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The next day, i went to the Indian High Commision to apply for my visa, which was an entertaining couple of hours, as i remembered from the last time i'd done this. There's something about the indian bureacratic system which really amuses me. I guess i'm lucky, a lot of people get irritated by it. But somehow, i enjoy the bizzarre complexity of doing the simplest things.
To get a visa, first you have to queue up at the window outside the building and get an application form (why they can't give them out when you go into the visa hall, i'm buggered if i know!) Then you go inside and upstairs to the visa hall, where you have to take a numbered ticket and hang around for an hour or more until your number comes up. Then you go up to the counter and one of the people there ticks everything on your form and staples your (three) photos to it. Then you have to queue up at the 'bank' where after half an hour you get to pay for your application. Then you take your receipt, your application form and your passport to another window, via another queue of course, where you deposit it and they give you a ticket for it. You can then come back at five o'clock in the afternoon on the next working day to pick it up.
I think part of the reason why all this palaver amuses me is because i learned a long time ago not to rush around trying to do lots of things in a short period of time. One or two things a day seems reasonable to me, so i'm never in a rush to get off somewhere else and do something else, like most Europeans (and especially Londoners) are. Because of this, i've got the leisure to sit around (or stand around) and enjoy the lunacy of it all. And there's few things in this world that i enjoy more than lunacy. I think that's why i liked India so much - it's fully crazy! But at least you never get bored.
This first taste of India was a pleasant introduction to the idea that i was going to be there soon. In fact, i was beginning to really look forward to going now. The travel-phobia had more or less dispersed itself and the prospect of a change of scenery was looking really inviting. Especially as it was beginning to get extremely cold. It's funny how winter very definitely starts on the first of November every time. It says something about the apparent climate changes and things that people talk about a lot. It doesn't seem to have changed that much...
On the following Monday, i was back in Maldon, but i thought i'd better go up to the Indian Embassy and pick up my passport, just in case of any complications. So i jumped on a bus to Chelmsford at about three in the afternoon and got on a train to Liverpool Street straight off the bus, more or less, which was lucky as it was a few minutes late. However, this meant i had a while to wait before five o'clock, when the embassy was due to open for passport collection.
I went in a bit early and there were already a good hundred people queuing up at the windows in the counter in the visa hall. I got the idea, by listening to what people were saying, that there were several different queues according to what number ticket you had, but i couldn't really be bothered joining any of them until they started giving the passports out. Lots of people were coming in and joining queues apparently randomly - it was hard to tell whether they knew which queue was what, or if they were just being hopeful.
Eventually, when the place had about three hundred people in it, crammed chaotically into half a dozen different sprawling queues, they finally put the blinds up and opened for business. There were unintelligible announcements about which queue was which and the whole hall turned into a massive rugby scrum. I just sat and watched for a while, entertained by the crazy spectacle of disorganized bureacracy.
It was just as well that i wasn't in too much of a rush to get in the queues, because once i did get to the counter, my passport wasn't there anyway. There were quite a lot of people in the same situation and apparently the embassy staff were still working on getting the last batch of visas done. Despite the apparent disorganization of the visa system, it seemed to be incredibly efficient in reality. There were hundreds of passports involved and a few of them seemed to have gone a bit astray, but it all seemed to be gradually sorting itself out and eventually my passport appeared at the counter.
I went back to Liverpool Street but the first train was packed as it was commuter-hour and i just couldn't face getting onto it. I wasn't really in the mood for rushing back to Maldon anyway. I was feeling happy and optimistic and in a bit of a restless mood. The moon was full and that and the early nightfall which happens at that time of year combined to make me a bit hyper. I went out of the station, across the road and down the stairs into Dirty Dicks, a pub on Bishopsgate, which has probably been there for centuries.
I had a pint of Young's Winter Warmer, a very strong bitter, brewed by a London brewery, but only at that time of year. There was a candle on the table i was sitting at and i sat there staring into it and contemplating nothing in particular for about half an hour. Then i went back to the station and caught the first train, which left a couple of minutes later.
At Chelmsford i hit stupid hour - or two hours, really. The last bus to Maldon had left just as the train had arrived and, after all day of buses every half hour, there wasn't another one now for two hours. It was predictable, i'd kind of expected it, but it didn't leave me any less annoyed.
*-*-*
I had a bit of a hassle with getting the tickets issued and i ended up having to go to London again to pick them up. I decided that Saturday the eighteenth was the best day to do this, as the travel agents were open Saturday mornings and i wanted to see a couple of friends who were at college most weekdays.
When i got to London, i felt really depressed for some reason. I had to go to the West End to pick up the tickets - which is bad enough at the best of times - and that didn't help. Then i went to Brixton to see Sergio.
I had to go to a bookshop there to see if they'd sold any of the five copies of "Message Sticks In Cyberspace", which i'd left with them on sale or return before the bookfair, and see if they wanted to buy the rest outright. They'd sold one copy, which was better than none, and they bought two of the others. I decided i'd take the remaining two copies up the road to the 121 anarchist bookshop.
I didn't think they shop would be open, but it was and a South African woman called Belinda was working there. We started talking about people from Melbourne we both knew, and somehow that cheered me up completely and the depression went away. I think it kind of reminded me of something that had slipped out of my consciousnes - something related to having family (in a spiritual or community sense) all round the world. I think i'd been a bit disturbed by the prospect of heading off into the unknown on my own and spending the next two or three months away from contact with friends. It also kind of reminded me i was beginning the journey home.
*-*-*
That evening, i finally managed to catch up with Paula for a short time. I'd been trying for a while to see her, but had only succeded in talking to her on the phone for a while one day.
I had to go back to Maldon that evening if i was going to get all the stuff done that i had to do the next day, so it didn't leave much time. It was really good to see her though, after almost exactly six months since we parted under weird circumstances in May. I gave her back the sleeping bag she'd given me before we left San Cristobal, as i wasn't going to need it in India and she'd need it in the London winter.
It was strange that i should finally meet up with Paula again, almost exactly six lunar months after we'd parted that strange way in Playa Del Carmen. I don't know where the moon was - astrologically speaking - either time, but i'd say there was a very good chance that it was in the opposite sign then to what it had been in May. The sun certainly was, and the new moons would have been of course. It would certainly have been very close.
And somehow there was the same sort of similarity of energy that astrology would probably suggest (i don't really know that much about it...) and the difference that it would involve too. Opposite signs are the same energy, but a different face of that energy. And in fact we were parting again, although on quite different terms and in almost opposite circumstances to how we'd parted six months before.
*-*-*
On Monday, the day before i was due to leave, i went out with my mum for lunch at Bradwell, a small village in the shadow of a nuclear power station, on the south side of the Blackwater, right at the point where it meets the North Sea and fourteen miles from Maldon. There's a pub called the "Green Man" near the water, but it was closed all day on Mondays. I suppose they don't get a lot of custom in November. That was the first time i've come across a pub in Britain that closes one day a week. I guess that's the down-side of the new, more liberal licencing laws. A few years ago all pubs had to open for the whole of their licenced hours.
Bradwell riverside is straight across the Blackwater from Tollesbury and diagonally across from Mersea Island. Mersea's right in the mouth of the estuary, with the entrance to the river Colne on the other side of it and a causeway connecting it to the mainland. The village is a mile or two away from the riverside and we ended up having lunch there, in a pub called the King's Head.
After lunch we walked down to the church of St Peters On The Wall, that was built in around the seventh century, at about the same time as there was a massive city around the same spot. It's impossible to imagine it now.
St Peters On The Wall stands close to the edge of some bizarrely typical Essex marshland. It's a very weird place - and very difficult to describe. It's really flat and open, with a massive expanse of sky to be seen all around. And a feeling of intense desolation and emptiness, which is enhanced by the vast expanse of the North Sea stretching all the way to Holland, Germany and Scandinavia.
The church itself is nothing special at all. It looks like an old stone barn - and in fact it has been used as a barn during part of its history. The site it's on is a very obvious sacred site. And a very powerful one too, i'd say. Which is no doubt why the christian bastards desecrated it with a church and the scientist bastards desecrated it with a nuclear power station.
In fact, one of the pamphlets about the place, which are on sale inside the church, mentions this co-incidence of power - relating to the power of "god" i think, rather than the power of the land. In a certain sense that could be seen to be the same thing, but in the way the cristian church sees things, i don't think the two are really related.
The church was built presumably by Saxons and it was on the site of an earlier roman fort called Othona. The place would almost certainly have had some major significance to the keltic Katwellan tribe who lived in the area before the Romans invaded. And probably also to the neighbouring Hicca tribe, who started the anti-colonial war, under the leadership of their queen, Boudig, which destroyed Colchester and London and got very close to driving the imperialist forces off the island. Unfortunately they lost a decisive battle and the roman bastards stayed on, to make major progress on the systematic destruction of Britain over the next three hundred years.
The exact tribal boundaries between the Hicca and the Katwellan are unknown, but i suspect the Blackwater and Chelmer rivers might have provided a convenient line, which nothing else in the region does, except the river Crouch, to the south. It's possible that the land between the Crouch and the Blackwater/Chelmer line was claimed by both groups and was never really one or the other. In a sort of a way, it remains like that today.
The land between the Blackwater and the Crouch, known as the Dengie Hundred, which Bradwell is a part of, is a very strange and individual area. Although most of Maldon is south of the river, it seems to have more in common with the area to the north, which includes Goldhanger, Tollesbury, Mersea and, further north, Colchester. South of the Crouch, it's different again. This area's dominated by Southend, which is a hideous seaside and industrial resort on the Thames estuary and seems more related to London than to Essex.
It was with a certain ammount of sadness that i looked out across the muddy grey Blackwater estuary towards Mersea and Brightlinsea and out over the North Sea in the direction of Holland. Bradwell isn't a place i've spent much time in my life, but it somehow seemed to contain the essence of that land around the Blackwater, which i seemed to have become more attached to than ever over the previous five months. I was leaving the next day and it was possible i'd never see the place again except in my memories - and in my soul.
*-*-*
I felt pretty rough at six o'clock that morning as i sent out my final couple of email messages. And i looked with mild trepidation towards the next leap into the void, which i was just about to make. It didn't worry me too much, although in a general sense it always scares the shit out of me, but i had one brief moment of sudden horror at the prospect in the night.
More daunting than leaping into the unknown was the fact that i'd be alone for at least a couple of months. After the extreme loneliness i felt at times in Mexico, it wasn't an inviting prospect and i really felt like i wanted to go straight back to Australia and my friends. But it had to be done. There was no escaping it. I wasn't even really sure why it had to be done - it wasn't only so i could finish this book! It was just the way the wind was blowing and, as usual, i had no choice but to blow with it.
Here we go again!
*-*-*
Flying again. This is so familiar to me now, that when i'm in a plane i feel like i've been in it all my life. It has that same, physically uncomfortable, but mentally comfortable feeling as catching a train or a long distance bus.
I was obviously born to move. It feels so fucking natural - maybe from doing it in excess! But sometimes i wish it would stop. More during this journey than ever before, i've felt like i really don't ever want to travel anywhere ever again. But i doubt i could achieve that, even if i really did want it. The freedom, the release from worldly worries that comes from being in transit is something that i think i need to keep my mind alive. I've become addicted to it in a certain way. In another way, it's something that's an essential part of my life, something that stops me from slunping into a self-destructive and unhealthy complacency, or rut, or self-imprisonment. It also helps me keep fear at bay. And fear is the most destructive element of human nature.
Travelling does scare the shit out of me. That leap into the void, the unknown, freaks me out intensely in some ways and at some times. But that's all the more reason to do it. If you don't do things that scare you, they grow inside you in a sort of psychological cancer and reduce your life to a sort of trance. When you do do it, and keep doing it, it gets easier - although it never stops being scary!
It's also a form of spiritual meditation, for want of a better word. To travel, following the wind, keeps you finely tuned into the natural rhythms and energy of the universe. Nothing in nature stays still, nothing stays the same. To give yourself up to the rhythmical, cyclical influences on your life, to let it drag you from place to place, trusting the natural flow of things to provide you with what you need to live the right life for you, certainly - for me, at any rate - sharpens my senses to all the other influences, to all the other aspects of nature, the environment, and life itself.
Duuuh... I wrote myself up a bit of a blind alley there! I got a bit lost in that rambling philisophical bollocks! But i'm writing this on a plane, suspended in mid air - the void before the void, or something, somewhere over the Arabian Sea.
Before the stop in Dubai, the screens which are displaying our route showed Europe and north Africa. Now they show India, South East Asia and northern Australia. To see Darwin appearing on the map, a long way a head, but *there* nevertheless, was quite an emotional feeling for me. It's a long way away from me still, in time if not in distance now, but it's good to feel i'm on the way.
*-*-*
I got almost no sleep on the plane and when we arrived at Trivandrum i wasn't feeling my best at all. It's a small and simple airport, but for some strange reason they take your passport off you at passport control and everyone has to stand around in a bunch on the other side waiting for them to be returned.
I'd met an american man called Bill on the flight from London and again while we waited in Colombo airport for the flight to Trivandrum. We decided to share a taxi into town. We took along another man who'd been on the flight from Colombo too. He came from Suriname in South America and had lived in Asia for eighteen years i think. He was dressed in orange monks robes and was, i think, a buddhist monk. I might be wrong here, as i can't tell the difference, and he could have been a Hindu. Whichever it was, he'd been the other one too, some time before. He was interesting and had travelled a lot, but i'm afraid i never asked his name a second time and hearing someone's name once is rarely enough for me to remember it.
In Trivandrum, we went our separate ways and i wandered around a bit near the railway station, trying to find somewhere to stay. But the combination of exhaustion, culture shock and the effect of a noisy, dusty and crowded tropical city spun me out so severely i couldn't handle being there. I knew Kovalam beach was only a half hour's bus ride away and i decided it was where i had to go. I met the Surinamer monk on the way to the bus station and he was feeling pretty much the same way. He was planning to catch the train to Goa the next morning, but being in the city was getting to him too and he'd decided Kovalam was the best place to spend the time he had to hang around.
In Trivandrum, i was overcome by this powerful feeling of "what the fuck am i doing here? and what the fuck am i going to do here?" This feeling was to last for a few days, during which i had very serious doubts about whether i really wanted to be in India at all. It just seemed so pointless. I think it was partly the result of, for the first time in a long time, not having anything to aim at, or anything in particular i wanted to do. I had some vague ideas, but there was no real substance to the them, and all i could see ahead of me was a two-month long void of aimless hanging around.
During the first four or five days, i also suffered from the worst jet lag i'd had for years. It was strange really, as it was only half the distance to Australia and i hadn't had jetlag this bad, as far as i could remember, since the first and possibly the second time i'd flown there from London.
Soon after i got to Kovalam i found a room and slept almost continuously for twenty four hours. It was incredible. I don't remember sleeping that long ever before - although i have got some vague memory of being surprised at sleeping close to that ammount of time on another occasion. When i woke up, i felt physically much better, but i was quite depressed and haunted by that feeling of not knowing why i was there.
That night i was in a restaurant at the edge of the beach and an american woman from somewhere in Georgia sat down and started talking to me. Her name was Kelly and she'd arrived there the previous day too. We talked for quite a while and, although i crapped on a bit more than my fair share, she told me some interesting things. She seemed to have had a fascinating and varied life and a lot of her ideas and views on life and reality matched mine pretty closely and i really enjoyed talking with her that evening. I would have really liked to have got to know her better, as it's not every day i meet someone who i can communicate with so easily and who sees the world in such a close way to how i see it. But unfortunatlely, apart from a brief hello in passing, the next evening, i never saw her again.
We got onto the subject of death somehow and Kelly told me a story that affected me intensely in a number of ways. When she was a psychiatric nurse, they'd brought in a quite crazy patient who needed some attention. While she was trying to deal with him, she tried to tune into his thoughts so she could help him better. Sho got this sudden psychic flash of what the world was like from the inside of his head and it freaked her out so much she had to get someone else to take over and go away to try and get her head back together. She'd basically seen a reality that had no boundaries, no distinction between herself and other people and things, the earth, the universe, everything.
I can't remember how she described it, but she explained it really well and i understood straight away exactly what she was talking about. It's something i've experienced in some ways, possibly all my life, although never, or not often, with such dramatic and graphic immediacy. And it's something that i'm always conscious of and that to a certain extent governs the way i live my life. Aware that the universe is really some formless, borderless soup and that we create ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our personalities out of it and maintain our distinction, our individuality, our ego, by a combination of personal and communal effort throughout our lives. Until we finally give up the illusion and go back to the soup.
I'm fairly certain that same level of conscious awareness of this aspect of reality is what distinguishes a lot of so-called "lunatics" from so-called "sane" people.
Kelly said the man died fifteen minutes later.
It was quite an amazing story and i thought a lot about what it must have been like to have experienced that close mental contact with someone like that so soon before they died. Later on that night, i lay in bed, unable to sleep because of the jetlag, the fact that i'd only woken up eight hours earlier and the caffeine that i'd ingested from a couple of teas that afternoon. I wondered if she'd helped him by doing that - made his death easier for him by sharing a part of his life that he'd probably never been able to share with anyone before.
That led me on to thinking about the woman i'd watched die at Zipolite, almost exactly six months before. And this train of thought led me to wonder about the effect on me of sharing someone's death so intensely. I begain to realise that i was still, in some sense, carrying this woman's death around with me. I was being haunted by her - or at least by her death. It occurred to me that the long and still vaguely lingering illness that had hit me less than a month after it had happened might be connected with this somehow. I'd never really been able to understand or explain that illness, which is unusual for me, but now it began to make sense.
As i became conscious of this, i was able to see it more clearly - skeptics will say i started to imagine it more clearly - and i could feel an almost physical presence somehow attaching itself to the front of my body.
I'd bought some incense and some candles that afternoon, from the little shop right outside where i was staying, and i got up and lit a candle and three incense sticks. I knew i had to improvise some sort of basic ritual which would help my mind focus on resolving this thing.
I did a bit of a dance and then, saying a few words to her to encourage her to leave, i grabbed the woman that was hanging onto the front of my body and threw her back towards the ocean where she'd drowned. As i did this, i could feel her, almost physically, with my hands. Then i quickly blew out the candle.
As i did this, i felt a really strange, sort of creepy feeling, that i've felt before in the presence of ghosts. It passed quickly and i felt a strong sense of relief as i lay back down on the bed in the darkness.
Now, i don't know if what i sent back to the ocean that night was the actual ghost of the dead woman or just something i created for myself as i shared her death with her, exactly half a year and half the planet away. But i don't really think the distinction means much - in the interconnectedness of everything, where can you draw the line between the two anyway?
*-*-*
Kovalam's a strange place. It had quite a pleasant, relaxed feel to it - although the wandering fruit and everything else sellers were their usual assertive, pestering selves. There were two beaches there with rocky headlands at each end and a sort of large rock hill just off the edge of the beach, on the water side, between them. In a way, they were the same beach, as there's continuous sand between the two, but they didn't look like the same beach and they didn't feel like it either.
There are similar strong currents, weird rips and regular drownings, like at Zipolite. And the place had a distinct feeling, for me anyway, of being related to Zipolite in some way. It faced a similar direction to Zipolite - approximately South - which may have something to do with it. It's nearly ten degrees closer to the equator, but it's almost as close as you can get, without being in the ocean, to being on the opposite side of the world. And strangely enough, like Zipolite, it's exactly half way between Britain and south eastern Australia - although this depends where in Britain, and where in Australia, of course!
I had a sense of being not only three quarters of the way through the journey in time, but also of having come three quarters of the way round the world. I suddenly saw the very neat way this journey had laid itself out so far, without me being aware of what was happening. Three months after leaving Australia, i was in southern Mexico, approximately a quarter of the distance round the world - although i'd probably done a lot more than a quarter of the total travelling i was going to do. Six months out of Australia, i was in Britain, approximately half way round the world, and at the nine month mark, i found myself in southern India, three quarters of the way back to Australia.
Of course it had been a very tortuous and convoluted route, and nothing like as simple as the above might suggest, but it was quite amazing that it had all fallen into place so exactly. I was somehow keeping pace with the cycle of the sun, as well as that of the moon. This all signified something important to me, but i was buggered if i knew what it was!
But i was still suffering from that overwhelming feeling of "why am i here?" and "what the fuck am i going to do?", which took a bit of the edge off the pleasure of being back in the tropics at last and being on a beach in a reasonably pleasant spot.
Kovalam is very touristy - although still on quite a low-level and manageable scale really. No mega evil concrete resorts as far as i could see. The second beach - the eastern one - was lined the whole way along with restaurants and a few other shops. The other beach had this stuff at both ends, but nothing in the middle. Behind the restaurants on the east beach there was a maze of narrow alleyways with guesthouses and restaurants and a few shops everywhere in a very jumbled, formless and quite inoffensive fashion.
What i found seriously lacking there was places to go that weren't restaurants. It's probably my warped british upbringing, but i find it very hard to meet people in situations where everyone is sitting at small tables. Somehow, inviting myself to pull up a chair and sit down at a table to talk to someone i don't know is just too difficult for me to handle. It's pathetic, i know, but i seriously lack any kind of self-confidence in situations where i'm pushing myself on people who i'm not fully comfortable with - whether they might want my company or not.
The lack of any interesting loud music - and, usually, of any kind of music at all - was also a problem for me. A few places that didn't have the rigid restaurant structure of tables and chairs, and played good techno at a decent volume would have made my stay in Kovalam much more relaxing and enjoyable.
There was also a serious lack of interesting vegan food and, weirdly - as this was India, no dhal to be found anywhere.
However, i still found the place pleasant and i enjoyed being there. I had a good room, in a small quiet place, half a minute's walk from the beach. And it was cheap too. It was certainly a handy place to get to and recover from the trip from Europe and to adjust gently to the climate and the culture of India.
*-*-*
On Saturday evening i went to the arrack shop in the evening and bought half a litre of arrack. The shop was a very small place, barely bigger than a cupboard and there was a small crowd of seriously drunk men standing inside. A man sat behind a table in a back corner, which was actually just inside the door, with a sixty litre plastic container on the table, which he poured arrack from through a tap on the side. I got some in an old plastic mineral water bottle.
It was quite pleasant tasting stuff - although it was pretty strong. They make it out of coconut in those parts apparently, although i'm not sure what part of the plant they use - whether it's the nuts of the sap, or what. Anyway, i took it back to my room and had a small drink of it and then went out.
That evening i got talking to a couple of british people called Jenny and Larry and ended up getting seriously pissed with them. I had a few beers in the restaurant and then when that closed we went back to where they were staying and i grabbed the arrack on the way.
Larry and Jenny were planning to leave on Monday and get the train to Madras, on their way to the Andaman islands. This is a chain of small islands, under India's control, which are closer to Myanmar than they are to India. They more or less form a continutation of the chain of islands that make up Indonesia and they're not really all that far from the north end of Sumatra. Me and Nicki had looked at them as a possible route into India, but as far as we could tell, you couldn't get to them from anywhere other than mainland India.
They said they thought i should go with them and i began to consider it. The possibility of going to the Andamans hadn't even crossed my mind, but it did seem like a reasonable idea, specially in the face of a complete lack of any other ideas! Also the chance of having some travelling companions for a while was quite an attractive proposition. I don't know when i decided to go along, but i think it was sometime that night.
*-*-*
On Sunday, when i finally got out of bed and went down to the beach, there were a lot of police about, and a lot of the locals seemed edgy because of this. And with good cause too, apparently. The next day, Mohan, who worked where i was staying, told me they'd arrested quite a few people - i think it was ten or fifteen - and they'd be looking at twelve to fifteen years in gaol! As far as i could tell, it was mainly people like restaurant owners who'd been selling drugs. Presumably they hadn't paid enough protection money that week or something. Maybe they'd all got together and refused to pay as much as the cops were demanding... Who knows.
I ended up heavily on the piss again that night with Larry and Jenny too. I didn't get home till about four in the morning.
*-*-*
There were no problems in the end and i got a sleeper in the same car as the other two. It was a relief, as i'd been having visions of being crammed into the non-reserved, sitting compartment for the night.
We had to change trains at five o'clock the next morning and i had to organize a seat on this one too, but again it wasn't a problem, although this time i didn't get a seat in the same car as the others.
We arrived in Madras at about half past two in the afternoon at Egmore railway station. We tried to find a room near there, but all the hotels were full and anyway, all the ones in that area seemed to be incredibly expensive. Eventually we let one of the hotel touts take us to a cheap one which was a bit of a walk away.
The Sri Shakti Lodge Hotel was in a side street, off a long road that was filled with motorbike and car parts shops and mechanics and nothing else. This road crosses Madras's black and stinking river, not very far away from the hotel.
I got a single room, which was just larger than a shoe box, although it did have its own bathroom. There was no window onto the outside world, but after all the hassle of looking for a hotel and the lack of sleep the previous night, i wasn't too worried really. The other two got a double room which was a lot bigger and had a small window high up in one wall, which wasn't much, but it made all the difference. There wasn't any kind of communal area in the hotel, so we had no choice but to sit in our claustrophobic rooms.
My first impression of Madras was that it wasn't as bad as people said, but i slowly came to feel that it *was* as bad, maybe even worse! It was filthy, crowded and polluted and there were lots of people living on the streets and in small thatched shacks crammed into any available space. The street near the hotel was ugly and it was hard to find anywhere to get food or anything else - except bolts and engine oil!
The next day we got up fairly early and went to the Georgetown area, which is by the docks, to check out the ferries to the Andaman islands. We eventually found out the next boat was due to leave on the following Tuesday. That meant almost a week in Madras - a prospect which none of us liked at all.
We got letters from the ferry office that we had to take to the immigration department and apply for our permits to visit the Andamans, which are a restricted area. The immigration office, of course, was on the other side of town, so we took an auto-rickshaw - an open-sided, three-wheeled taxi, with a two-stroke engine and a single seat in the back which will just about fit three people.
On the way, we discussed the possibilities for getting out of Madras for at least a few days while we waited for the ferry. We'd heard you get your Andamans permit on the same day if you get the application in in the morning, so it seemed like a good bet to hit the road tomorrow and stay out of town till Monday. Mahabalipuram seemed like a reasonable bet. It's a beach town about two and a half hours south by bus.
At the immigration department we found it wasn't going to be that simple... The following day would be a public holiday and we could come back on Friday at five in the evening to pick up our passports. This was a bit of a blow, as we'd have to get our tickets as well, so it looked like we wouldn't be able to get away till Saturday at the earliest. We decided to try and find somewhere else to stay, because none of us were enjoying being where we were.
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The next morning, Jen had another look at the Lonely Plonker guide book and remembered there'd been one hotel in there which had caught her eye when she'd looked before. It wasn't very far away, so we decided to go and check it out.
The Broadlands Lodge was an amazing place. It was apparently once the palace of the Nawab of Arcot, who was a local ruler, but it was nothing like as fancy as that description makes it sound. It was organized around three main courtyards, which contained a pleasantly large ammount of plants and trees. There were two levels of flat roofs, which were easy to get to and were pleasant places to sit around in the evening and watch the sun set over the city. Behind the hotel was a largish park surrounding a mosque, which gave the place an extra green aspect - although you could only appreciate this from the roof, or if you had one of the rooms at the back. The layout of the place was like a maze, with staircases everywhere and an amazing jumble of passageways, interconnected verandahs and rooftops.
We moved into one of the three dormitories, which was possibly the least pleasant room in the place, although it was a great improvement on the Shakti Lodge. The section we were in had six beds, all very close together, along one wall. But that was all the beds there were, although they could have easily squeezed more in, so the place had quite a spacious feel to it.
I spent most of that afternoon sleeping and after that i felt a lot better. Madras had suddenly taken on quite a different feeling. Broadlands really was a refuge in a crowded, dirty and noisy city. Inside its courtyards, the city could have been a hundred miles away. It was peaceful and pleasant and for the first time since we left Kovalam, i felt relaxed.
We ate at a vegetarian restaurant just around the corner, where the waiters were friendly and helpful and the food was good and cheap. Then we got some beer from the beer shop across the road and spent a noisy, laughter-filled and enjoyable evening in the dorm.
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