Welcome in India

Sleeper trains - not conducive to a good night's ZZZZZs

We survive our first sleeper train and arrive in KL at sunrise. After a shower at the station, we catch a train from KL Sentral to KL City Centre, have a leisurely brunch, and wander around beneath the impressive 88-storey, 450m Petronas Twin Towers. The differences between Thailand and Malaysia are marked - you instantly know you’re in a different country as soon as you cross the border. KL is industrious. It’s clean, lovely and modern, and the locals are polite. Pete ventures off to find the Bose store for headphones, while I get my last espresso fix for quite some time. 

Petronas Twin Towers, KL

Trim flat white over, I ask a man for directions back to the station, and shortly afterwards, we're the best of friends. Geoffrey, a 60-something year old banker from southern Malaysia, not only shows me the way there, but also how to buy a ticket, and where I need to go for the bus to the airport. We catch the same train back to KL Sentral, and wish each other well as he heads off to a business lunch. Pete and I head to the airport to catch our Air Asia flight bound for Chennai, and after a delicious vegetable briyani on board, I feel I’m ready to embrace India.

Blissfully unaware of the chaos ahead

We come in to land at 7pm to a pink dusk and peer down upon a vast city, which appears to have huge numbers of waterways. The international arrivals terminal is sparse - just a couple of stands and make-shift shops and a very temporary-looking customs area. Our luggage arrives amid dozens of Sony and Panasonic LCD TVs and electronics being imported by Indians who jostle at the conveyor belt. No-one apologises when they push me aside; apparently there’s no such thing as manners here.

We exit the terminal to find absolute chaos. Hordes of dark faces and arms lean through barriers, yelling, pointing, waving, holding signs. We hear the first beeping of car horns – a noise, I’m told, that is the defining sound of India. We’re immediately set upon by someone who says he's an airport coordinator and not an agent, and we tell him we've decided not to go to the centre of Chennai, but to head 70km north to Mamallapuram. He says he can get us a “good car with very good driver” for 1600 Rupees, and strongly recommends Lakshmi Lodge, a hotel by the beach, “with swimming pool”.

After exchanging a few glances with Pete and consulting our Lonely Planet guide, we seriously question the guy’s legitimacy; it’s very difficult to believe he has our interests entirely at heart. We’re probably about to be ripped off, but it’s getting dark and we need to get the hell out of this chaos, so we agree to the “good car with very good driver” and to at least checking out Lakshmi Lodge. 

The motorway, if you could call it that, is like nothing I've ever seen or heard or felt before. A couple of years ago, the Contiki bus I was on in Paris did a few spins around the Arc de Triomphe in rush hour, while the driver played the Mission Impossible soundtrack. At the time, I thought that all those crazy French people in European cars weaving in and out and across lanes was the most chaos a road could ever handle. I was so, so wrong. In a word, Indian roads are terrifying. 

Thousands upon thousands of cars, trucks, buses, scooters, motorcycles, push bikes, and people on foot are all fighting to inch forward. It looks like there should be just two lanes each way, but the traffic is at least six vehicles wide for as far as the eye can see. Everyone toots incessantly, which seems incredibly counter-productive. How can anyone tell who is tooting at whom? If everyone kept their hands on their steering wheels instead of their horns, maybe the traffic would move a little more smoothly; but this is India, and if my experience with the country’s High Commission to get my visa is anything to go by, nothing here is going to be easy. 

Our driver tells us a cyclone hit last week - which explains what we thought were waterways. He says more than 40 people died and thousands have been left homeless. To add to the existing traffic woes, the south-bound lane is closed for a long stretch further down the road, because of damage from the cyclone, so all of Chennai's traffic is crammed into the north-bound lane. The roads themselves are worse than the pot-hole ridden ones I experienced in Tonga last year; they’re more like something you'd expect in Baghdad. 

Huge holes and mounds of dirt along the way make for a bumpy ride - amplified by the fact there are no seatbelts in the “good car” Ford Fiesta we’re in. The people, shops, containers, rubbish dumps, food stalls, shacks, and cows chilling out on the sides of the road for the entire length of the journey provide distraction enough from the rough ride. We pass a Dizzee World theme park with rusted rides, and more cows patrolling the entrance. It's pitch black outside but people are everywhere. Tiny children rifle through piles of rubbish on the sides of the road, men smoke, eat, spit, yell, and sell their wares, while women in beautiful saris mill about doing nothing much. My jaw keeps dropping and my eyes have never been glued open this widely before. 

We have more than a few near misses with scooters and eventually escape the chaotic traffic to the open road. At first, it’s a relief, but then our driver speeds up to 120km/h. He puts his own seat belt on at one point, even though there are clearly none in the back. The rat. Pete and I give each other concerned looks, and on more than one occasion I find myself saying Hail Marys, sure I’m minutes away from a certain death. Pete tells me later that he’d texted his Mum from the car, saying something like, "No opportunity to pass a bus on a corner has been missed."

Assault doesn't even begin to describe the experience of arriving here. As the sign at the airport said when we arrived, 'Welcome in India'.