Mamallapuram - On the hippie trail

After a few aimless days in Chennai decided to follow the traveler’s hippie trail to a little seaside town called Mamallapuram. This town after the busy chaos of Chennai is a welcome relief, however it is very much Westernized and was born out of the tourist trade, here all the menu's are in English and rather than dividing the menu up by types of food the menu is divided instead into countries the best that we have seen so far is the 'French Breakfast' - French toast, coffee and a cigarette.

After the heavy rains and being not quite tourist season, the town was very quite and the shop owners solution to getting more business was to position loud touts at the front of their shops and restaurants that basically hassled you until you were so angry you would never go in or would just give in and end up going in. Despite all this the shop owners that we met here was lovely particularly off the main road.


This town's main income comes from two streams the tourism being key but also fishing being a major industry. Before the Tsunami there were 7 boats and as many fisherman, although the water did rise very high here and effected the main tourist drag and washed away their 7 boats, the damage was minimal and thankfully only 2 lives were lost. However a Swedish company has set up a relief effort specifically in Mamallapuram but only helps the fisherman giving them boats, nets, rice and funds. There are now 150 boats in Mamallapuram and over fishing is already evident, Lobster is advertised everywhere and sadly they are only 10 to 15 cm's long, young and grossly undersize. I imagine it won’t be too long before they are all gone.

The reason that travelers starting coming to this town was for the large rock carvings and the temple - sadly these are not practicing temples and walking through them just does not give you the same experience. Born out of these carvings an artistic tradition of rock craving has begun here and there are many shops with artists out the front working selling everything from pendants to enormous statues.