Merry Christmas India

Last night was Christmas Eve and we ate at a restaurant on the beach. The moon was full and Jupiter was hanging high above it - I know that because it was described in the paper yesterday. The meal was nothing like a Christmas meal at home - Geordie ordered grilled red snapper and I had Tandoori prawns, two big ones that cost twice as much as Geordie's whole fish. With that we were served a large plate of vegetable fried rice and a large plate of "finger chips" (French fries to the uninitiated), as well as two of the huge beers on offer here. The breeze of the Andaman Sea (or the Bay of Bengal as it says in some guide book or other) was fresh - fresh enough to cool the rice and french fries quickly. The fish was delicious but the prawns were over-flavoured with the tandoori paste and spicy hot, so the sweet taste that might have been was overwhelmed. No matter. We enjoyed our evening on the beach.

Today we are going to go for a walk on the beach again. We'll wander along enjoying the sight of the waves and the bawling of the cows who are hanging out there too. It sounds like the right thing to do here in Mamallapuram. We discovered a couple of days ago that once one gets past the edge of town along the beach, going north, the beach gets much cleaner. There's also a very fancy hotel up there which is probably far beyond our budget. But maybe we'll drop in for a coffee, or a cool drink on our walk. This morning we had coffee at the nice place we discovered earlier this week - I thought you might appreciate its name - "The Freshly and Hot Cafe".

Mamallapuram has put on the dog for Christmas mind you. Our little resort has a tree out front decorated with little presents wrapped in shiny foil paper - I noticed that one of the children of the resort had unwrapped one this morning - I'm afraid she was quite disappointed. Last night outside the Seashore Restaurant where we ate our Christmas Eve dinner there was a large tree in the sand with lights draping it as well as red tinsel garland. And on top a large three dimensional star - there are lots of these around town decorating many of the shops and restaurants.

On the streets themselves there are lovely chalk decorations; some of these are made by rolling a tube of chalk across the pavement or sidewalk leaving an intricate design; the tubes are for sale. Others appear to be labours of love, drawn in coloured chalk in entrance ways and on the sidewalks in front of people's businesses. These beautiful designs lend an exotic air that makes them for us the Indian spirit of Christmas.

One sad note that should not be forgotten - I wished the manager of our hotel a Merry Christmas this morning and he replied that the pleasure of Christmas was destroyed for him by the tsunami of 2004. He was not morose about it, but obviously for the people who live here, it is a painful memory that is brought back every year by the tourists celebrating Christmas while the locals live with their pain.

It's obvious that Mamallapuram has bounced back from the disaster and it is certainly now thriving again as a tourist haunt; we hear many voices from foreign climes, many of them European, German, Norse or Swedish, French, but few English voices, and there may be other Canadians here but if so they don't stick out. We have heard few people with the accents of home, and the locals who ask where we are from guess more that we are Australian or English than that we are from North America.

We are planning our onward trip now. Geordie has been on the Internet several times, attempting to make reservations for trains beyond Pondicherry which we head to on the 27th of December. He managed to reserve an overnight train to the tip of India from Trichy which is inland, but wasn't able to get us from Pondicherry to Trichy by train, so it looks like we may finally have to figure out how the buses work. I don't think a car from Pondicherry to Trichy is reasonable so we will have to work it out. Two of our fellow travellers on our Rajahstan tour wrote that they had taken buses on the second leg of their tour and that it wasn't so bad, so we are going to do our research and make our way to Trichy by hook or by crook since we do need to make that train.

It's beaching time for us now. We've enjoyed our week here in Mamallapuram, with sea breezes to cool our food, the pleasure of not being hassled continuously as we walk the streets, the relative calm of the streets, the amazing rock carvings which are within a stone's throw of town. After inland Trichy which will be hot and steamy we imagine, we will be keeping to the coast as much as possible. Unlike Rajahstan there's no need for a scarf here to keep the ears warm so those sea breezes will be essential.

So it's Merry Christmas to all. We have enjoyed the Christmas wishes we have recieved from folks and wish you all the pleasure of the season, whether you are at home with family, on the beach in Mexico or Hawaii or anywhere else in the world you have chosen for this holiday time. Now is the countdown to 2008 - get yourselves ready for a Happy New Year. Love and peace from Geordie and Nigel.