Arriving in Mamallapuram hasn't been nearly as bad as arriving in Pondicherry, but it also shows fewer signs of redeeming itself in the morning. The reasons for this will become apparent later, when I critique the two guidebooks we stupidly believed might have visited the places they were talking about (Jacob, you were oh-so-right).
Before leaving Vellore, we had final meals at the Darling Residency (great name, great food) on Tuesday, at the university canteen on Wednesday (dinner) and this morning (breakfast), and the YWCA canteen. All were excellent. We also tried to pick up our tailoring - Ben and my suits are great and were delivered bang on time; the shirts took daily visits to the other tailors from Monday, when Toyin and Charlotte went to collect their stuff. The discussion then went something like this:
Charlotte: Valakum. [hands over receipt for her and Toyin's trousers]
Tailor: [looking nervous] Ah! [sends lackey running from shop] Please - sit, sit! Tea, coffee?
Me: I'd love a tea. [Toyin demurs as she's a lactard; another runner returns with three cups of sweet, milky coffee. Charlotte is thus forced to drink two coffees and I have to drink a coffee rather than a tea, but hey.]
[we wait some time]
[runner returns with small parcel]
Tailor: [to Charlotte] Please! [Charlotte inspects the trousers]
Toyin: Where are my clothes?
Tailor: Ha ha ha ha! [points hopefully at Charlotte's trousers]
Toyin: My clothes?
Tailor: Tomorrow!
Toyin: You said today!
Tailor: [headwaggling apologetically] Tomorrow for you.
Me: Just checking... [handing over my receipt] Shirts tomorrow?
Tailor: Ha ha ha ha!
Me: Tomorrow? [this being the agreed day for delivery]
Tailor: Ah! [sends lackey running upstairs; he returns in a moment carrying about half of the material Ben and I had left, all completely untouched by scissors]
Tailor: [looking at it] Wednesday for you.
Me: But... [I notice Ben's appalling ochre cotton, which I had avoided purchasing because I have eyes, in the pile]...this isn't for me.
Tailor: [looking at my receipt] Yes.
Me: No - this is for the other one.
[Thankfully, I was eventually able to prevent him making Ben's shirts in my size, so I avoided the ochre monstrosity, and Ben avoided my diagonally-striped peach number.]
Toyin: You said tomorrow, and we leave on wednesday. It must be tomorrow.
Tailor: [further ambiguous headwaggle]
Toyin: So - all ready tomorrow?
Tailor: [defeated headwaggle] Ok - all tomorrow.
How the shirt confusion arose I have no idea, as Ben and I spent about quarter of an hour methodically checking they had everything written down correctly first time, only narrowly stopping short of running a brief test. However, when we arrived the next day, not only had they come through and delivered the goods, they all fitted like a dream, including the ochre (Ben: "Mate - I should have gone for off-white." Charlotte: "It fits very well. And you can rescue that with the right tie.") and the peach (Charlotte: "That looks much better on than I was expecting.")
In keeping with her luck over the course of the holiday, poor Charlotte was the only one whose tailor let her down. When we turned up on Monday, a full two-and-a-half weeks after she'd given him a dress she'd brought from England specially to have copied, he span her some yarn about the woman he needed to do the work being off sick with chikungunya, and said it could be ready in a week. When we revealed that this was not okay, he told her to call again in the morning. The upshot was that Charlotte, who sorted her tailoring out before any of us, ended up with the dress she came with which the tailor managed to draw on in two places with biro, two silk saris she'd bought to have incorporated into the copies, no copies nor silk dresses, and no time to find anyone else to do the work for her. In the unlikely event that you should find yourselves in Vellore looking for a woman's tailor, do not use City Garments - the owner is a bastard.
Finally this morning we took a bus from Vellore to Kanchipuram which took one and a quarter hours and was smooth as you like. At Kanchipuram we had a slight wait for a 212A. Although the numbering system suggests the bus company have given themselves a minimum of 999 bus numbers to play with, they also have at least A through N just on 212; we almost got on a 212H by accident, which would doubtless have been disastrous. I used the time to play colon roulette with the bus station onion bhajees [this was a grave, grave mistake. Ed.] - the two bullets I put in the gun both tasted excellent, and Ben is the control in the experiment ("Mate - I'm sticking to a zero-tolerance policy on street food"). The second leg of the trip reverted to type, as Charlotte sat down and got someone's sick down the back of her dress, the ride was bumpy as hell, and was made even less comfortable by the fact we had all our bags with us (we bought a ticket for one of them to get the bus conductor off our backs), and by the arrival onto the bus of approximately fifty schoolchildren who swarmed into the aisle and spent most of the journey surreptitiously touching Toyin's hair. All I could think of was (1) whether Toyin was going to snap and begin throwing them through the open door and (2) the immensity of the likely death toll if we crashed.
Mamallapuram itself started off unpromisingly in that the bus station was full of cows and touts, and our hostel turned out to bear precious little resemblance to both guidebooks' descriptions of it as "a charming hotel by a lake and set in gardens which are shared with an artists' gallery and are filled with sculptures. Has a pool." Closer to the mark would have been: "Marble-floored rooms with noisy and erratic fans by a slime-filled mosquito-spawning ditch set in a sandpit full of unidentifiable rubble. Has a pool which is full of six inches of slime and 30,000 mosquitos; beds sized for pygmies; place run by established confidence-trickster." We walked from reception down to the rooms through clouds of mosquitos, and Ben commented "There are a lot of mosquitos here" to which the owner replied brazenly "No, no mosquitos here." The only positive thing was that they were so gorged on the blood of gora that they couldn't fly very fast, and so we embarked upon mozzie genocide as soon as we got into the room. We then discovered that the beds were at least a foot too short for Ben or I to lie down in - and had footboards.
In the morning, however, we went for a very respectable breakfast during which I got sunburn on one arm which was in the sun and Ben got generalised sunburn because he'd forgotten that doxycycline photosensitises you. We then wandered around the local temples, and saw a very good mural of an elephant, which you can see opposite, and the relatively famous shore temple, which should be further up. While there, we amused ourselves by videoing one another doing the headwaggle I have mentioned previously, and I will post links to these at a later date. After that we met up with the Australian members of Team Egg Puff, Jim and Clint, who you can see in the photo below. If you want an alternate viewpoint on Vellore, Clint has a travelogue which is well worth a read. I then went to bed as I'd begun to feel horrendous, getting up only to eat some beautiful fish at a place called Moonrakers which the guidebooks criminally undersold; alas by this stage even swallowing water was rather as I imagine swallowing ground glass to be, but thankfully - as it was the first time I had ordered something genuinely good - I soldiered on.
Our last day in India was spent just outside Mamallapuram at a beach resort (the "Ideal Beach Resort", in fact). I spent much of the day asleep, emerging at sunset to find the other three ensconced on the beach, Ben in a hammock. We then had a last supper at the restaurant with Clint, Jim, and Nok (another Aussie friend of theirs), and had to endure another taxi not turning up to take us to the airport, resulting in our having to book one through the Ideal Beach Resort and getting royally shafted on the price. However, we had left our room key with Jim and Clint, so we got our money's worth!
On arrival at the airport, Toyin and Charlotte plumped for a samosa each to tide them over until the flight left (at 4am); they are both still suffering the after-effects now. For my part, the flight back was deeply unpleasant, as I was running a huge temperature, had constant muscle aches and headache, had to drink lots of water to stay hydrated even though it hurt, and was forced to watch Stormbreaker or whatever that film about the teenage spy is called. Whatever it is called, it was rubbish. Only sickly Ben, with his zero-tolerance policy on street food, has survived unscathed.
All in all, though, India was a great success, and unlike Charlotte, Toyin, and I, Ben is getting neither first-hand experience of antibiotics, nor the benefit Charlotte's got of her consultant discussing her case with the entire firm ("Guys! Charlotte's had D&V for ten days now, and the microbiologists have given her cephalosporins. What would we give her?"). It is reassuring to see how literally some people take the description of medicine as "the caring profession"...
Hope you've enjoyed reading - normal intermittent service will now be resumed, probably after exams.
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