Travelog I : The Big Island Crab
// December 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // travel
Our first target – Port Blair.
We landed in Chennai at 7 pm. This was my first time here in 15 years. There is something very strange about the Tamil script. It looks tougher and way more complex than Traditional Chinese (which, I can somewhat make sense of, thanks to Segreta and The I Quest ).
The city itself is fairly large. It took me an hour to get to the guest house from the airport. The next challenge – conversing with the people. My driver had no understanding of English or Hindi. Most of the communication here is guided by power-words like “left” “right” “more” “less” etc. It is certainly not a good idea to ask the whereabouts of good restaurants from the locals. A possible result can be the torturous experience of eating raw crab meat off a banana leaf and then searching for Hajmola all around the place the next day.
We didn’t get to see much of Chennai. The flight to Port Blair takes about 2 hours. We had to leave at 6am. The Air India breakfast was unexpectedly nice. I wonder why they don’t have Wifi in the hotels here. Thankfully, my first scan led me to this network coming from a nearby building. God bless Unsecured Wifi and their Admins.
The drive around the island is a scenic appetizer. There is this road from where you can see Ross Island amidst the blue ocean which reminds you of those Windows XP wallpapers. An amazing jumble of colors in nature over the purest blue right out out of a Photoshop palette.
Of course the Juhu beach rates on a different scale all together, but the beaches in P. Blair are anything but clean. You can find shards of broken bottles, pieces of cloth and polybags lying all around in the waters. The better ones are located around the other islands of the group ( Havelock, Jolly Buoy etc.).
The highlight of the day of course was the .75 feet King Crab that was so brutally murdered in front of my eyes, which I later ate, with lots of gravy and sauce. Lesson learnt – however big the crab, eating one is a bad idea. You work your way through those tough shells only to half as much meat as that on a chickens neck. Butter chicken so… so… rocks.
So that was the Andamans in a day. The real trip begins tonight at midnight, when we leave for Kuala Lampur. Malaysia… truly Asia :-p Lets See.
Awaiting the next Unsecured Wifi,
- Twish
