72/ 100 Visiting Mahabalipuram

On our first trip to India, back in 2018, we decided to escape Chennai and hired a car and driver for a couple of days with a plan that we would visit the southern city of Puducherry. We quickly got underway, weaving through the busy traffic in the city, utilising any flat bit of pavement, and gaps between the cars ahead that were only about the width of a samosa, to then be held up at the next set of traffic lights along with all the same people our driver had squeezed past. This pointless game of leapfrog continued for about an hour until, at last, we were mercifully free of the city.

Our driving woes didn’t end once were were on the faster road south though. Like so many people traveling on the Indian roads, our driver was clearly blessed with limitless good fortune and would think nothing of overtaking slower vehicles around blind corners and on the wrong side of the road. I was feeling precariously close to losing my breakfast, and perhaps mine and Fiona’s lives, so I told him to stop at a service station.

After an effort to convey our concerns to the driver without annoying him too much (we were going to be with him for two days after all) we once again set off at a brisk pace. Still far too brisk in fact. Perhaps the god Shiva was looking down onto the top of our speeding car because in the distance was revealed a huge parking area, full of other taxis. I asked the driver to stop there and, once again, we had words, although they were a little sterner this time. I told him that if he didn’t promise to slow down considerably we would get a different driver to take us to our destination. He was very apologetic and did indeed drive (a bit) more carefully from that point onwards.

Once we had achieved the near-impossible feat of managing to convince an Indian man to drive more like a European he pointed out that we were actually stopped in a pretty interesting place that was worth a visit. We were at the Mahabalipuram temple complex, right by the Bay of Bengal. At this point in our journey we had only been in the country for a day or two and we were definitely not quite ready for the energy and craziness we found.

The main reason people visited this bizarre Indian beach resort was to visit some holy relics and one of India’s oldest temples – the Shore temple at Mahabalipuram. The temple is a Unesco world heritage site and was certainly quite interesting as far as stone temples go, but what was far more interesting was the beach industry that had built up around it.

As well as nauseous tourists and scolded taxi drivers, the large car park was full of busses bringing pilgrims to the area to pray, visit the holy temple and bathe in the sea. The busses were adorned from one end to the other with garlands of holy neem tree leaves. I assumed the busses must have been heavily blessed as that was the only way I could envisage these ancient smoking monstrosities actually moving without simply breaking apart into a heap of rusty components. Perhaps the neem leaves were integral to the structure.

Unlike the Ganges in Varanasi, however, here there was more than a slight resemblance to Scarborough and I couldn’t help but get the feeling that the religious aspect of the location had somehow been forgotten about. The temples were largely deserted because everyone was caught up in the stalls selling all manner of lurid plastic junk. All over the world, anywhere there is an opportunity to sell something to someone, there will be a little industry of purveyors of tat.

You could buy pink plastic keychains depicting the temples, pink candy floss, luminous t-shirts, buckets and spades and plastic Hindu Gods. Plastic trucks, diggers, aliens, unidentifiable children’s characters, guitars and all manner of bizarre stuffed toys. If it was plastic or pink or completely useless you would find it there. Nobody went to these shops to buy anything at all. Like a long line of magpies they simply couldn’t resist the lurid colours and funny noises as they walked past.

Walking to the beach through the long lines of stalls was entertaining but exhausting. Essentially everyone there was a tourist, but we stood out as tourists with a bit more cash than most and everyone offered us their wares. Not really wanting a cat-sized orange plastic model of the god Hanuman we pushed on empty-handed through the crowds to the beach itself.

It was quite breathtaking, but not in the way a wild remote beach in the Scottish Highlands is. Hundreds of Indian ladies and children were in the sea, fully dressed in their saris. The men didn’t appear to ever go in, and there weren’t very many there anyhow for some reason. The bathers were in their large tour groups, their group outfits all the same colour but mostly shades of red and orange. I found out later that the colours reflected the parts of India they had come from. The local children were there causing a nuisance by riding their horses at a gallop up and down the beach through the crowds of people. Nobody said or did anything about it, despite quite a few close shaves.

Back at the car park the busses were still there but by now, hanging out of every window, there was a wet sari drying in the sun and dripping the salty water down the sides of the bus onto the holy neem leaves. I didn’t take a photograph, even though I really wanted to, because I didn’t want to be the creepy tourist who looked like he was trying to take pictures of naked ladies hiding on the bus while their clothes dried.