Day one, 22nd December, Penang to Chennai

Although I have been anticipating going to India for most of my life, I had very mixed feelings the night before leaving our fabulous time in Penang.  However I didn’t really have time to be maudlin because we had to be up at 5:00 a.m. .  Mr Khoo, our sapu (unlicensed taxi driver) was there to meet us, bang on time as always.  He greeted us with his usual, cheery ‘happy morning’.  Humpf, what’s happy at this hour of the day, I thought.  I sat in the back while Jon and Mr Khoo bantered and tried not to be too petulant.

The inauspiciousness of the day was confirmed when we got to Penang airport to find that the computers were down.  This is a regular occurrence in Penang, but not something that you want at 6:00 am when you are trying to just get your boarding pass and pass out on a plane.  We queued for two hours in a maelstrom of Indian people with even more luggage than us, all trying to get to the front of the queue at once. It was guerrilla queuing, and I polished my elbows with the best of them, not being at my cheery and benevolent best at any time that counts as ‘early’. So many of our fellow passengers had huge plasma or lcd tv’s on their trolleys, perhaps they are very expensive or unavailable in Chennai.

By the time we got out of that mess we were tired and grumpy, but the plane did eventually take off and only an hour late: given the queues I had expected worse and was pleased that it took off at all.  We had pre-booked front row seats which cost $10 extra on AirAsia and are worth every cent.  Because nobody else wanted to part with the extra ten bucks, I had three seats together and was able to sleep through most of the flight.   Indian people seem extraordinarily keen to get off a plane, they were jumping up out of their seats while the plane was definitely still taxiing on the runway and one of the flight attendants had to run down and wrestle one woman back into her seat.  Kids,I noticed, were entirely unrestrained.

Next queuing experience was Chennai airport. Another hour or so in the foreigner’s queue gave me plenty of time to people watch.  We were behind a bunch of studious looking Aussies- dressed in out of date, dorky attire which made me prepared to bet they were academics.  A European woman behind me evidently trying to be culturally appropriate or cool, preferably both, was wearing a pink cotton salwar kameez with chikan work but sadly the whole effect was somewhat negated by the fact that the kameez was transparent and she was wearing black skimpy underwear.

We got through immigration with no problem at all (for some reason I always feel like I have something to hide when facing officials) and then faced the phalanx of people at the entrance to the airport about which I had been warned.  At first I thought it wasn’t too bad, and what was all the fuss about, but that was inside the terminal.  Perhaps the drivers aren’t allowed into the terminal at all, but once you turned the corner into the parking area there were literally hundreds of people waiting, all squashed up against barriers on either side of the exit lane.  A lot of these people, at least 150 or so, were holding signs with people’s names on them.  Eventually I found our driver,  but finding the right card made me feel distinctly like I was on a challenge from ‘The Amazing Race’ TV show. Eventually we were spirited away to the Raintree hotel Anna Salai in a comfortable SUV style car, with cool drinks, which were very welcome.

On the drive in from the airport I noted only two cows, some slums, and totally out of control traffic.  I am wondering if I am so acclimatised to bad traffic now after six months in Penang, but it didn’t seem so bad.  No rules followed whatsoever, but not much different to Penang except for two things:  horns (which are rarely used in Penang, but in constant use here) and young men admiring themselves in their car mirrors and doing their hair while driving, whereas in Penang it is all about texting while driving.  The slums looked like slums, and somewhere that I am glad I was not born.  For some strange reason though I caught myself thinking that they didn’t look so bad as the ones I saw in Burma.  Relativity of poverty…. 

The hotel is new, and very comfortable.  Embarrassed to admit that we saw no more of Chennai than the trip in and the view from the rooftop.  Exhausted, fell into bed and slept other than a quick break for in-room pizza (how embarrassing).