December 21, 2009 – Day 361 – Chennai, India

Our last day in India! We took a walk down to the water front, Chennai’s beach, to have a look and contemplate our last day here. And what a way to spend it! Since we are about to leave here, we were feeling a little nostalgic about the past 3 months we have lived in this country.

Anything but beautiful Chennai Beach

We have liked some things and hated some things. Today definitely cemented the fact that we did not like many. The water by the beach front is so polluted that it is black. The entire beach area smells like a mixture of piss, human excrement, fish, typical Indian body odor and something dead.

Nasty black waves

The sand was so thick with trash you couldn’t take a single step without unearthing bits of paper, food scraps, or the occasional miscellaneous unidentifiable random object. The beach is covered with beggars and street kids, Indian tourists, stray angry dogs, and then the usual locals who alternate between sitting facing the ocean, staring at us, pointing at us, picking their noses, asking us for “one snap,” and the very few just walking around minding their own business—a real rarity in a place where the mere act of breathing makes you susceptible to at least 4 other people’s scrutiny.

Shops on the beach

Yes, this is India. And if today were not our last day here, we might just leave anyway for sheer exhaustion of this place. We are both very glad that we came here but India is most definitely not a place that either of us feel the desire to ever return to. More than once this country has tried its best to kill us. Once we were honest-to-goodness afraid that it was actually all over (Rishikesh…shudder). Now if only we can survive the flight out of here, we can officially say that we survived 3 months in this strange land. We will let you know it goes…

Our last rickshaw...