THE ARRIVAL (2006.08.20)

It is a 7 hour flight from Hungary to India if we could get a direct flight. There is no such flight so we have to fly westwards, wait a for the next flight and a few hours later fly back same way above Hungary enroute to India. The flight lasts 8 hours, which is just bearable. The time lag is 4.5 hours or 3.5 hours in the summer. The huge country has a single time zone and does not use daylight saving time in summer.

We flew from Budapest via Zurich and Mumbai to Chennai. Mumbai was renamed from Bombay in 1995 when the Indian cities were named back to their original Indian names. It’s the economic capital of India and with 18 million inhabitants and is the 5th largest city in the world. The world largest motion picture industy is here, not in Hollywood. Bombay is bustling city, maybe the most European like. For us it is more Indian like of course. We took a cab from the international airport to the domestic :

A short, nearly 2 hour long flight took us to the next town : Chennai (formely : Madras) which is the 4th largest city in India with 7 million inhabitatnts. This is the city where our challenge began.

Bustling traffic and of course a lot of rickshaws. We arrived just in time to go to practice with our rickshaws on a sport track. There was a veteran car exhibition at the same time, so we watched the beautiful oldtimers :

We had to wait for 2 hours to get our rickshaw, ours was number 9. After a short briefing we could practice a few rounds at last :

Notice the licence plates : no compulsory standard plates available, so everybody paints or makes its own, not two of them are the same in size, or style.

Our first trip : VIDEO

After a short practice came the first exercise. „Find your way back to the hotel” I couldn’t beleive it. Chennai is a huge city, 7 million people, we had no maps, how the hell shall we find our way back ? Nobody watched the road on our trip here, I even fell asleep in the bus. We didn’t even had our GPS with us. I think we just stood there and cursed for a few minutes, then started to solve the problem smartly. As we had no other solution we hired a taxi (a rickshaw of course) who guided us back to our hotel. To be precise we just smartly followed the team PUKKA TUK TUK who paid for the taxi. We arrived pretty soon to the hotel, so our rickshaw was parked first int he yard of the hotel. We deeply regretted that the next day because it meant that ours was last out to the start.

That evening we were invited to the most posh club in town the 150 years old Madras club, where I tasted my the best Dhal (indian lentils) I ever had. When I asked for the recipe I learned that the cook is 89 years old. Than nust have been a real authentic recipe.

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