30th Jan 2011, Mamallapurum
WM: We are all in dire need of the aforementioned shakti or energy (as in ‘Kellogs Cornflakes provides 8 times as much iron shakti as a bowl of spinach’ – the claim seems doubtful but the children have been trying to convince me that, as it’s on the packet, it must be true…)
We have spent today walking and climbing around exquisite rock-cut monuments that I failed to see last time I was here. Was it inertia, nausea, ennui? – I can’t quite remember why WD and I omitted these important World Heritage sites and instead stuck to banana pancake territory in 1999, but we do recall (and commemorate every time we pass it) the exact spot where I got off the bus and vomited into a parking lot on that occasion. I’d been holding it all down for two hours from Pondy, so an impressive feat of self-control worthy of daily commemoration.
We’ve also spent about 3 hours swimming today and the end result is that L and W fell asleep after their evening meal, full of pizza, soothed by ambient new age music on comfy floor cushions. Fortunately, it was not so far back to where we are staying and they aren’t so heavy to carry straight to bed….This is the second time we’ve achieved this amazing feat (2/2 visits to Le Yogi) – sea air is soooo exhausting.
This is the last stop on the South India trip. We fly back to Delhi tomorrow and I already know that I will miss the flowers (even our girls are wearing jasmine in their hair this evening), the banana leaf high-class veg and the smiles that WD’s efforts in Tamil usually bring.
M: Do you know one thing I’ll really miss from South India? The heat. I found the heat enjoyable because I can cope with it. I had a really nice time in South India eating idlis and chick pea vadai. I’ll miss the lovely scent of jasmine everywhere. I prefer South Indian temples because they always seem to have very friendly priests and I like going with dad to Tamil temples.
L: I’ll miss dosas.
WM: The Wolfgang was given the accolade of being ‘like an Indian family’ yesterday – our quantity, noise levels or food intake, I wonder? - so we’re obviously making progress of a sort here. WD’s just got nostalgic when someone’s brought him out a Golden Eagle beer and we’ve had a toast to Dravidian Culture!
So we’ve been enjoying Mam (M has been making me practice pronouncing Mam-alla-puram and I still can’t do it) and its temples-by-the-sea ambience. It’s the only Tamil flowering of ‘traveller’ culture – think café menus with the obligatory pancakes but also mashed potato, book exchanges (still offering the same titles they always did, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance’, ‘Papillion’, ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ but now also bizarrely the complete works of Joanna Trollope) and baggy trouser emporiums. The average traveller here has aged quite a lot – think groover in their 50s or even 60s, rather than the eponymous year-offer. There are still enough beautiful people with tattoos and freaky hair to suffice though. I am threatening a nose piercing, more to shock my children now rather than my mother, but probably won’t bother. The girls were telling me that it would all go rancid and I’d get some horrible infection. They know because they’d seen a picture in the BMJ.
Also, we are slightly bemused by the amount of Russians here. They smoke SOOOOO much and determinedly seem to detach themselves – we haven’t managed eye contact, let alone a verbal, from our next-door neighbours (2 beefy-but-gone-to-seed guys and a woman, archetypal ex-KGB on holiday I say) despite it becoming a bit of a game on our part now to be the first to elicit any sort of greeting or acknowledgement.
L: Yesterday we went to a crocodile farm*. There were loads in one giant pit. They fighted each other. When they lide on top of each other they dint mind.
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| Gharials, in case it's not clear! |
W: We saw lots of crocodiles. Mostly they were crocodiles but some snakes and turtles too. And we went to a Craft village. All of us ate dosas. I bought a spinning top. We saw a dancing peacock – it wasn’t real, it was a person, with a peacock dressing up suit. We went to lots of old houses from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. And one was like George Kutty (from the homestay, a Syrian Orthodox Christian)’s grandfather’s house.
M: We had mendhi patterns done on our hands. Mine is a peacock with lots of extra decoration. It took ages for the henna paste to dry especially W and L’s. Mine dried the quickest and it felt really itchy and you wanted to scratch it off, and in due course you could, but you had to resist whilst it dried. The lady did the pattern off by heart. It was bright orange when you washed the paste off, but it’s now dark brown. Mine is exquisite with lots of curlywurly patterns. W: Mine’s a Lizard and he’s breathing fire.
L: Mine’s a flower with stalks on each finger.
M: Before we had our hands done, we went in to an old Tamil merchant’s house. A woman showed me how to do Kollam patterns with rice powder and I had a go.
L: I learned how to grind rice with two stones to make rice flour. That’s for kollam and to make idlis.
WM: It’s a crocodile pit here – most of the time we lie around lethargically, rolling over each other reasonably tolerantly, into a pool of sludgey water to cool down and then, just sometimes, out of the blue (or maybe with some preliminary agro) something will REALLY REALLY upset someone and then there’s some tail slapping, teeth baring and crocodile tears. Living with the family so full time and up close, it has felt at times like I’m making a wildlife documentary – I’d always thought primate behaviour but maybe I’m wrong and we’re actually a load of crocs.
And Development moves on here – further roads of guest houses and beach ‘resorts’ with banks of noisy generators, covered drains and World Heritage Site status means wasteful sprinklers, greenish lawns and landscaping (rather than the scrub from before). The fishermen’s beach remains largely unchanged from what I remember pre-Tsunami – with lots of merry cows (Miss Cow from Cow-cutta? Sorry, this is a L joke) and itsy dogs scrapping in the general debris while the fishermen sit around playing cards. Their boats have got fancier: proper wooden boats with outboards, rather than the palm trunks strung together – post-tsunami aid, micro-finance, tourist dollars filtering down?
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| Beach boy W |
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| M writing her journal in the beach cafe |
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| M prepares to join Baywatch |
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| A very pregnant Holly by the Shore Temple |
WD: For those of you who don’t know, Mamallapuram is a small fishing village that’s now all-but overwhelmed by the tourist industry, the old low-key backpacker element now joined by both domestic Indian and eastern European package tourism. WD can reminisce annoyingly once more about how it was twenty years ago, and for him the enduring reason to come here are the monuments: the most substantial body of early architecture and sculpture dating to the seventh and eighth-century in this part of southern India. Europeans have been visiting and writing about the place since the 1790s: the carving of sensuous lithe figures of gods and demons, elephants, reclining bulls and cats doing yoga from the rock outcrops around the village continue to fascinate and amuse visitors as they’ve been doing for centuries. The children enjoyed the opportunity to scramble around among the man-made cave-temples and rock-cut shrines. “When are we going to look at the art?” W wondered. M was admiring of one lady-warrior’s 6-pack in a huge relief of the battle between the goddess Durga, mounted on her lion, fighting the buffalo-demon Mahisha. She certainly has iron shakti. The girls’ knowledge of Hindu myth is already excellent, the result of daily reading of the mythological comic series, and they are adept at identifying many of sculpted reliefs (WD is very proud). |
| L studying up on her Hindu mythology with Mam-types in the background |
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