EC-Rider Travels

Well it has been quite a day. Breakfast with Mariam and Ram, was a little different from the usual fruit and yoghurt, an incredibly light crispy pancakes called a dosa and various spicy sauces to dip it into. Bit of surprise for the taste buds first thing in the morning but Mariam’s girls make the most amazing cappuccino.

I was then taken by Dhananjayan to meet Mariam’s cousin Dilip. He did not disappoint, though was in fact wearing orange trousers today. Unbeknown to me, Dilip who had given up his whole day, at a days notice, to take a complete stranger around Chennai, had also employed a top Government guide to escort us. So first we went to collect Sushila who was the most amazing guide. There was nothing she did not know, though sadly only a snippet will be remembered well enough to get down here.

Chennai, or Madras as it used to be known, is a huge sprawling city covering 426 Sq km and home to a population of over 8m. It is on the Bay of Bengal in south eastern India and the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu. It was largely built by the British, originally as a military garrison and a trading outpost for the East India Company.

We first went to one of the main Buddhist temples, the Kapaleeshwarar Temple, which is more than impressive and thought to date back to the 7th century. It is like a village in itself and you enter through huge wooden doors which used to be covered in heavy spikes to prevent them being rammed by elephants.

It is dedicated to Lord Shiva and has numerous shrines to different gods adorned with carved and painted figures, and also several halls which appear to be meeting places for a good chat! With 560 different varieties of worship, the Hindu faith, or indeed ‘way of life’ as they prefer to describe it, is immensely complicated and I am not going to attempt to reproduce all Susheila told me. However it seems a very peaceful and social way of living and worship with people trailing in and out of the temple all the time, moving round to different shrines where there would be holy men who would apply a Tilak on their forehead and pray for them. As they left they would also be offered a free bowl of food. It was all very cheery with a lot of chat.

To the west of the temple is the Kapaleeshwarar Tank or teppakulams (temple lake), measuring 190m by 143m. It used to be used for meeting and washing, but is now just used for holidays and festivals.

We left the temple and wandered through the local market, full of the most amazing fruit and vegetables and people making beautiful floral tributes for the temple using strips of banana leaf or thread to hold them together. It was like a form of crochet, knitting each flower head to the next….. without even looking. Amazing! People sitting around everywhere on their haunches (making my knees hurt just to look at them!) and others just bustling around in hooting cars, on bikes or squashed into tuktuks. It is totally frenetic with cows, scraggy dogs and chickens weaving their way in between them all. You cannot understand how someone or something is not squashed every five minutes.

We then found Dhananjayan who drove us around to see more of this city. We had a brief look at the architecturally stunning St Thomas’s Basilica which dates back to 1523 built over the tomb of St Thomas. It is one of only three Christian churches which enshrines a tomb of a saint, the others being St Peter’s in the Vatican and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia Spain said to be over the tomb of St Philip.

We passed Fort St George, a fortress founded in 1639, by the British as the heart of their settlement and trading activity, and the beginning of Madras. Other beautiful colonial buildings continued from the fort many now housing university colleges, We passed Victory War Memorial commemorating the soldiers who died in WWI and WWII and the most amazing beach – the second largest city beach in the world!

We then visited the Madras Museum to see an amazing collection of bronze sculpture dating from 7th century to more recent times. Susheila gave us the most fascinating talks about all the different gods depicted and how their representation changed through the centuries. They were mostly made of an alloy of metals including gold, silver and copper.

Our morning sadly came to an end and we dropped off Sushila and Dilip then took me for the most delicious lunch at an incredible new hotel called the ITC Grand Chola – more than spoiling. He is the most fascinating man, once a financier, who miraculously survived the 2004 Tsunami by being impaired, naked on a thorn-bush, and decided to become an artist. He does incredible work – art, sculpture and more recently photography – which he is managing to sell all over the world for a fortune.

Dilip and I then went in a search of Todhunter Nagar which Unkie had told me about. Great, great uncle Sir Charles Todhunter was briefly ‘Acting Governor of Madras’ (12 April 1924 – 14 April 1924 two days!) and an area of Chennai is named after him. It was not easy to find as it had been purchased by the government for community housing and very few signs were in English. But after some searching we found the following! The tuktuk driver we asked, said the bus-stop was also called Todd Hunter.

Our final stop was a cup of tea in the Madras Club – this was a wonderful old colonial club with magnificent gardens overlooking the sea. It was the most amazing oasis in the middle of bustling Chennai with not a soul in sight!

I said goodbye to my lovely guide and headed back home in order to change to go out for dinner in another beautiful hotel with very charming Gopalkrishna and Tara Gandhi – again fascinating, a diplomat who had been an ambassador and High Commissioner all over the world, not to mention being Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson. Goodness what a day!