Day two – Chennai to Madurai

Mental note to self: travel is exhausting, and flying these days really sucks.  We’ve basically lost two days just getting from A to B and it makes me wonder why trains and ships are called ‘slow travel’. Slow maybe, but I find them much more relaxing than flying, moreover flying is not as quick as it once seemed to be.  Get to airport hours early, queue for an eternity, have several anxiety attacks about being in the right place at the right time, get basically undressed to go through security. It tends to eat up most of a day each time when you’re at our age because by the time you’ve been through all that you’re good for nothing much more than a lie down and a handful of drugs.

So anyway we had to do that again today.  Chennai airport was more familiar this time.  The security is very high even- or perhaps especially- for domestic flights.   Or perhaps I should say security is intended to be thorough, but is in fact a bit random.  For Kingfisher Airlines, and Indian airport security, it was evidently pick-on-Jon day.   The first thing that is different about domestic flight security processes here is that everything must be tagged, that includes your handbag, your carry on bags, everything.   Then you go through a metal detector and undergo a relatively serious frisk search that is actually ‘hands on’.  There’s one lane for women and another for men.  I got through quickly and unscathed but emerged to see someone going the grope on Jonnie.  They then confiscated a bottle of water from his carry-on luggage.  Strangely however, my capacious gold shoulder bag went straight through with not one but two large bottles of water in it which I had not realised were banned on domestic flights.  I guess the guy must have looked away at the exact moment my bag went through the scanner, which was good for me at the time but in the long run that’s not too reassuring.  The reason every single bag must be tagged is that they stamp  it to say it has been through security.  Unfortunately, however, they forgot to stamp Jon’s daypack so when we got to the gate to board the plane they sent him back to security.  I waited around and they told me to get on the bus to board the plane, however I refused to leave without Jon so in the end we had a bus all to ourselves which took us out to the Kingfisher airlines plane sitting waiting on the tarmac. I was only slightly disconcerted about flying on airline named after a brand of beer.

The plane was a turboprop, something I haven’t flown on for quite a while, with the two propeller blades out to the sides in full view: kind of fun to board, slightly retro, slightly exciting.   The flight was calm and relatively uneventful, save for the antics of the worst behaved young Indian girls I have ever seen.  I was quite surprised at their loud and uncontrolled behaviour with mum sitting in the seat in front of them ensconced in a Bollywood magazine, oblivious to the noise, seat jumping and crawling about on the floor behind her. I have never seen Indian kids so badly behaved in Australia, they are usually angelic, at least in public. I  was also amused to see a huge advertisement on the bulkhead for “Black Dog” which I presume must be a type of whisky manufactured by Kingfisher,  rather than an advertisement of the ilk “Fly Kingfisher: get depressed”.

The flight banked out over Chennai’s beaches and hugged the coast before turning inland. From the window of the plane I could see the silted delta of what I presumed to be the Cauvery river.  ‘Silted delta’ is a hackneyed phrase but that’s what it was, and nothing describes it better. The long green  river, divided by obvious sandbars stretched below me, surrounded by paddy fields and coconut palms in various green hues.   Another interesting landform was the hills that recalled high school geography classes, being obviously areas where some sort of plates had, eons ago, been pushed upwards against each other revealing ridges of stone and giant boulders.

We landed at Madurai airport and I immediately liked Madurai.   A large bald rock hill, not unlike Uluru, provided an attractive backdrop to the airport and there was no rush and bustle as in Chennai.   The drive into Madurai was like being in a Kollywood movie: groups of schoolgirls with doubled up plaits, flat-bed wooden farm ‘trucks’ drawn by cows or buffalo with huge horns, women walking along the dusty streets in brightly coloured saris, poverty – lots of it, men peeing by the side of the road, and everywhere walls with Tamil script announcing who knows what in large colourful letters.   Eventually, after quite a circuitous route through dusty traffic-clogged streets, past perplexing traffic lights that flashed from yellow to red and back again in less than thirty seconds, and a policeman with an enormous gut attempting to direct traffic in the middle of a dustbowl-come- roundabout, we arrived at the Heritage Hotel Madurai.

The Heritage Madurai is a ‘boutique garden hotel’; lots of heavy teak, stone work and whitewash.  The hotel has a large swimming pool which is modelled on the tank of the Meenakshi temple which is the main drawcard to Madurai.   Our room is enormous, and has its own private plunge pool.  The food is Chettinad in persuasion although the head chef is Sri Lankan and once we got talking to him about food he offered to prepare a special, off the menu traditional Sri Lankan meal for just us.  Looking forward to that. But in the meantime the food is delicious and I had ghee thosai for breakfast.  Staff here are very helpful, without being obsequious but sometimes a little overwhelming in their desire to help.  However things happen quickly as a result and you certainly can’t complain about service that says ‘within one second I will be sending….’.