Madras
January 8th 1996
On the Monday i went to the Air Lanka office to see if i could change my flight out of India from Trivandrum to Madras, as i really didn't want to go all the way to Trivandrum just to fly to Colombo. It wasn't any problem to do this, i just had to pay a bit more, but it didn't amount to that much, although it was a lot more than the train to Trivandrum would have cost. But it was well worth it to avoid that extra travelling.
The ease of changing the route was opposite to what the travel agent in London had told me - predictably, i suppose. She'd said it wouldn't be possible to change the routing at all, which i thought at the time was nonsense. Actually, it was amazing how easy it had been to deal with Air Lanka after all the hassle i'd had to go through in London getting the flights in the first place. But i think most of that was due to the fact that for some reason the travel agents couldn't deal direct with the airline, but had to go through another agency.
However, they couldn't tell me anything about the KL to Melbourne sector of my trip, as this was with Malaysian Airways - even though it had been booked through Air Lanka and was supposedly a joint operation of some sort. So i decided to walk to the MAS office and make sure my flight with them had come through alright, as it had been full when i left London and i'd only been wait-listed for it.
It turned out to be a long walk down a very busy, dusty main road - another part of Anna Salai, in fact, which also passed not far from Broadlands. There was only one person behind the desk and there were a lot of people waiting, so i had to hang around quite a while. But my flight was confirmed and i got the ticket changed. It saved having to do it in KL, although it would probably have been a lot easier there - if the office was anything like the one in Penang.
As well as changing my departure from Trivandrum to Madras, i managed to get a slightly earlier date and a flight that connected much better with the one from Colombo to KL too. That was great, i'd originally been scheduled to leave Trivandrum on the eighteenth and to fly out of Colombo a day later. Now i was leaving on the fifteenth and i had less than an hour to wait in Colombo. This also meant i'd arrive in KL on a Monday rather than a Friday, so in fact i'd be able to start trying to sort out tickets and a visa for Laos almost a week earlier. If i was really lucky, i'd find myself going there on the new moon, which i thought was on the twentieth. If not, it would hopefully be very soon after.
- - -
Now i had a week to hang around in Madras while i waited to get out of India. It was a pleasant thought, to be leaving. It wasn't really a problem with India that had made the last six weeks a bit less than wonderful - it was me. But at that point in my life, and at that point in my journey, India wasn't really where i wanted to be - especially not wandering around aimlessly, unconnectedly, staying in hotel rooms and not being able to cook my own food. I think this was one of the worst things really. I liked to cook food for myself and i rarely ate so well if i couldn't. It wasn't easy to get a proper healthy vegan diet unless you prepared most of the food yourself - or ate with other vegans, of course.
But a week in Broadlands wasn't such a bad prospect. There was nothing to do in Madras, or at least nothing i could be bothered searching out at this stage in the game. So all i could do was hope a few good books passed through the book swap/library there and a few interesting people passed through the courtyard. There was a good restaurant round the corner - the Maharaja Hotel - so it wouldn't be too bad.
Over the next few days, i didn't do much at all, except read, write, play with my computer a bit. And shit a lot. I got sick with a fairly mild dysentery which i thought i'd picked up in Pondicherry. I tried not eating at all on Tuesday and half of Wednesday, but that didn't do any good, it just made me really weak and i felt like i was sick, which i hadn't before.
On Thursday i went to a homeopath who was just round the corner and got some homeopathic pills from him - i forgot to ask what they were. I didn't really want homeopathic medicine, mainly because they make the pills with lactose, i wanted to see an ayurvedic doctor. The man in the guest house who told me where the homeopath was had told me he did homeopathy and ayurvedic medicine, but he was wrong. Once i was there, though, i thought i might as well give it a try.
One thing was certain and that was that i wasn't going to see any quack western doctor, or "allopathic" doctor as they call it in India, and let them give me some poxy animal-tested chemical drugs which would make the symptoms go away but would harm my body in ways that would be harder to heal than the original illness.
- - -
Larry and Jenny turned up at the guest house on Friday afternoon. They'd been in Mahabalipuram, which was down the coast towards Pondicherry, since they got back from the Andaman Islands at the end of December. I wasn't really surprised to see them as i'd somehow expected them to show up at some point. It was good to meet up with them again and we sat around on the roof and swapped bits of stories about what we'd been doing over the last five or six weeks.
Naturally we ended up on the piss heavily and i drank a couple of quarter bottles of rough indian vodka over the evening. It was nice, as i hadn't had much to drink for a few days and i hadn't been pissed for ages. I thought it would probably sort out the dysentery anyway.
And it did! Well, at least, it seemed like it had... I think it was partly due to that, anyway. But probably mainly due to the homeopathic medicine i'd been taking.
- - -
The next night was a much wilder drinking session than the day before. In fact it ended up as quite a party. I joined Larry and Jenny and a couple of other people on the roof at a bit after dusk and gradually over the next few hours, more and more people joined us until there was really quite a big crowd. There was a large amount of beer drunk and i think the last of us went to bed somewhere around four in the morning. The next day i felt like shit and i couldn't do very much.
I still felt pretty rough when i woke up on Monday morning, which wasn't helped by the fact that i had to get up at half past six. My flight was at half past ten and i wanted to get to the airport fairly early. I caught an autorickshaw to Egmore railway station and got a train from there. The whole journey took less than an hour.