subsequent life choices somewhat difficult to comprehend. Next to the museum was her tomb and her bare little bedroom, a very moving place even for an agnostic like me.

I’m glad I had a second chance to visit Chennai.

Abu Dhabi

Writing a blog in retrospect has its advantages, notably the ability to put initial impressions into the perspective of familiarity, but it does have its drawbacks. The novelty of a new location pales into the background once it starts to feel normal and to feel like home. The time that this happens, for me, is usually halfway through a posting. Routines and surroundings take on a familiar rhythm and previously unseen details become noticeable. So it was with Abu Dhabi.

I will attempt to transport myself back to those first impressions. Stepping out of the airport to a wall of heat - a bit like walking into the fallout from the exhaust of a bus. The cloying heat takes your breath away and, strangely for somewhere surrounded by desert, the humidity drenches you within seconds in a dripping layer of sweat. My first few weeks in Abu Dhabi saw me wringing wet and red faced as I tried to negotiate the city on foot, the wide pavements totally deserted as the majority of the population wisely sheltered either miles away in cooler climates, or indoors in air-conditioned coolness. On occasion I thought it was raining, which happens only once or twice a year in the UAE and when it does, the streets flood immediately - why bother building drains when they're used so infrequently - only to discover it was just sweat steadily dropping from my sopping wet hair. Mind you I could be forgiven since Abu Dhabi had the dubious distinction of being the hottest place in the world as the mercury soared past fifty degrees with 98% humidity.

So, back to the airport and that wall of heat. My first impressions were of expensive cars covered, mostly, with a thin layer of desert sand, massive modern buildings and traffic that more or less obeyed road regulations with hardly a car horn to be heard. The first time a car stopped at a zebra crossing for me I thought they had broken down. How very different to India.

The city is still being built and on a grand scale. Ambitious projects for tower blocks, marinas and resorts all pepper the landscape. Money - on the face of it - appears little object. The city itself is practically embryonic and dates largely from the 1970s - in many people's living memories - at which time it was little more than a collection of rustic buildings in a desert landscape, with camels wandering around. First fresh water was discovered, followed by oil, and the rest is history. This history is charmingly explained in Abu Dhabi's fort museum, the building of which was originally the Sheikh's palace which, along with a nearby mosque and adjacent British Embassy, comprise practically the only original buildings in Abu Dhabi. The city exists in the shadow of its larger more brash neighbour Dubai, but Abu Dhabi is much more personable, smaller and easier to get around, at least once I'd sussed out the public transport. Taxis are a dream in Abu Dhabi, marvellously cheap, with drivers who generally know where they're going, always switch on the meter and even have seatbelts. If a driver speeds, a tinny female voice pipes up from the sat-nav: ‘slow down, you are crossing the speed limit'.

Cheaper still with a flat fee of around 40p are the buses. They're a bit slow but they go most places and, endearingly, had a metal tin at the front like a child's piggy bank where you pop in your fare - no tickets or checks, just an honesty system. The amusing aspect to this procedure is that ladies sit at the front of the bus whilst men, without exception, must sit at the rear. There's only one honesty box so male travellers need to feed the box with their fare then sprint round to the rear bus doors before they swing shut in order to get on again. And swing shut they often did, leaving many a paid-up male passenger mouthing helplessly as the bus pulled away. Sadly by the time I left Abu Dhabi this quaint system was being phased out in favour of an oyster card system. The buses suffer from extra sensitive brakes, frequently pitching passengers hither and thither, including an apologetic lady who ended up being launched forwards out of her seat opposite me and landing bodily in my lap, black robes flapping and her surprised face just inches from mine.

Once I'd sussed out the layout of the city which involved getting lost many, many times, I needed to find something to do. Abu Dhabi has plenty of malls which are great places to cool off from the heat but shopping holds limited appeal to the author of this blog. Add to this I'd inevitably get lost in any mall, wandering aimlessly past Boots, New Look and Costa Coffee trying to find the appropriate exit. Happily there are supermarkets on every street corner and the disparate population of the city - native Emirates make up only about 15% of the population - makes even the smallest store a global cornucopia of groceries from the UK, USA, Australia, India and the Philippines.  I underwent a perpetual battle in any given store, since as my shopping whizzed off down the conveyor belt there was a guy at the other end packing it in plastic carrier bags. So I constantly tried to reach him before my shopping did in order to get him to pack it in the plastic carrier bags I'd brought to the store. Recycling is a foreign concept in Abu Dhabi and i was regarded as if i was a crazy woman producing all these second hand plastic carrier bags to reuse. 'No plastic?' they’d say sadly, shaking their head in bewilderment. Environmental awareness doesn't figure highly in UAE psyche, surprisingly. It's common to see cars completely empty, abandoned outside shops or restaurants, engines merrily idling in order that the air-con keeps them cool for their owner’s eventual return.  The UAE does nod to sustainability however with the development of Masdar City, a rather surreal place miles from anywhere which we discovered following a tortuous bus ride from Abu Dhabi. Rather grandly referred to as a city, it is rather a complex of academic buildings used for studies of climate change and the like, which when we visited were eerily empty. The only thing to see really was a sort of wind tower which is used to cool down the ambient air by means of drawing the hot air upwards and thereby creating a cooling breeze – simple yet ingenious. So we pottered about a bit, had  lunch and almost returned to Abu Dhabi before realising we’d missed he prime (some would say sole) attraction of Masdar City, that of the electric driverless cars rather grandly referred to as the Personal Rapid Transit System. We had a bit of trouble finding them - incredible really as Masar City is so small - before we realised that they ran underground, ferrying people to and from the city and the car park. We hadn’t arrived by car but we still caught one of the dinky podule type driverless vehicles to the car par in a very space age manner.

But as has probably become obvious to any reader of this blog, my first love is walking.  Once it started to cool down a bit I began walking with gusto.  There are pavements all over Abu Dhabi, but a mystifying ongoing programme of works which appear to involve lifting the pavement slabs and putting them back down again in exactly the same condition meant the pavements often stopped dead, necessitating a walk in the road dodging the traffic.  Crossing the road anywhere other than at one of the interminably slow pedestrian crossing is not just frowned upon but incredibly difficult because invariably there’s a central reservation and a fence in the way, meaning the only option is to walk – sometimes half a mile or more – to find a crossing place or pedestrian underpass.  Cars have the same problem, as there are rarely right or left turns possible off major roads, instead the driver has to drive a not inconsiderable distance to do a U turn in order to turn down a side street. A lovely walk, particularly in the evening, takes one along the Corniche which is the seafront promenade. It’s called a sea but is in reality a bay, with man-made beaches at intervals, and a paved tree-lined walkway set back from the road with views of proper desert dunes on the opposite side of the bay. In the daytime it’s pretty deserted on account of the heat, towards evening it comes alive with power walkers, joggers, Segway riders and cyclists.  The Emirate Government is forever trying to encourage its citizens to keep fit so there are often exercise classes on the beaches or in the public parks. A scary statistic quoted some 30% Emirates commonly suffer from diabetes and a further 30% are pre-diabetic.

Of course Abu Dhabi has plenty of money and does like to show it off. The shopping malls have their fair share of designer stores only the Emirates can afford.  Touts on the street offer the latest I Phone 6’s and unsolicited text messages offer to value your gold rather than PPI refunds.  During my first weekend in Abu Dhabi I strolled to the Emirates Palace Hotel (not an easy task as nobody arrives at the hotel on foot – absolutely everyone arrives by taxi) – which is an ostentatious confection of a building, built originally as a palace for the ruling Sheikh.  For ostentatious read vulgar.  Dripping with chandeliers and over-the-top decorations, the famous gold bar vending machine was sadly out of order when I was there.

It’s safe to say that my first impressions of Abu Dhabi were of a city bereft of culture, but I did try hard to discover its charms, which are much more evident when the city creeps out of its summertime torpor. The little backstreets off the main thoroughfares repay exploration with plenty of cheap eats and stores catering for the Indian and Phillippino population.  As for culture there is the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, the largest in the world and admittedly stunning with its startling white marble, splendid carpet and huge chandeliers. The complex is huge, meaning another taxi journey as it’s impossible to walk there and beyond being huge, is pretty much like any other mosque, as blasphemous as that may sound. It took me such a long time to kit myself out with the my black nylon abaya, not helped by the fact that I’d forgotten my ID and there was a concern that I might run off with my lovely cloak, no doubt in case I wanted to go to a fancy dress party as Darth Vader. So late was I that I missed the free tour so I just wandered about for a bit, underwhelmed. I can’t deny that I was expecting Abu Dhabi to be far more conservative than it appears to be, and I wasn't expecting to see girls wandering about in shorts and sleeveless tops but it wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. The traditional Emirates dress is a splendidly-named long white robe or dishdash for men teamed with a white head dress called a keffiyeh secured by a black cord known as an agal. On the other hand women wear long black abayas with a headscar or hijab.  Here is not the platform for a discussion on the merits or otherwise of hiding 50% of the population away behind black material, but I can tell you now that it’s incredibly hot and during my time wearing one I did not feel in the slightest bit comfortable.

Of course every visitor to Abu Dhabi has to take a desert safari, a highly organised trip out to a ‘traditional’ Bedouin camp in the middle of the desert, with slightly naff activities like camel and horse rides and a tedious film extolling the virtues of UAE, however the trip was worth it alone for the sight of a proper, real camel train – wild camels just plodding around in the slightly unreal, proper, red desert.  Interesting was the falcon display – I say display but it was deemed too hot to fly the bird so we just witnessed it eating a bit of chicken, but we did hear about traditional  relationship between man and bird.  Falconry in the UAE goes back a long way, when falcons were used for hunting by nomadic Bedouin tribes.  Traditionally falcons were caught at the start of autumn and trained whilst living with the family 24/7. At the end of winter they would be released as they cannot tolerate high temperatures so would then fly off to the mountains only to be recaptured – most likely by a different family – the following year.  As Abu Dhabi grew and the Bedouin lifestyle ceased to be, so people still liked to keep falcons however by now the falcons’ natural prey, the houbara bustard, had become so overhunted that it was a threatened species and as a result it is now illegal to hunt using birds in the UAE.  So what happens now is that the birds are transported overseas by plane to hunt.  They travel on a special perch and take up an airline seat just like any other passenger, and as long as they have their little hoods on their heads they are as contented as can be. Nowadays all birds are bred in captivity as catching wild birds is not officially allowed. Since they’re not out and about perching on trees their claws get too long, so two to three times a year they are booked into the falcon hospital for a pedicure and a beak trim.  The hospital also mends feathers – if a bird breaks or loses a feather, it cannot fly properly and therefore cannot hunt as well.  With these birds costing as much as £90,000 apiece that’ s a worry for their rich owners so the feathers are ingeniously mended using spare feathers that have been moulted off other birds, bits of cocktail sticks and superglue.

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE but there are actually seven emirates – Dubai, Sharjah,Fujairah, Ajman, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Qaiwain. A couple of hours outside of Abu Dhabi is this Emirate’s second city Al Ain, which grew up on account of being a leafy green oasis in the middle of the desert – a perfect place for an amble on a hot day. A bus ride away through flat vast red desert, Al Ain is very different to Abu Dhabi. It is all low rise buildings and has a much more local feel. It has a fantastic, bustling market, piled high with spices, vegetables, fruits and locally produced honey.  It’s also home to the camel market – camels are utilised for milk, meat, racing and working in the UAE. The folk in Al Ain are more often to be seen in traditional dress, the men sporting the familiar checked headscarves, the women in black Abayas but often also sporting a kind of black and white mouth covering confusingly known here as a burqa, which is thought to have been used initially in order to keep out the desert sand.  We collared a local taxi to take us up the winding road to the top of Jebel Hafeet, a vast rocky promontory in the middle of the desert overlooking on one side the atypical greenness of Al Ain and on the other, the deserts of Oman. It was a welcome break from the city.

So why a retrospective blog I hear you ask?  Well, the Emirate authorities take great care to monitor social media communications so unless I was to give the country a positive whitewash I wasn’t going to risk mysteriously disappearing on account of an ill-advised blog comment.  After all, this is a country which has a Ministry of Misinformation – a Python-esque phone line one can call in order to ascertain whether a statement seen on social media is true or a misinformation.  Startlingly hilarious but ultimately fascinating.