Day 56
Today we didn’t have much planned. After breakfast, Amy and I went downstairs to Tymitz Square to see if there was an inter-port person and ask them if there was anything exciting to go see or if they would suggest something to do today. While we were down there, we met Andrew and Natasha. They were going to Mamallapuram and asked us to join. Our shuttle driver got a taxi for us, a real one, not a rickshaw. And not even 5 minutes from leaving the port he runs out of gas and has to hand us off to another taxi driver. I guess that here in India they don’t watch their gas tank gauge. After our hour and a half ride to Mamallapuram, we were greeted by a guide who showed us around. It was hard to understand what he was saying, but we got to see cave temples and historical sites. The sites were supposed to be temples but they never ended up getting finished. During our tour, we came across a group of women that were from a certain village where they have never seen a white person before. When they saw us they were so excited and asked to take many pictures with us, I felt like it was the paparazzi. After this tour, our guide took us to another temple and showed us a sign that had all the prices listed. The sign read “Indians 10 rupees and 250 rupees for all others”. The exchange rate is 45 so for Indians it was about .22 cents and for Americans it was about 20 dollars. That is insane especially because we would be seeing the exact same thing, we decided that we didn’t want to see and just wanted to grab some lunch. We asked our taxi driver to bring us to a restaurant, we asked for more of a family type place so that we knew it would be nice and would have decent food. He ended up bringing us to a really nice place on the water where there was a beach and a bunch of other touristy restaurants around. When we first walked in though, there were three plates of fish sitting there with the eyeballs still in and there were flies all over them. We were a bit sketched out, but just stayed away from the fish. We can’t drink the water in India, so we couldn’t eat it anyways, just had to stick with something that was cooked. I ended up getting chicken fried rice and some French fries! It was pretty good. When we got back to the port our cab driver tried charging us more, like they all do. We agree on a price before we get in and by the time we get out they are jacking it up. But we just hand them our original negotiated price and walk away. There is seriously never a dull moment here in India.
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