India13 blog - best way to view photos

The photos can be seen full screen if you click on the first photo in each blog. You can then scroll through them full screen size.

I especially recommend this for the blog dated 17 April 2013 when we visited the Adalaj stepwell, (Maniar wonderland) and the 5000 year old village excavated at Lothal.

Enjoy


Monique

3 and 4 May 2013 the long journey back to Australia

A long long day today... The taxi driver was an hour late due to a blown tyre. The check in and immigration check took 1.5 hours (immigration is very very understaffed) so we literally got on the plane and it left 5 minutes later. We got to Kuala Lumpur at 3pm local time.Our flight to Perth was due just before midnight.  I had intended to spend a few hours in a hotel however decided against this due to the cost of taxis. We spent the many hours in the waiting lounge with the announcements screaming overhead in English and Malay and sometimes Mandarin. I was glad to get on the plane!!

 Bye Bye Chennai ...

Saturday 4 May 2013

We landed at 5:30am and were home by 6:30am. I have spent the day washing all the clothes, food shopping and cooking.

2 May 2013 continued ... Chennai: outing to Madras Crocodile bank and Mahabalipuram

Next we visited the Madras Crocodile bank. After yesterday's disappointing zoo visit I was expecting to see a small tank with 2 crocs in it but it was actually excellent. There are many varieties of crocodiles there with some pens housing over 50 crocodiles. The mugger/marsh crocodiles came 'running' when the keeper appeared with a pail of meat...

not a crocodile ....

turtle

"viewing cave" aquarium for gharial crodile

Siamese Crocodile

playing peek-a-boo

Young caiman crocodiles

More mugger/marsh crocodiles 

 A whole lot of snake in the nocturnal house:

We visited the small coastal town of Mahabalipuram. Here I had wanted to see the temples and other things carved out of single pieces of granite. However we were confronted with a 250 rupee per person entry price (versus 10 rupee for indians) so we decided to spend the money on lunch instead... On the way to lunch we actually saw one of the carved temples (Anjali's pennance) and a huge boulder nicknamed "Krishna's butter ball", and Dave bought some postcards to fill in the rest. After lunch we went in to a small tailor's shop where I had two dupetta scarfs for myself and one for each of the girls made on the spot with the fabrics of our choosing.

web photos from the Archeological Survey of India

                                              Krishna's butter ball

 TIme for lunch; Blue Elephant/Moonraker's http://www.moonrakersrestaurants.com/

 Natasha's mashed potato with mushrooms

Tasty spicy chicken for  me ..

Natasha showing off her new dupetta scarf

                                         The patterns of my two dupetta scarfs

Back in Chennai:

At night we walked through the streets of Velachery in search of bangles; I settled on some hinged ones as they are easy to put on and take off.