Day 11-12: Chennai and All It's Glory

Day 11:

We set out early to walk around and scout out shooting something around town. Maybe something at the local music and dance school that on our map appeared to be nearby.

Our cabbie from the night before seemingly slept in his cab and was waiting for us. We told him that we were going to walk around and wouldn't be needing him. He looked liked we had slapped his grandmother.

We walked and walked and eventually got a cab to take us to the school. It was farther then we'd thought and we couldn't figure out which street was which since there are no signs anywhere.

The school indeed was there and was wrapping up a recital of traditional song and dance. They let us go inside and watch the end of the performance.

It was the traditional stuff you've seen on TV and would expect to see here. The musicians/singers were Ph.D's in traditional music so we got to see really the finest examples of the regions music.

We had a great idea to get some dance students on a stage showing Michael some moves, but with some asking around found out that it would be impossible.

After leaving, we caught a cab to go back to the hotel. The cabbie didn't speak English and was looking confused. Another cabbie pulled up and his eyes went wide when he saw us. He threw the passengers out of his cab, passing them off to the cabbie that didn't speak English. He wanted to be our cab driver and have the chance to take our Rupees.

The whole way back to the hotel he told us how he spoke good English (he didn't) and how after returning to our hotel, he'd wait for us, all night if need be, to take us to all the tourist places. He promised we'd go to the museums and even the beach.

We told him that we didn't want a cabbie and that we had our own rickshaws. This sounded like a bold-faced lie to him and he insisted he would be our cabbie as long as we were in town.

We firmly told him "no" an asked what it would cost to go to our hotel. He replied, "as you like" and said that after driving us around for 2 days we could decide what to pay him.

We again firmly said no, that we were going to get our cameras and rickshaws and wouldn't be needing a driver. We just wanted the price to our hotel.

Again he tried the, "as you like" trick and we told him to stop and threatened to leap from the moving vehicle.

Dejectedly he said 60 Rs. but insisted that he was a good driver and wanted to be our driver.

Luckily he let us out around the corner from our hotel and we avoided what would have certainly been an all-out cabbie fight to be our guy. People desperately want your money in this town.

We walked up to the hotel our cabbie friend walked over looking hurt that he'd waited all morning for us and we weren't taking his cab. We explained that we had our own rickshaws that he'd seen the night before and he suggested that we'd need a guide and he'd tag along for a couple of days. We again said no, we were fine without him.

We loaded our gear and got ready to head out to the local Snake Park to see what action was there. The area also had numerous other sites including the famous MGR movie studio where many of India's films are shot.

Our cabbie was there again suggesting that he could be our guide. I turned tables on him and told him that I had driven over a 1000 kilometers on my own. Was he suggestiong I wasn't a good driver? This left him speechless. The small twist in logic and his poor English left him unable to navigate a way out.

We were official through with him.

Getting to snake park was difficult. Chennai's roads are the worst anywhere. The traffic is unlike anything you can imagine. I don't care how bad the roads are that you've seen somewhere else - Chennai is worse. Times 2.

The Snake Park was sad. Like a north Florida snake sideshow on it's last leg. We nearly couldn't find anything to shoot.

It just so happens that the cobras are brought out into a small enclosure surrounded with seats protected by glass. A crowd was gathering and we quickly set up the gear. We wanted to get a shot of Michael on the opposite side, looking in at the snake handler.

The cobra came out and the crowd roared. The snake looked as bored as we felt and the show was over before we could get more then a couple shots off.

We didn't make it back to the hotel for hours as navigating the insanity on the roads was more then just a 3-man job. Maybe we should have hired our enthusiastic friend after all.

Regardless, shooting in the city proved to be so much more difficult then the country that we decided to write all of Chennai off. The only reason we stuck it out in this town any longer was because Michael forgot his sport coat in Pondicherry and they were trying to figure out how to get it to us. Eventually Michael had to hire a cab to drive it to Chennai. The cab driver had to find driving a filthy coat 160KM his strangest fare.

Day 12

This our second day in the ugliest city on the planet.

We left town in the afternoon and made it to Nellore as fast as possible. We were lucky enough to get a white taxi car driver who knew of the 3-Star hotel called Dr. Uttanash's 3-Star Hotel. It turned out to be a hotel and restuarant management school and testing ground. It became obvious that everyone was still learning there.

This was another one of those places where the lobby is nice, the rooms okay and the bathrooms gross.

Strangely every drawer in our rooms had moth balls rolling about in them. There was even an individual ball in the sink drain. We surmised it wasn't in fact to stop a moth problem but instead to hide the mildew smell. Hotels in India are moldy.

We chucked all our moth balls and kept our door open to air the room out. We sadly couldn't open our window so had to settle for the stinky hallway air as second best.

Having plenty of light left in the day, we decided to get some video footage of Michael driving the rickshaw up a small, busy, store front lined street. This part of Nellore was the old part of town and stuffed with tiny roads going in every direction. We circled and circled the neighborhood, finally settling on one street.

We set up without much gawking and got some really nice footage of Michael driving up the street. It took a few loops around the block and while Adam was filming I walked around.

There was a printers row nearby and there were amazing looking letterpress shops lining the street. It was so cool.

We were exhausted from the long drive and the afternoon of work, we settled into the hotel bar. It was empty and really, really dark. India likes dark bars and extremely bright restaurants. There were only a few men there as is typical here.

Feeling like the dark would buy us some cover Michael went to retrieve his gear and try and do a bar shot.

By the time we got everything set up the place had filled with businessmen. After a few polaroid test shots the head waiter came over and said that customers were complaining thinking we were taking photographs of them in a bar. Apparantly this is illicit activity for some of them.

We gave him a test polaroid were you can really only see Michael and his beer with the background all black. We told him to show it around and assure people that we were only shooting ourselves. It worked.

That night I went for a long walk and found a distant internet cafe. By the time they closed and I was headed back to the hotel, all the other shops were closed. I thought I knew the way back, but everything looked different all closed up and dark. We'd driven so many of the streets that day that the few things I recognized, I could be sure I didn't from driving, not because the hotel was nearby.

Hours of walking later, I was in an area that I didn't recognize in anyway. It was really, really late and my larger and larger walking circles had made me more lost then I'd ever been before.

I sat down on the steps of a building to savor the feeling of being in a completely foreign land, unable to speak the language with no sense of where I was. To top it off I didn't remember the name of the hotel. It was a strange feeling.

After walking some more, I found a kindly looking old man with speckles. I told him I was looking for my hotel. He asked if I needed a hotel and I said I had one, just didn't know where it was.

Suddenly I remembered it had 3-Stars in it's name and it rung a bell with him. He said it was down the stree and take the first right. Eventually I would find it.

I thanked him and set off.

Not 100 yards later and he pulled up on a motorcycle. He just shook his head, smiled and said to get on. I happily did and he took me the 20 blocks to the hotel and in the back way. I'd wandered completely the wrong direction from where I thought I was and was only getting farther and farther away.

I thanked him profusely and tried to offer him some money. He flatly refused and told me to be careful. I would from now on, I promised.

Day 08: Trichy & Villupuram

Day 08

We got the heck out of Dindigul and high tailed it for Trichy, which is short for a very, very long India version of the town's name, Tiruchchirappalli. Names in India are all shortened or given odd acronyms.

We found a restaurant to eat lunch at and took turns guarding the stuff and eating. The resturant had a air conditioned room off the main dining room which they automatically shuttled us into.

This was our introduction to eating off of bananas leaves and the concept of "meals". The "Meals" is an all inclusive entree with loads of cups around a large platter. In the middle of the platter they pile high with rice. You then mix whatever sauces you want with your rice, eating with your right hand. It was fun and really tasty. It would become our standard to order.

Outside we decided to try and get a shot of Michael navigating a busy street. We had to cross the road to get to our autos and it seem quintessentially Indian.

Besides nearly getting Michael hit by a bus, the set up also attracted quite a crowd. In the crowd was what can only be described as a eunuch. I've never seen a eunuch, but this person seemed like what you'd imagine one would look like. They are spiritual people here and ours was babbling in the eeirest high and then low pitched voice. He/she would point to the bright sun which I could only glance at for miliseconds. Then he/she would stare directly at it for 2 minutes none stop! Adam got the whole thing on film. For the performance the eunuch only wanted some water, which Adam happily indulged him/her in.

Much to our dismay this place seemed a lot like the Dindigul side of Tamil Nadu - dirty and sad.

After much driving, which at the end of the day is the worst possible way to maintain your living status, we found someone we hoped would be able to help us.

We pulled over at a small shop on the opposite side of town from the highway after unsuccessfully trying to randomly find a hotel and talked with a cabbie there.

As we are discovering, most advertising signage, which is omnipresent, is in English. No one speaks English. At least not in the circles we run. These autorickshaws attract the lowest common denominator. The are the bluest of collar vehicles that we've found, just above no collar, which would be a pedirickshaw or ox cart. We gain instant enthusiasm and interest from the locals when we pull up, but no one can help us.

We found a older guy on a bike that spoke some manageable broken English and plied his position as "helper" by stating adnauseum that he had a daughter in California and the USA was great.

He wasn't so.

We were convinced, as we had no our recourse, to load him in my rickshaw and he would take us to a place he knew of. On the way he told us about the bank he worked at that he insisted we'd visit him at in the morning. He wanted a time.

We have learned and somewhat perfected the promise of future activities that no one expects will happen. This in mind, we said, "yes, we'll see you at 8am."

He promised breakfast at his house, as 8am is his break and a day of sight-seeing. We tried to explain that we were leaving the next day but he wasn't having it.

Bad turned to worse when he turned us down a dark alley and into a dank courtyard. It seems that his "bank" was ajoined to a filthy lodge. He had a buddy that was going to show us around and take some money from us. We knew instinctually that there was no way in hell that we were going to stay in this place.

Our guy was way insistant. Seriously instant. The kind of jabbering, constant insistant that you can't break into with normal levels of protest. Such that on the way to the "lodge", at a frantically busy intersection, he went so far has to smack my throttle arm and yell, "go" when he deemed I'd been overly cautious waiting out traffic.

We agreed to look at a room and proceeded into the bowels of the hotel. It was obviously for the truckers that frequent the major roads in India. It looked and smelled like a porta-potty at Lollapalooza. Betel spit was everywhere. The room was disgusting with bugs on the walls and years of grim everywhere. There was no way we were going to stay, much less remain in place in a hole like this.

The problem remained of our insistant friend. He'd abandoned his bike on the outskirts of town to ride along and shove me to this "lodge".

He was forcefully insisting that we book the room, NOW. We said that we might look around at other places first, which he understood to mean we were hungry.

See we've figured out that very familiar English words appear all over India but they take on different meanings depending on what native language is about.

For instance in Kerla, "hotel" means hotel. In Tamil Nadu it means restaurant. If you want a hotel, you find a "lodge". Also "meals" is rice or a whole set up meal with sauces, dips and assorted veggies stuff.

"Coolie" means cold, when a beverage is the topic. But only in Kerla. In Tamil Nadu we have no idea what to ask for to get something cold.

"Auto" is autorickshaw and "car" is car.

"Petrol" is the fuel we use but "gas" is something all-together different. I'm not sure how.

Back to our lodging problem. We convinced our friend that his hotel was fine and that what we were going to do was drive about and take some photos. Thereby we'd need all our luggage and would be returning in the near future to secure our spoke in said hell hole.

He bought it. So much for broken communication. The ability to sign your way through a lie is amazing.

We took him back to the outskirts of town to his bike. He was repeating the whole time that he would get his bike and we'd follow him to get a drink, or some such nonsense.

When we got to his bike he hopped out and I yelled back to Adam to "GO!" We peeled out and did a u-turn back towards town and Adam stalled out.

We thought we'd lost him.

Somehow we escaped and found someone else to take us to a hotel that we reasonable. You'd be surprised what you learn to tolerate when you have to.

Unpacking the autorickshaws, Adam noticed Michael drinking some water from a bottle. He asked him where he got the bottle. Michael it was under the seat and we both laughed as that had been the eunuch's water. Michael was aghast.

After getting settled we ventured out to find a bar. There was a neon sign for a bar not too far way that we locked bearings on. Adam wanted to run to a store to get something first and said that he join us soon. When we got to the place with sign there was a long, long, enclosed hallway down to a where the bar was supposed to be. Not like an enclosed hallway in a hotel or something, but like the entrance to an abandoned moped parking structure - dark, crumbily, oily and frightening. It kept going back and getting darker. It looked like where you'd meet if you were running guns to the Afghani underground.

Michael and I went in the "bar" and looked around. I'm not sure how to describe it. If you seen the seediest tire repair shop on the SW side of Chicago in an all Mexican neighborhood, you'd start to get the idea. Barely. There was about 80 guys, somehow baring the incredible heat and stink, gathered around tables looking up at the lone source of light - a TV. Some Bollywood tripe was blasting away. There was counter right by the door where a waiter was grabbing fistfuls of fly-covered bar snacks and putting them in bowls.

We questioned what we were doing not only in this place but also in the country and silently contemplated the fact that if anyone wanted they could make us "disappear" there and then.

Saying something noncommittal to the waiter, we gracefully ran out of there and made for the street.

Roadside there was no Adam in sight and no other bar. We needed a bar. We discussed our option and agreed that we should buy some beer from the gun-runners bar and go back to the hotel. We did just that.

Adam actually found us in the bar and had a fun time walking the hallway trying to figure out if this was the kind of place we'd have gone to. Turns out it was.

Anthony //