Arriving in Chennai in the early morning is a pungent reminder of coming back to the East. The airport is concrete and smells of the less exotic aspects of a visit to India. Immigration is swift and casual, but a visit to the loos is another reminder that we have at last arrived.
The drive South to Mamallapuram takes in the long sweep of beach with its resident fishermen. This community suffered great loss in the Tsunami, and the concrete block houses built for the fishermen are still not finished.
Mamallapuran is an old port and is now a World Heritage Site on account of the temples which litter the area. Most were built between the 7th and 9th Centuries, many carved from a single block of stone. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabalipuram) The whole area has the aspect of a series of demonstration samples of the art and architecture of the time, my favourite sculpture being an unfinished panel of an elephant with a baby playing underneath its tummy.
The stones are unprotected and other visitors can make it a noisy and litter-covered experience, but a short time looking at the detail in the sculptures shuts out modern annoyances. The Shore Temple is on the beach, and a stunning place to visit at sunset or sunrise.
All around the temples are stone carvers who work the soft stone of the area. They specialise in Hindu deities, but visitors to the markets and tourist shops of South India will recognise the delicate and skilled carvings of elephants and other animals. The stonecarvers line the route out of town and display their wares outside their lean-to shacks where they both live and work, oblivious of the health hazards of the stone dust.
Back to GRT Temple Bay, the walk along the beach was beset by the usual problems where you have a fishing community, but the naturalist may have been pleased by the huge piles of dead anchovies and large puffer fish on the shoreline. There are several small guest houses and restaurants on the beach.

Picking up the pieces!
I think it was Mark Twain who said the "a tourist is someone who sees everything and looks at nothing", and with some of the itineraries we have looked at, it would not be possible to look at anything! A recent enquiry came from a potential client whose holiday with an adventure travel company had been cancelled after the flights were booked, as they no longer offered that tour. I suspect that if they had tried it, they would not have offered it in the first place! In 17 days the poor customer covered many miles, most days involving hours of driving with brief stops at some of the most important sites across South India. The highlight was the night spent at Hampi, as after an 8 hour drive from Bangalore, the customer was whisked off the next day for another 8 hour drive to Goa. Presumably the visit to the World Heritage Site took place at night. The tour finished on the beach at Goa, where the exhausted traveller could finally get some sleep! 'Adventure' travel is a specific market, and these trips do often involve some discomfort and long journeys, but this tour was, in our opinion, not viable.
It makes us angry on behalf of the customer who books the trip in good faith and is then put at risk or has a perfectly miserable time, often unprepared for the heat and condition of the roads. We try to offer equivalent alternatives, but having been promised an itinerary customers are often reluctant to believe that it is not advisable to try it. In those cases, we lose the customer, but we would rather do that than torture them and our drivers.
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