Our last stop in this leg of our journey is Mamallapuram, a little town in India. We will be flying out of Chennai tomorrow, but we will hate to leave this charming large Indian city, we’ll miss the noise, traffic and the people, mostly we’ll miss our great room at our hotel Chennai India, which was our sanctuary and respite.

Normally, in Mamallapuram there’s not much to do besides seeing an 8th century Pallava and walking along the beach, which would be stunning if it wasn’t for the litter. Fortunately, we arrived during a month long dance festival. We got to see some very interesting Indian folk dances that were performed in-front of some majestic ancient sculpted background. We spent the rest of the time reading and by all costs avoiding the shopkeepers trying to sell us sculptures with a ridiculous markup.

We are glad this is our last stop, we have become a bit tired of India. Before coming here, we had talked to many travelers who have come here, and we got a variety of opinions. We got the typical stereotypes, like India is a spiritual society, or India’s people are poor, but happy. Someone told us India will change us, and I have to agree with that statement, but not in the way we expected.

We found India to be a land of extreme contrasts. Great wealth and dire poverty. Wonderful smells of flowers and delicious food, then human excrement. Taj Mahal, one of the most amazing architectural achievements located right in the middle of a shantytown. India’s landscape is magical and diverse, hauntingly beautiful, but there’s garbage everywhere. All of our senses are being assaulted every moment, which is just too much. A few hours in Chennai left us exhausted. The food and the clothes, the homes and temples, the rickshaws are all wonderfully colorful. The smells are overwhelming. The noise is shocking and the mass of people is unavoidable, we bumped into more people in a day than we would normally in a year.

Related posts:

1. Chennai’s Wildlife
2. There’s New Things in Old Town San Diego
3. Kolkata, West Bengal, India
4. Know When it is Time to Get the Oil Changed
5. Spice Dish