I finally left Burma on the 8th, flying out of Mandalay 14 days after the time permitted by my visa. I had planned to leave earlier than the 8th, but when booking my flights on the internet in Bagan about the third night I was there, the earlier flights were either quite expensive (because of the Christmas-New Year's tourist deluge, I suppose) or not available. Plus, I wanted to fly from Mandalay to Bangkok and then Bangkok to Chennai in India on the same day. Leaving on the 8th, however, gave me plenty of time to see Bagan and Mandalay.
Air Asia provided a free shuttle bus from the city center to the airport, which is a good thing as the airport is almost 30 miles south of the city. The bus left about 9 and took about an hour to reach the airport. For a short while it traveled on the new four lane, almost deserted highway that runs from Mandalay to Yangon. A mileage sign indicated 366 miles to Yangon. The immigration staff at the airport didn't seem the least upset at my overstaying the period of stay allowed by my visa. One guy filled out a form for me and I was charged $3 a day for my 14 days of overstay, so $42 in all. My $91 flight to Bangkok was full and left at 12:45. As we flew southeast towards Bangkok, I could see the deserted new highway below and soon we were over the mountains. The only feature I recognized was the Salween River in its mountainous gorge.
About a flight of an hour and twenty minutes we landed in a very hazy Bangkok. My flight to Chennai did not leave for more than five and a half hours and I was happy to sit and wait. My ribs were a bit better, but still hurt. Air Asia uses Bangkok's old airport and appears to have a very big operation there.
My $154 flight from Bangkok heading almost due west to Chennai left at 8:15 in the evening and took three hours, arriving at 9:45 in Chennai (in a time zone one and a half hours earlier than Bangkok). It took a while to change some money at the airport before taking a taxi to a hotel where I had reserved a room via the internet. The smoggy air on the way made me cough, which hurt my ribs. I checked in and took a cold water bucket bath, not too bad, as Chennai is further south than Mandalay, at about 13 degrees north latitude versus between 21 and 22 degrees. I got to bed after midnight and slept under a fan for the first time in weeks.
It was past 9 the next morning when I finally left the hotel, wearing shorts for the first time since mid December and searching for an ATM, which took some time. It is much cooler here now than in it was when I was here in late March last year. The newspapers have been showing highs of about 86 or 88 degrees and lows of 68 or 70. As always upon arrival in India, I was struck by the filth of the streets. Not that Burma was spotlessly clean, just the opposite, but India seems to take filth to a whole new dimension. I remember somewhere in Burma seeing a sign proclaiming "Raise Your Country's Grace By Cleaning." Odd that it was in English.
Chennai, called Madras until 1997, has almost seven million people and is the capital of Tamil Nadu, with about 75 million people, thus more populous than any nation in Europe save Russia. Tamil Nadu is the heart of India's Dravidian south, very different from the north. When I arrived in Chennai in late March last year, the weather was heating up and I had less than two months left on the period of stay allowed by my visa, so I decided to postpone traveling in Tamil Nadu and Kerala for the time being and instead fly to the Andaman Islands and thence to Calcutta and onto the Himalayas.
The last couple of years I have arrived in India in November, but Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the two southern states I have yet to visit, are hit by the northeast monsoon from October to December. This monsoon is quite distinct from the main southwest monsoon which wells up from the Arabian Sea and hits India from June to September or October. The northeast monsoon proceeds from the Bay of Bengal and brings rain just to Tamil Nadu and Kerala. So I decided to travel in Burma first and delay my arrival in southern India until late December, delayed until early January by my overstay in Burma. I have heard that the northeast monsoon was very light this year.
After breakfast I took an auto rickshaw to Chennai's main museum, with large portions badly lit or closed off. Foreigners play 250 rupees for the privilege of entering while Indians pay 15. The museum is largely in a colonial brick building dating from the 1890's which would be quite handsome if there was any maintenance at all. Cannons captured in Britain's colonial wars in India ring the building. One building, a new one, however, is very well lit and maintained. It contains superb Chola bronzes, including a Nataraja ("Lord of the Dance"), Shiva dancing in a circle of fire with one leg raised as he swirls, his long hair and a garment around his waist flying. The gallery includes many other wonderful bronzes made by the lost wax technique and featuring Shiva and his consort Parvati together, Vishnu, and others. One shows a combination Shiva and Parvati, one half of the figure male and the other half female. There are even bronzes of Buddha. The oldest of these bronzes, including the Nararaja, date from about a thousand years ago, when the Chola Empire was at its height.
From the museum I walked to Egmore train station, built in the 1930's, and then to the nearby St. Andrew's Kirk, dating from 1820 and modeled after St. Martins-in-the-Field in London. It has a lovely bell tower and a dome ceiling and its walls are lined with interesting colonial plaques. Under the dome the pews fan out before the altar in a semi-circle. I walked around a bit more, then took an auto rickshaw to near my hotel and walked the rest of the way through narrow streets of that Muslim neighborhood. There are not many Muslims in Tamil Nadu, maybe five percent of the population. The Muslim influence in the north of India rarely made its way this far south.
The next morning, after a breakfast of two plates of puri and potatoes, I walked towards the seaside, passing the big modern cricket stadium and the ruinous Chepauk Palace, once home to the Maharaja of the Carnatic. This part of India. along the coast of the southern Bay of Bengal, was once called the Carnatic, and the British and French East India Companies fought a series of wars here in the mid 18th century for supremacy.
Chennai's seafront has a long promenade with a very wide beach, maybe a quarter of a mile wide in places, between the promenade and the sea. Fisher folk live on the beach. I remember walking on the beach at the edge of the sea when I was here in 1979 and watching all the fishing activity, and being somewhat astounded by all the people taking a crap at the water's edge. Now, after all my time in India, I have seen more than my fair share of Indians crapping on the seashore, so I decided not to walk along the beach at water's edge. I stopped first at the MGR and Anna Samadhis, beachside memoriasl to Tamil Nadu politicians. The Congress party governed Tamil Nadu until 1967, when a Tamil regional party, galvanized by an attempt, vociferously opposed by southern Indians, to make Hindi the national language, won the state elections. The Dravidian southern languages have nothing in common with the Indo-European northern Indian languages. The DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kakagham), the party that won the election in 1967, was led by a man named C. N. Annadurai who died in 1969. The party split soon after, and in the 1972 elections, the AIADMK (All India Anna DMK), led by a movie star named M. G. Ramachandran but universally known by his initials, MGR, won and continued to win for at least two more elections. Recently, the two parties have been alternating in government.
MGR had played Robin Hood roles in his films and adopted the same persona in politics. In fact his 15 years in power (he died in 1987 after remaining in office for a time after suffering a paralizing stroke) was known for its great corruption. He is almost always pictured wearing black sunglasses and a fur hat, and that is the way he is depicted on the gold statue of him at the entrance to his samadhi, which I think is the word used for a place of cremation. It is quite a modern shrine, at the center of which is a block of granite or some similar stone with his name, birth and death dates, and the legend "Diligence Makes Eminence." Flowers lay upon the cubical block of stone. A group of colorfully dressed women, all in saris of red and yellow, asked to pose with me, and I was happy to oblige. The Anna Samadhi next to MGR's was simpler.
MGR's successor as head of the AIADMK and current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is another former film star named Jayalalithaa, a former co-star of MGR and his former teenage mistress, when he was something like 30 years older than she. She is now obese and apparently just as corrupt as her former lover. She has served several terms as Chief Minister. She is the daughter of a Brahmin, which is somewhat surprising in that these two big Tamil parties started out as not only regional but also anti-Brahmin. Also Marxist, and the son of the leader of the long time leader of the DMK, being prepared for the leadership of the party, is named Stalin.
I walked south along the promenade, with the wide and dirty beach to my left. I had hoped to stop in at the Vivekanada Museum, housed in a pink colonial building that once served as an ice house, but it was closed for restoration. Vivekanada was a holy man who wandered around India and even made it to the United States, where he spoke at the Congress of Religions at the 1893 Chicago World Fair. He took a universalist approach to religions and made a tour of the United States, spending some time in California. One story I read about him during his American tour mentioned a man leaving one of his lectures and overheard saying, "We are sending missionaries to these people? They should be sending missionaries to us." India celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth last year. Oddly, despite his universalist approach to religion, Hindu nationalist have taken up heralding him.
Eventually, I reached the San Thome Cathedral in what was once the city of Mylapore, now just a part of Chennai. Mylapore was an important port trading even with the Romans two thousand years ago and St. Thomas, the disciple of Jesus known as "Doubting Thomas," is believed to have come to India in 52 A.D., arriving on the coast of what is now Kerala and traveling to Mylapore, where he was martyred in 72 A.D. The present church dates from the 1890's, replacing a Portuguese built one from the 1500's. In the modern crypt under the church supposedly rest the bones of St. Thomas. A few relics, small pieces of his bones and the spear head that is supposed to have killed him, are on display. A mass was going on in the small modern crypt and was full of Indians.
I walked inland to a Hindu temple, in which I could walk around the courtyard but not enter the sanctuary, and then about 1 took a train north to near Chennai's old fort, a ride of about fifteen minutes. I walked to a nearby restaurant famous for its good "meals," the word used in the south for thalis. It had maybe eight different dishes, including yogurt and sweets. You buy a ticket (for 95 rupees, about a dollar and a half), sit down at any table where you can find a seat, and the waiters bring you your meal.
After lunch I walked by the colonial era Law College and High Court buildings, sandstone buildings with white domes and high towers that tourists can no longer enter, and eventually reached the Fort St. George. The British East India Company was granted this site in 1639 by a local ruler and started building its first fort in 1640, and it became Britain's headquarters in India until replaced by Calcutta more than a century later. The present fort, dating from 1666, is not all that impressive. The walls seem low and it now looks out onto port facilities rather than the sea. Also, it is Tamil Nadu's state government center and was thronged with people. The main building in the fort, an 18th century colonial building with black columns, is the now the main state government building and cannot be entered. A nearby building, also 18th century, is now a museum but was closed. I made my way to St. Mary's Church, built in 1678 but renovated in 1759, which I remember visiting in 1979. It is very stout, with thick walls and a low vaulted ceiling, built that way to shelter the inhabitants of the fort during French sieges. Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University, was married here in 1670 and the old, yellowed marriage registry page is on display. Born in America, he served as Governor of Fort St. George from 1687 to 1696. Lots of interesting colonial plaques line the walls, and gravestones line the courtyard outside, the earliest I saw dating from 1689. Many of the gravestones were densely covered with bird droppings. Also inside the church is a nondescript plaque, ugly compared to all the colonial ones, stating that the church was renovated in 1968 due to the Class of 1924 Yale classmates of United States Ambassador Chester Bowles.
I stayed at the fort until about 5, and then walked back to my hotel, which took over an hour. I stopped again at the MGR Samadhi, crowded at the end of the day. That afternoon my ribs finally stopped hurting with every step I took, which felt great.
I would have left smoggy, dirty Chennai the next morning, but I wanted to see the Fort Museum, so I took an auto rickshaw there at about 10, spending about two and a half hours in the museum. The 1790's building, formerly an exchange house, was interesting and so was the collection inside, with statues, portraits, arms, coins, porcelain, old uniforms and other things. It contains a colossal statue of Lord Cornwallis, who after his debacle at Yorktown served as a rather more successful Governor General of India, defeating Tippu Sultan in the Third Mysore War. A large upstairs room contained giant portraits of several viceroys, along with Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, King George V, and Queen Mary. There were excellent diagrams of the expansion of the fort over time.
I walked north, retracing the route I had taken the afternoon before, passing the High Court and stopping in at an 18th century Armenian church and a Catholic church before reaching the same restaurant I had eaten in the day before. I had lunch there about 2 and then took the train back to near by hotel and rested the rest of the afternoon.
Air Asia provided a free shuttle bus from the city center to the airport, which is a good thing as the airport is almost 30 miles south of the city. The bus left about 9 and took about an hour to reach the airport. For a short while it traveled on the new four lane, almost deserted highway that runs from Mandalay to Yangon. A mileage sign indicated 366 miles to Yangon. The immigration staff at the airport didn't seem the least upset at my overstaying the period of stay allowed by my visa. One guy filled out a form for me and I was charged $3 a day for my 14 days of overstay, so $42 in all. My $91 flight to Bangkok was full and left at 12:45. As we flew southeast towards Bangkok, I could see the deserted new highway below and soon we were over the mountains. The only feature I recognized was the Salween River in its mountainous gorge.
About a flight of an hour and twenty minutes we landed in a very hazy Bangkok. My flight to Chennai did not leave for more than five and a half hours and I was happy to sit and wait. My ribs were a bit better, but still hurt. Air Asia uses Bangkok's old airport and appears to have a very big operation there.
My $154 flight from Bangkok heading almost due west to Chennai left at 8:15 in the evening and took three hours, arriving at 9:45 in Chennai (in a time zone one and a half hours earlier than Bangkok). It took a while to change some money at the airport before taking a taxi to a hotel where I had reserved a room via the internet. The smoggy air on the way made me cough, which hurt my ribs. I checked in and took a cold water bucket bath, not too bad, as Chennai is further south than Mandalay, at about 13 degrees north latitude versus between 21 and 22 degrees. I got to bed after midnight and slept under a fan for the first time in weeks.
It was past 9 the next morning when I finally left the hotel, wearing shorts for the first time since mid December and searching for an ATM, which took some time. It is much cooler here now than in it was when I was here in late March last year. The newspapers have been showing highs of about 86 or 88 degrees and lows of 68 or 70. As always upon arrival in India, I was struck by the filth of the streets. Not that Burma was spotlessly clean, just the opposite, but India seems to take filth to a whole new dimension. I remember somewhere in Burma seeing a sign proclaiming "Raise Your Country's Grace By Cleaning." Odd that it was in English.
Chennai, called Madras until 1997, has almost seven million people and is the capital of Tamil Nadu, with about 75 million people, thus more populous than any nation in Europe save Russia. Tamil Nadu is the heart of India's Dravidian south, very different from the north. When I arrived in Chennai in late March last year, the weather was heating up and I had less than two months left on the period of stay allowed by my visa, so I decided to postpone traveling in Tamil Nadu and Kerala for the time being and instead fly to the Andaman Islands and thence to Calcutta and onto the Himalayas.
The last couple of years I have arrived in India in November, but Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the two southern states I have yet to visit, are hit by the northeast monsoon from October to December. This monsoon is quite distinct from the main southwest monsoon which wells up from the Arabian Sea and hits India from June to September or October. The northeast monsoon proceeds from the Bay of Bengal and brings rain just to Tamil Nadu and Kerala. So I decided to travel in Burma first and delay my arrival in southern India until late December, delayed until early January by my overstay in Burma. I have heard that the northeast monsoon was very light this year.
After breakfast I took an auto rickshaw to Chennai's main museum, with large portions badly lit or closed off. Foreigners play 250 rupees for the privilege of entering while Indians pay 15. The museum is largely in a colonial brick building dating from the 1890's which would be quite handsome if there was any maintenance at all. Cannons captured in Britain's colonial wars in India ring the building. One building, a new one, however, is very well lit and maintained. It contains superb Chola bronzes, including a Nataraja ("Lord of the Dance"), Shiva dancing in a circle of fire with one leg raised as he swirls, his long hair and a garment around his waist flying. The gallery includes many other wonderful bronzes made by the lost wax technique and featuring Shiva and his consort Parvati together, Vishnu, and others. One shows a combination Shiva and Parvati, one half of the figure male and the other half female. There are even bronzes of Buddha. The oldest of these bronzes, including the Nararaja, date from about a thousand years ago, when the Chola Empire was at its height.
From the museum I walked to Egmore train station, built in the 1930's, and then to the nearby St. Andrew's Kirk, dating from 1820 and modeled after St. Martins-in-the-Field in London. It has a lovely bell tower and a dome ceiling and its walls are lined with interesting colonial plaques. Under the dome the pews fan out before the altar in a semi-circle. I walked around a bit more, then took an auto rickshaw to near my hotel and walked the rest of the way through narrow streets of that Muslim neighborhood. There are not many Muslims in Tamil Nadu, maybe five percent of the population. The Muslim influence in the north of India rarely made its way this far south.
The next morning, after a breakfast of two plates of puri and potatoes, I walked towards the seaside, passing the big modern cricket stadium and the ruinous Chepauk Palace, once home to the Maharaja of the Carnatic. This part of India. along the coast of the southern Bay of Bengal, was once called the Carnatic, and the British and French East India Companies fought a series of wars here in the mid 18th century for supremacy.
Chennai's seafront has a long promenade with a very wide beach, maybe a quarter of a mile wide in places, between the promenade and the sea. Fisher folk live on the beach. I remember walking on the beach at the edge of the sea when I was here in 1979 and watching all the fishing activity, and being somewhat astounded by all the people taking a crap at the water's edge. Now, after all my time in India, I have seen more than my fair share of Indians crapping on the seashore, so I decided not to walk along the beach at water's edge. I stopped first at the MGR and Anna Samadhis, beachside memoriasl to Tamil Nadu politicians. The Congress party governed Tamil Nadu until 1967, when a Tamil regional party, galvanized by an attempt, vociferously opposed by southern Indians, to make Hindi the national language, won the state elections. The Dravidian southern languages have nothing in common with the Indo-European northern Indian languages. The DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kakagham), the party that won the election in 1967, was led by a man named C. N. Annadurai who died in 1969. The party split soon after, and in the 1972 elections, the AIADMK (All India Anna DMK), led by a movie star named M. G. Ramachandran but universally known by his initials, MGR, won and continued to win for at least two more elections. Recently, the two parties have been alternating in government.
MGR had played Robin Hood roles in his films and adopted the same persona in politics. In fact his 15 years in power (he died in 1987 after remaining in office for a time after suffering a paralizing stroke) was known for its great corruption. He is almost always pictured wearing black sunglasses and a fur hat, and that is the way he is depicted on the gold statue of him at the entrance to his samadhi, which I think is the word used for a place of cremation. It is quite a modern shrine, at the center of which is a block of granite or some similar stone with his name, birth and death dates, and the legend "Diligence Makes Eminence." Flowers lay upon the cubical block of stone. A group of colorfully dressed women, all in saris of red and yellow, asked to pose with me, and I was happy to oblige. The Anna Samadhi next to MGR's was simpler.
MGR's successor as head of the AIADMK and current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is another former film star named Jayalalithaa, a former co-star of MGR and his former teenage mistress, when he was something like 30 years older than she. She is now obese and apparently just as corrupt as her former lover. She has served several terms as Chief Minister. She is the daughter of a Brahmin, which is somewhat surprising in that these two big Tamil parties started out as not only regional but also anti-Brahmin. Also Marxist, and the son of the leader of the long time leader of the DMK, being prepared for the leadership of the party, is named Stalin.
I walked south along the promenade, with the wide and dirty beach to my left. I had hoped to stop in at the Vivekanada Museum, housed in a pink colonial building that once served as an ice house, but it was closed for restoration. Vivekanada was a holy man who wandered around India and even made it to the United States, where he spoke at the Congress of Religions at the 1893 Chicago World Fair. He took a universalist approach to religions and made a tour of the United States, spending some time in California. One story I read about him during his American tour mentioned a man leaving one of his lectures and overheard saying, "We are sending missionaries to these people? They should be sending missionaries to us." India celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth last year. Oddly, despite his universalist approach to religion, Hindu nationalist have taken up heralding him.
Eventually, I reached the San Thome Cathedral in what was once the city of Mylapore, now just a part of Chennai. Mylapore was an important port trading even with the Romans two thousand years ago and St. Thomas, the disciple of Jesus known as "Doubting Thomas," is believed to have come to India in 52 A.D., arriving on the coast of what is now Kerala and traveling to Mylapore, where he was martyred in 72 A.D. The present church dates from the 1890's, replacing a Portuguese built one from the 1500's. In the modern crypt under the church supposedly rest the bones of St. Thomas. A few relics, small pieces of his bones and the spear head that is supposed to have killed him, are on display. A mass was going on in the small modern crypt and was full of Indians.
I walked inland to a Hindu temple, in which I could walk around the courtyard but not enter the sanctuary, and then about 1 took a train north to near Chennai's old fort, a ride of about fifteen minutes. I walked to a nearby restaurant famous for its good "meals," the word used in the south for thalis. It had maybe eight different dishes, including yogurt and sweets. You buy a ticket (for 95 rupees, about a dollar and a half), sit down at any table where you can find a seat, and the waiters bring you your meal.
After lunch I walked by the colonial era Law College and High Court buildings, sandstone buildings with white domes and high towers that tourists can no longer enter, and eventually reached the Fort St. George. The British East India Company was granted this site in 1639 by a local ruler and started building its first fort in 1640, and it became Britain's headquarters in India until replaced by Calcutta more than a century later. The present fort, dating from 1666, is not all that impressive. The walls seem low and it now looks out onto port facilities rather than the sea. Also, it is Tamil Nadu's state government center and was thronged with people. The main building in the fort, an 18th century colonial building with black columns, is the now the main state government building and cannot be entered. A nearby building, also 18th century, is now a museum but was closed. I made my way to St. Mary's Church, built in 1678 but renovated in 1759, which I remember visiting in 1979. It is very stout, with thick walls and a low vaulted ceiling, built that way to shelter the inhabitants of the fort during French sieges. Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University, was married here in 1670 and the old, yellowed marriage registry page is on display. Born in America, he served as Governor of Fort St. George from 1687 to 1696. Lots of interesting colonial plaques line the walls, and gravestones line the courtyard outside, the earliest I saw dating from 1689. Many of the gravestones were densely covered with bird droppings. Also inside the church is a nondescript plaque, ugly compared to all the colonial ones, stating that the church was renovated in 1968 due to the Class of 1924 Yale classmates of United States Ambassador Chester Bowles.
I stayed at the fort until about 5, and then walked back to my hotel, which took over an hour. I stopped again at the MGR Samadhi, crowded at the end of the day. That afternoon my ribs finally stopped hurting with every step I took, which felt great.
I would have left smoggy, dirty Chennai the next morning, but I wanted to see the Fort Museum, so I took an auto rickshaw there at about 10, spending about two and a half hours in the museum. The 1790's building, formerly an exchange house, was interesting and so was the collection inside, with statues, portraits, arms, coins, porcelain, old uniforms and other things. It contains a colossal statue of Lord Cornwallis, who after his debacle at Yorktown served as a rather more successful Governor General of India, defeating Tippu Sultan in the Third Mysore War. A large upstairs room contained giant portraits of several viceroys, along with Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, King George V, and Queen Mary. There were excellent diagrams of the expansion of the fort over time.
I walked north, retracing the route I had taken the afternoon before, passing the High Court and stopping in at an 18th century Armenian church and a Catholic church before reaching the same restaurant I had eaten in the day before. I had lunch there about 2 and then took the train back to near by hotel and rested the rest of the afternoon.
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