The journey to Kodai. Chennai - Kodaikanal. Day 2

Travelling: Chennai – Kodai Day 2

Welcome back, to the Unaccompanied India Explorer, where I tackle the dangers of navigating foreign airports and trusting employees of airlines with my passport.

In the previous episode, I lost a book and some scissors.

Now, may the epic saga continue.

I woke at 6:30 to the sounds of car horns, and strange sunlight coming through my window. I tried to get back to sleep because breakfast was to be at 8, but I was stressed out. So I eventually got up at 7.

Got dressed, cleaned my room and organised my bag for another day of travel.

Afterwards I walked around the hotel a bit, going up and down the stairs to see if breakfast had started.

Down the end of the hall was a glass cylindrical wall that looked out towards the road. I stood there for a couple of minutes, just seeing the traffic moving. I was slightly expecting to see an accident, considering the traffic rules in India, but nothing really happened. Only a lot of horns constantly going. The Indian people seem to have developed a way of navigating through chaos extremely well. They use their horns more like indicators.

Antonia came out, and breakfast was ready so we went down and ate.

A TV was on in the little restaurant they had downstairs. It had an Indian news show on, but what I found most amusing was the ad’s.

My favourite was one for a concrete company.

An elephant had just broken out of a zoo and people were running and screaming. The elephant starts to run towards a house. There’s a man and woman inside, the woman starts screaming and tries pulling the man away. He sits still and tells her perhaps to not worry.

The elephant then runs into the concrete wall around the house. It stops, not even a mark on the wall. The elephant’s trunks begin to crumble, then the rest of his body falls to the ground in a rocky pile.

Then a man pops up and may have said something like ‘(insert company name here) concrete, made strong, unbreakable’

Of course it was in Tamil, so I had no idea what was being said, anyway it put a smile on my face.

Then the whole fisco began.

We went to call the person who was meant to come and take us to the airport, the same who dropped us off at the hotel the night before. It was about 8:10 at this time.

He said that he couldn’t come to pick us up at the hotel and to meet him at the airport. Then he said that we should go back to our rooms, cause we didn’t need to leave the hotel till 9:30. The flight was at 10:30 so it caused a lot of issues, because we needed to be the airport 2 hours before.

The biggest issue was that we couldn’t clearly communicate together. There was a lot of confusion, but we ended up waiting in the reception since we had checked out our rooms. Since we thought we needed to get to the airport at 8:30, and we didn’t understand why the man couldn’t get us from the hotel.

Antonia got onto her dad, who then called the man. After that her dad told me to organise to get to airport, see if the man was there, if he wasn’t then Antonia and I’d just go through without him.

So after a small wait, we got into a car and went to the airport.

Writing that experience down doesn’t quite do justice to how uncertain, confused and somewhat frightened we were.

But still, I could help but smile. We were having an actual adventure, with drama and things not going as hoped/planned. I was thrilled.

We got to the airport and quickly discovered that the weight limit for our bags was 15kg’s, not 20 like we had packed. We had to pay up 2750 rupee’s, which wasn’t fun.

We went through, with a bit of an issue with accents.

At security they took out my brushes, and the army officer there seemed to have never seen some before. I had to get them out, show him and explain how they worked. He also whacked it on the back of his hand to see if it inflicted pain, which is understandable but for me quite amusing.

Anyway, we got through and arrived at our departure gate. To get to the plane, we needed to take a small bus ride on the tarmac. As soon as we walked out the gate doors we were hit by a wave of hot humid air.

The 1:30 long flight from Chennai to Madurai turned out to be the most fun of all 3 flights. Whilst ascending, I looked out and saw houses and farms as far as I could see. The ground was a dry pale brown and the weak green of grass in summer.

Further into the flight, the clouds became a thicker layer. At one moment, I looked out of the window to see a blanket of pure white clouds, stretching to the horizon with mountains in the distance raising the heads through the covering.

Towards the end, the mountains became more numerous and the clouds disappeared.

I could see the ground again, except it was drier. Green peaks randomly jutted out of the otherwise flat plains. Soon there were many of them, and I started to guess which ones contained the hill station of Kodaikanal. Some were small, others were grey and seemed to be level with the plane.

Also, on the descent into Madurai Airport, the plane seemed to jerk down. So we felt ourselves loosing our seating. It was like riding the batman ride at Movie world, except a lot easier on the stomach.

During the flight we became concerned about what we were meant to do once in Madurai. Thankfully we got onto my dad and he told us there was to be some one there to take us to India.

It was 30+ degrees in Madurai on the ground. A driver was holding a sign for us. I had been told that we were to take a bus to Kodai, instead it was just his car.

When we first got out of the airport it really seemed like a foreign country. It was hot, dry and had mountains off into the distance. It was like no place I had been before

So, the final leg of our journey began.

It started with us driving through flat, dry countryside. We passed villages with houses made of scrap metal and wood. In these villages there were animals, mainly dogs and cows that held up traffic.

Cows are quite funny, they seem to take no notice of traffic trying to move around them. I suppose they have gotten used to it.

Another thing was the rubbish. There is SO MUCH rubbish around communities and on road-sides. Whilst driving I saw piles of rubbish off the road, with people looking through them. If there’s a vacant plot in a village, it will be filled with rubbish, mainly plastic. There’d be chickens and other animals looking through it for food.

In the plains I began to see poverty, but it wasn’t the overpowering sense of pain that I had expected. To me it seemed that everyone was getting by, as if they were used to this very simple lifestyle.

Whilst driving, we saw some sights that I would like to share:

·      2 trucks were parked on the side of the road. One of them was a tanker, filled with petroleum. The other was carrying stacks and rows of gas bottles. I couldn’t help but imagine how catastrophic it would be if a car veered off the road and hit them.

·      The next thing that caught my eye was when we were in some traffic, a car merged in front of us. The car’s number plate was a mirror, with the sequence printed onto it. From behind the car we could see what the number plate read, but I think if a speed camera (or some other traffic camera) was to try and take a photo of the number plate, they would only get a bright reflection and not be able to read the number plate.

    Number plates in India can be quite fancy. There is no standard model so people muck around, change the font, size and colour.

·      Another thing that drivers change in India is their horn sound. It’s no longer just the long, constant bleat, but sometimes a quick tune. Mostly it’s just changing the pitch quickly, but sometimes there is rhythm in their loud screeches. On Saturday, I was in a car that when reversing played a cut from a song.

It’s just these little things that make India an incredible place, so different from the rules in Australia.

·      We were driving through a town, and a bus was turning right in front of us. It was going around the turn, but before it had finished it stopped. There was a cow on the road, eating the grass that grew on the lane divider. The bus didn’t quite have enough room to complete the turn without hitting the cow. There suddenly became a line of stopped cars and buses behind the stuck one. It became a symphony of car horns like you couldn’t imagine. We all were just stuck there, with our driver pumping the horn. The bus became to slowly edge around the car and eventually managed to get going.

Whilst climbing through the mountains toward Kodai, at some points the roads were just terrible. There would be large rocks (not boulders but still could easily stop a car) that came out from the side of the road whilst going around a turn.

There were a lot of blind turns that were quite narrow. The problem was that cars coming the other way didn’t always stay straight in their lane.

The strangest of all was when we came across a car sized hole in the road. The mountainside was pretty steep at that point, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a small landslide that caused the hole. We had to go around by a temporary dirt road.

There would also be piles of dirt and gravel by the side of the road, making it a lot more narrower.

Of course there were times when you could look out off the side of the road and not see the bottom. Not quite as scary as Top Gears journey through the Andes mountains (I think).

There were very few trees at first, but that began to change as we approached the mountains. The first half an hour of our accent was amazing. The trees were quite short, so from the road we could look out over the valley. At one point, we could see that mountains surrounded a green valley. Everything got greener and lusher the further up and further in we went.

We pasted though many different towns, gradually becoming cleaner the further up we went.

Finally, after more than 3 hours we made it to Kodai.

I got settled into my room, and then had Domino’s pizza for dinner with Antonia, the Dean and assistant Dean of the school

That night was for dorm bonding, but I was in bed by 9:30. I was stuffed.

The rest of the dorm kept going till past midnight I think.

Well, that is the story of my journey to Kodai. I’m sure there will be many things to write about coming up, like my time in the back of a van taking food to an elderly person’s home and orphanage, then the school dance (where I received a compliment for my dancing, must be a very strange place for that to happen). Anyway, I hope this has provided you with some insight into the crazy goings in the life of India.

If you want any more info about my journey, please ask some question in the comments, or shoot me an email at: comanduash@gmail.com .