Day 15

Day 15 : Child Brides

Room service is a great thing, you just pick up the phone dial three numbers, request what you want and five minutes later a man is knocking at your door with a hot pot of fresh coffee.
I enjoyed my coffee in bed this morning under my nice warm blanket; I was propped up on two proper pillows that didn't feel like bags of cement under my neck. I was feeling good, having just enjoyed my best night's sleep since arriving in India.
Admittedly I could have gone back to sleep, but Nick was already up and about ready to take on the world again, so I thought I better join him, especially as it was now well after seven!

We ate breakfast in the hotel, ordering a couple of dosa's to start. These are thin crisp sweet breads the size of a dart board that have to be folded over twice to get them on the plates. I liked mine, but Nick was not to keen on them.

The Hindu newspaper carried another couple of interesting articles this morning. The first to catch my attention was about the amount of young brides that had been married off during the festival week.
It reported that the poorer people in the villages had married off at least one thousand child brides, some of them as young as eight years old. They do this so as they can get rid of another mouth to feed and so put the onus for feeding the child on the groom's family.

The second article spoke about the life expectancy of these young girls who were married of at an early age. It was claimed that a survey carried out had put this at a mere forty years. This the article said was due to these young girls having to grow up a long time before they should have, with a lot of them bearing children in their very early teens. The article was in favour of a motion to raise the legal age for woman to twenty-three. Somehow I don't think this will ever come to anything, but it is certainly worth looking at with such a high mortality rate amongst those who are married at an early age.

The young rickshaw driver who looked a little like Che Guevara with his untidy hair and patchy beard, was waiting across the road for us as arranged at 9.a.m. The brief we gave him was to show us whatever was worth seeing in the city, and no emporiums! He shook his head with that knowing smile, the one that says he doesn't quite understand, but wants you to believe he does.

First off he took us to the local museum where they wanted to charge us ten dollars to get in, if this museum was anything like those we had already seen there was no way it was going to be worth the entrance fee. We gave it a miss and just walked around the building to see if would be missing anything.

Returning to the rickshaw Che Guevara was surprised to see us back so quick, we told him we were not going into the museum and wanted to move on. Another man quickly approached and wanted paying for our rickshaw that was parked here.
You will have to see the driver, "it not our rickshaw, it's his" said Nick, pointing to Che Guevara, much to the amusement of us both!
It was obvious he was just trying his luck, there were no signs saying anything about parking fees, and even if there had we would not have paid them. We never gave him anything, the rickshaw driver just shrugged his shoulders at the man as we drove off without paying. A small moral victory, but it made me smile none the less.

Next we went to a large open square plaza by the beach front, where the driver wanted to show us the almost cathedral like Catholic Church, and the shrine in the square, which depicted the crucifixion. The church was busy with pilgrims coming and going to pay homage.

Che Guevara parked up in the square and we had a walk around, but did not go into the church as we could see all we wanted through the numerous doors that were open all around the building allowing some cooling air to enter. Cutting up a side street towards the beach directly behind the church, this was a real eye opener!

Here we were one minute we are looking at a great feat of modern architecture in the form of the spectacular church, a structure that I would imagine had obviously cost a great deal of money to build. Then no more than a thirty seconds walk away, we find ourselves in one of the poorest slum areas I have seen in India.

We walked along the narrow alleyways that housed a great deal of people, in very small, shanty like dwellings. Women wearing once bright, but now torn and faded saris were doing their cooking and washing out in the open, a few small children who were drawing water from one of the hand pumps eyed us suspiciously.. A small child lay sleeping on top of an old blanket in a shaded doorway, protected from the intense heat, and harmful rays of the sun.

This was a real eye opener, but I suppose in reality no worse than we had previously witnessed over the wall from our hotel in Mamallapuram, only then we just observed from afar, now we were walking through it, looking I imagine to the locals like two aliens that had arrived from Mars. The women stopped what they were doing to look at us inquisitively, I suppose wondering what brought us here, some even managed a nervous half embarrassed smile. If anybody should have felt embarrassed it was us, we felt like we were intruding somewhere that we were not supposed to be.

The alley led out to the beach where fishing boats lay dotted around amongst the palm leaf and tented structures that made up further housing. It was definite that we were at the poorer end of town.
Children who were playing quite happily amongst the dirt and squalor soon caught sight of us and came running in their bare feet and clothes that were no more than rags. The one thing they all had in common was a bright smile to accompany their outstretched hands looking for gifts.
A few sweets and pens was all I had in the bag, these were thrown into the air meaning the kids had to scramble for them, while Nick and I beat a hasty retreat.

Che Guevara took us to the Snake Park and Children's zoo next. In the car park deer were roaming freely with some pigs and cows, probably an overflow to the children's zoo.
First of we went into the snake park that not only housed snakes, but also had crocodiles, alligators, iguanas and large tortoise. The pens they were being kept in were all just barely adequate and the rest of the place was generally pretty shabby.

Next door at the Children's zoo things were not much better, with most of the animals on display looking bored as they lay slumped in the corners of their cages.
The average size aviary was far to small to cope with the large amount of Herons, Flamingos and such like birds that were captive here. Nick again did not want to look round the zoo, preferring to wait outside.
I had a quick look around, but there was nothing of any real interest, the only place I did stop for any length of time was the monkey cage where it was feeding time. All hell had broken loose with the monkeys fighting for the food being dished out by the keepers.

We went for some lunch at a Tex Mex, cum American coffee shop style restaurant that was called "Stop at Sams" It was appropriately named as it took ages for a waiter to take our order. The restaurant got a good write up in the guidebook, but we thought it was very average and overpriced with poor service. After our lunch we went to the Emporium across the road, which would give some baksheesh to our driver and get him off our backs. There were lots of nice things here, but all way out of our price league.

Once back in the Rickshaw driver Che Guevara wanted to know if we would like him to arrange some drugs or women for us? "Thanks, but no thanks" we told him. Driving along the seafront and just down past Ghandi beach we could see endless makeshift homes constructed out of palm leaf, old tarpaulin covers, wooden crates and oil drums, you name it, there was a bit of everything there. The driver told us this was where he lived! At least he had good sea views to boast about.
(Above: Children of the Shanty town, Chennai)

Back at the woodlands hotel we arranged for Che Guevara to pick us up the following morning at seven, so as to run us out to the airport. It was not yet 3 p.m. and we felt tired and a little bored, we were going home the next day and to honest looking forward to it.
Towards the end of any trip I think you tend to look forward to getting home, especially now as we were in Chennai which did not offer us anything new to experience.

After about an hour's rest we went in search of somewhere to send our final e-mails home, we wanted to let our families know that everything was still on course for our arrival.
It was another young driver we selected to take us to where we could find the e-mail centre. A nice enough and very easy going lad, this new driver was telling me about the time last year when he had taken a Canadian tourist all over Tamil Nadu in his Rickshaw. I found it a little hard to believe that anyone would want to travel in a rickshaw for two weeks, but must admit that it would have been good fun and a great way to see everything.

As we drove along a busy main road we passed an elephant and it's mahout. Children were chasing behind teasing both the elephant and it's handler. The man was waving his stick at the children and threatening to stop the elephant, but this only served to make the children tease him more.

We had seen so many elephants on this trip they were becoming second nature, yet I still asked the driver to stop so that I could watch this graceful animal as it meandered down a side road with all the kids still in tow.

Killing time was all we were doing when we asked to driver to take us to the Ghandi beach, we wanted to watch the sunset over the Arabian Sea one last time.
It was now early evening and the beach vendors were setting up their stalls to sell their trinkets and foodstuff to the many people that were around. The local lunatic soon found us as we sat on a grassy embankment watching the world go by. He kept talking to us, this seemed to amuse everyone else who were sat around; he could have been saying anything as we didn't understand a single word.
I gave him a smoke and he seemed happy enough, preferring to talk to himself after a while, as he was getting no sense out of us!

There was a large stage erected on the beach where a children's television program was being filmed. The rickshaw driver told us it was called "Dreams come true" a king of "Jim'll Fix It".
The warm up act, a magician, was performing on the stage and attracting a large crowd to see him do some tricks with snakes, all very tame stuff, but the kids were enjoying it immensely. We watched for a little while, but soon moved off when the kids became more interested in us than the magician.

The sunset would have to wait, we were hungry and bored with everything, that last day feeling again.
Dominos pizza was what we wanted, and that's what we got for our evening meal on the way back to the hotel, weaning ourselves off Indian food we went for the12 inch supreme vegetarian, washed down with Coca cola. It tasted good and so it should have at that price, it was probably about the most expensive meal we had eaten on the whole trip. Our belly's full we returned to the hotel for 7.p.m. With no further plans except to pack our rucksacks for one last time, the TV went on for a while to ease us back into our western ways, then it was time to get an early night. We had a five thousand mile journey ahead of us to come.