Hop on, Hop off

Less than 15 min after getting off the train in Chennai, I saw this bus that said 'Hop on, Hop off'. On asking mom what it is, she vaguely said some Chennai tour thingy and that the tourism department has introduced one to Mahabalipuram too. I make a mental note of this, forget all about it within a few minutes, get home and start planning for the Pondicherry trip (Plan-A) which was long due. Due to technical glitches I realised that the trip isn't exactly possible. So, I started looking for a Plan-B. Then I decided to find out more about this 'Hop on, Hop off' tour (I'll call it HoHo henceforth, kinda sounds like Santa doesn't it?:)) ', I didn't really understand how this worked, called a couple of numbers, wasn't happy with the answers the TTDC officials gave, finally decided to go to Mahabalipuram!

The whole HoHo tour has buses at 1 hr intervals and has a number of stops (tourist locations) on the way (11 to be precise). We could get down at any of these spots and take the next bus that comes on the way. The whole thing didn't start off well 'coz we had to stand in the 1st leg of our journey. We hopped on at Thiruvanmyur and hopped off at Dakshina Chitra which is like a center for promoting art/traditions of south India. Interesting place and has a nice craft bazaar. Roamed about for 2 hours and then decided to go to crocodile bank from there (skipped some water ride thing and sea lion show in between). Oh my god! I've NEVER seen SO MANY crocodiles in my life! A cage/pool contained abour 400 crocodiles! All just lazing about all day. Crocodiles are lazier than me for sure! After this, we directly went to Shore Temple in Mahabalipuram and I was certain that the heat'll kill me. Humidity just made things worse. Summer is NOT the time to visit these places! The Shore Temple is now under the Archeological Surbey of India and was maintained lots better than what it was a few years ago. After a late lunch there, we moved on to the Five Rathas. Brilliant sculptures built on a single rock, eons ago! Simply marvellous! 

Ah, I'd like to mention a small incident that happened when we were entering this place. All these tourist sites have different rates for Indians and foreigners (no clue why). Shouldn't they be happy and charge them less/same rate? Ok, we've decided to loot the ones that come from abroad. This lady (non-Indian) was wearing a saree, married to an Indian guy entered the place and walked a few steps . The security comes from nowhere and says 'madam you have to take a different ticket, this one isn't valid for you'. The lady was so bewildered when this happened. Atrocious, don't you think?! It just got me thinking on whether other countries behave the same way with their guests, are they as discriminating as we are? And soon after this it was time for us to get back. We boarded the bus and had a peaceful ride back to Thiruvanmyur. Nice experience on the whole, and punctuality of these buses definitely needs a special mention. They are on time at each location. And, the other locations I missed were- VGP, Mayajaal, MGM, Tiger Caves and a temple (don't remember the name)

No surprises that the journey from Mahabalipuram to T'myur took less time than from T'myur to T.Nagar thanks to the traffic, it was ten times worse because of the humidity, temperature and the crowded bus. 

Chennai! :-/ 

(All those who want to start arguing about Bangalore being the same, don't! The weather there doesn't make you feel that you are going to drop dead any moment because of dehydration/heat and that wasn't the point of the whole post!)