Sunday 19 January

Chennai – Mahabaliipuram

We met out driver today! He’s called Vaishakh and he lives in Mysore. Vaishakh is married and has a young son. He’ll be our driver for the next 10 days. 

This morning after breakfast Vaishakh drove us to to the UNESCO world heritage site at Mahabalipuram – the remains of an unfinished group of royal Hindu monuments and temple complex. The buildings were carved out of granite  – some in situ – in the seventh and eighth century!

The ancient name of the place is Thirukadalmallai. The drive south took us about 2 hours. The carving on the stones were extraordinary – many depicting scenes from the the Mahabharata. We began at the Shore Temple, by the sea on the Bay of Bengal, a beautiful tall temple with some charming stone lions keeping guard.

Then we walked along the beach for a while – amazing to be near the sea again and lots of people enjoying being by the sea too.

We drove to the  Five Chariots – each one carved from a single piece of stone.

There was a glorious life-size elephant carved out of a single piece of stone.

Time for a snack then / we had a coconut each from a stall. Then on to the lighthouse (along with a modern British built lighthouse constructed in 1904) with India’s oldest lighthouse close by that was built around 640 by the Pallava king Mahendravarman. Here we met our first monkeys!

We left Vaishakh with the car and wandered through the ancient site – stone baths cut out of the rock, temples, and the largest open-air carved stone relief in the world – called Descent of the Ganges, depicting the giving of the sacred river – when it rains water flows down a channel in the rock face The relief has life-size figures of an elephant family, monkeys, a deer, lions, rams, snakes, the god Shiva, Vishnu in a temple the sun and moon – it’s vast, around 15 by 30 metres (49 ft × 98 ft).

Next we saw Krishna’s Butter Ball, a giant rock balanced precariously on a stone incline. 

It was quite a bit of walking and clambering over stone steps – wonderful to see, though. We headed back to the car and drove back to our hotel in Chennai. 

After a snooze (Mike) and swim in the hotel pool (Matthew) we headed out for dinner and to pick up some supplies from a store in a mall up the road.

We came to the Express Avenue shopping centre – it has an H&M,  ASICS, Adidas and Pima stores, a Bodyshop and even an M&S! We were truly home from home! There was also a giant food court – we managed to establish that the dosas had ghee in them, so they were off – we ended up with some plain noodles with veggies, which was quite tasty.

Matthew couldn’t help himself and had already gone wild in the aisles – he went in to a Simon Carter store, bought a shirt, the sales assistant said he could have a second shirt for free … so he chose another shirt; then the sales assistant said that he could have a third shirt at half price… which of course he did. I told him that they’d seen him coming! I caught the sun today and hadn’t packed a hat (I needed the air in my bag), so I went to H&M to buy a cap … I’m at the checkout and Matthew sidles up with a jacket “Can you just add that?” He asked. Sigh. I did point out that his bag as full – apparently he knows that he hasn’t used all his luggage allowance!