Port Blair and The Bambi Experience

As I've said in previous episodes of Travelers Honeymoon, we got married once in the desert and once again by the sea. These are the stories of our Eight Months Honeymoon. What better test of compatibility is there than traveling on a shoestring with your partner....India can really make the best and the worst come out of you... sometimes it's like heaven and other times like hell!

Every once in while throughout the trip, we would have what we called Honeymoon Splurges. This in one of those times...Andaman Islands Here we Come!

Making our way to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world was a little frustrating. We caught a little bit of a bad taste for Indian matters and the chaos that is India! I really didn't like having these feelings linger...

The journey seemed smooth as a baby's bum, we jumped on a commuter train and stopped in an area of Chennai, close to the airport where we thought they'd be plenty of guest houses. (We were leaving pretty early the next morning and wanted to be close to the plane so we didn't have to rush.) After walking around for a good hour and half, our backpacks were starting to weigh, it was getting dark and we were getting hungry. All guest houses were full or unwilling to have us stay, so we got into a rickshaw who dropped us off at an expansive hotel (supposedly the only hotel around with vacancy) and it wasn't any greater than the cheap option we were used to.

Sitting at the hotel restaurant, maybe all that aggravation came from being hangry.

We were tired, aggravated and feeding off each-other's anger. We fell into that dark hole where everyone around us seemingly was trying to rip us off. Whatever, in the end we could say fuck it, because it didn't really matter, maybe the big dirty city with all it's usual city madness, turned us and everything around us agro... Either-way like I said, it didn't really matter, we were finally had a bed and we were this much closer to the Beach!!!

The next day at 6 in the morning we grabbed a rickshaw for the airport which was surprisingly painless and effortless all the way to the Andaman Islands.

Once we landed in Port Blair, once again anger and aggravation came over us as the rickshaw driver we picked, blatantly took us around to his "friends' guest houses". The problem wasn't the driver's business deals, the problem was that the guest houses were crap and they were so overpriced. I have nothing against giving someone a finder's fee, a little baksheesh can go a long way, but 3, 4 or 5 times the price of other cleaner guest houses isn't my cup of tea, you know!

When people get off a train, a bus or whatever mode of transportation into a new city or town rickshaws, taxis, guides, thieves and crooks will approach you to help you on your way... Whatever you need you can find it there. It's a great thing but it sure can be annoying when you want to be left alone or have had enough of being looked at like a bag full of cash!

Sometimes you can't help but feel like the prearranged tourist price is 10 times what it should be. Fuck Man, leave us alone, go away, you're a crook just like the rest of the flies that pretend to help!

Once we walked away, of course we found a nice clean little hotel right in the center of it all, cheap and friendly! What a difference. At that point we decided, no more rickshaws bringing us in, no more paying a different price than the original negotiation. It was now time to take it all in, let the madness roll over our shoulders and be slick like snakes and just navigate through the chaos.

Port Blair ended up being such a nice place (as is mostly the case after that first pass through the chaos). It wasn't so different than the rest of India's small cities. There was lots of street food, trinkets, souvenirs, religious offerings, all the wonderful smells and the really horrible ones. It's a busy little city with the usual sounds of musics blaring through broken speakers and wallahs loudly selling bits and bobs.

We got on a boat to near by Ross Island where the old colonial buildings have been taken over by nature. Every man made structure from those days were being choked and strangled by enormous root systems that look like they're the many tentacles of some wild animal-tree thing. Amongst all these buildings was a massive church, also swallowed by this tree creature. There was also beautiful peacocks and ducks walking about and running away from picture perfect moments and Bambi was everywhere (Yes Bambi, the Disney character with the little white polka dots), mostly begging for food, picking through leftover coconuts and bullying those not willing to give up a meal from the island's only restaurant!!!

The Wildlife:

Very wild, as you can tell!

The Church:

The Tree Creatures:

The whole thing was surreal, it was a wild place to see. At the time the English had the island they had fabricated big desalination machines to make potable water for the troops. They were these giant cylinder surrounded by a dozen small tubes that ran the length of it all. The face of these machines reminded me a little of refills for a toy revolver.

Back in Port Blair, the English had built a prison for "Political Prisoners". It was a huge complex of cells, a few stories tall with gallows and a watchtower in the center of it's star shaped construction. Today the prison is a museum and from time to time they have shows in the yard anything from music, theater light shows with lasers and fireworks to re-enactment of Port Blair's colonial history.

To Be Continued...

Previous Episodes:
Episode 01 ~ Episode 02 ~ Episode 03

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Next Week:

Paradise Finally!!!

If you want to know what is inside the Coconut, take a look at my #HumansOfSteemit entry HERE and afterwards go and give @ashleykalila a digital hug or something sweet for creating such an amazing project and motivating people to chase their dreams!

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