You wont believe this but we still wondered about taking the train to Chennai and so made enquiries, the local travel agent told us that due to the holidays the trains were full but they could possibly get us on tomorrow's train. This sounded familiar to us and so we bailed on the idea, funnily enough. We then tried to book a flight to Chennai....it took ages and ages and eventually when we paid for it, we had a message saying that due to the holidays the flight was full and that they couldnt confirm the seats, we would have to go to the airport tomorrow and find out. This meant we couldnt book the connecting flight to Singapore unless we were confirmed on the Chennai flight. The mystic inside me told me that India was telling me something...."Have patience young scholar of Kharma, have patience...", the cynic inside me was ready to gouge eyeballs out. Mrs. Gibbs back at Moonbase Alpha then cheered us up a bit later by saying why hadnt we just flown from trivandrum to Singapore as there were direct flights. That's because the idiot inside me hadnt thought about that.

We got to the very modern airport very early and once again nice men with machine guns helped us on our way. We managed to get on the flight and sent Mrs. Gibbs back at Moonbase Alpha an email asking us to get a flight to Singapore ASAP. The Air India Flight to Chennai via Bangalore was different, the plane was brand new, the staff were friendly and very efficient but here's the big one, they didnt serve us curry. Maybe Air India had been privatised whilst we were being scared to death in paradise.

Chennai proved to be a huge let down. The city has grown by at least a half since my days of riding Royal Enfield Bullets there. With the expanse had come even more squalor and poor old Madras (as I knew it) has suffered terribly. We stayed in a very nice hotel very cheaply in the middle of a slum. What made it worse was that the hotel's theme was the Madras of Yore and they had photographs of how beautiful it had once been. I had been lucky 20 odd years ago to have seen some of that. We went to Fort st. George and now the military have retaken it so you had to get screened by security and it was a hassle. In the museum we were charged 100 Rupees each. I said to the chap that 20 years ago, there were no police and it was free. He then replied..."20 years ago, India was free".