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Our Indian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur landed in Chennai, a city of 5 million people in southern India, formerly known as Madras. The plane was still slowing down as nearly every Indian in the plane stood up, opened up their overhead compartments, took out their oversized hand luggage and then just stood there, crammed in the aisle, while the plane was taxiing to the gate! Patience must not be their strong point.

The Trouble in Paradise

Odv
2006-04-15 18:40:16

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Our Indian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur landed in Chennai, a city of 5 million people in southern India, formerly known as Madras. The plane was still slowing down as nearly every Indian in the plane stood up, opened up their overhead compartments, took out their oversized hand luggage and then just stood there, crammed in the aisle, while the plane was taxiing to the gate! Patience must not be their strong point.

We had been forewarned by many other travelers about the difficulties of traveling in India, hence we felt prepared. With extremely low expectations we settled in a cheap hotel in the Triplicane area. Our first impression was that it was not all that bad. It was actually possible to walk a few meters without being bothered by someone.

Granted, some things are a bit extreme. People defecate in the streets and others (or the same ones) live and sleep in those streets. Everything is dirty and badly maintained. We could not see for example if buildings were just old and crumbling due to lack of maintenance or if they had been damaged by the tsunami as even away from the coast the mess still looked the same.

There was nothing appealing to us in Chennai, the odd few things to visit were unimpressive, mainly it was just a big dirty city. Thankfully we found a flight to Colombo and on to Malé with Sri Lankan Airlines that would bring us back to Bangalore, center of India's IT industry, we would not have to return to Chennai.
Kandy

We were initially very impressed with Sri Lanka, due to the quality of their national airline and the efficient airport immigration. Kandy was our first destination and this is were our initial good impression was shattered into one thousand pieces.

It seemed like every Sri Lankan, approached us to start a "friendly" conversation, which quickly turned out to be a commercial pitch or an attempt to get us to go somewhere so that they could get commission. In one case, ...