We begin our journey through South India in Chennai, where the agency has booked us a room far nicer than our level of cleanliness deserves.  The food in the restaurant is cheap and good.  I am happy.

The tour agency sent us a driver, who greeted us and started driving to an undisclosed location.  We found ourselves at the City Museum, which has a number of ancient artifacts that would probably have been interesting if they were accompanied by more detailed descriptions.  From there, we went to a cathedral and visited the tomb of Jesus' apostle Doubting Thomas, and then the driver had no more to show us.  Instead of going back to our hotel, we asked him to leave us at a mall that I had seen on the way so that we could eat at a reasonably priced restaurant and Julian could buy even more books.

The mall was a good decision.  I had the best tandoori chicken of my life, and my bookworm came away with 4 more books.  He was pretty excited about taking an autorickshaw (known in other parts of the world as a tuk-tuk) back to our hotel.  We walked to the stand and negotiated what I thought was a pretty bad price, but I was desperate to get home.  The driver tried a few times to convince us to go to a shopping complex and we refused, but then he said, "You go, free T-shirt."  He pointed to himself and nodded happily.  It seemed like a nice thing to do, so we agreed to take a look around but not buy anything.

In an Indian city, depending on where you stand and which way the wind is blowing, any number of smells come drifting toward you - rosewater, urine, hot oil, feces (human and animal), bubbling curry, sour fish.  When we left the shopping complex and our driver came tripping into our autorickshaw, all of these smells were overpowered by heady perfume of marijuana.  The driver started to leave, then stopped and parked in the middle of the exit to the parking lot.  Hopping out, he poked his head in to look at us with a many-toothed grin - "I forgot t-shirt!" - then ran back into the store.  When he came back a minute later, we began our harrowing odyssey home by narrowly missing a schoolboy crossing the street, then coming within an inch of crashing into the back of a truck.  Every honk behind us seemed to sound impending death.  We stopped at 2 gas stations along the way without getting any gas and were jerked once by a speed bump, but we reached our hotel without incident. I later wondered how, in a vehicle built like a golf cart and in a city as pungent as Chennai, the smell of weed stayed with us so long; Julian told me that the driver had been finished off his joint during the first few minutes of our ride.   In hindsight, I wonder if what I perceived as dangerous ganja-slowed-reflex driving was simply the way the road looks from a little 3-wheeled autorickshaw in a city where lane lines, direction of traffic and traffic lights are merely advisory.

When the drive was over, we gave the driver 500 rupees, expecting 100 rupees change.  He gave us 70 rupees, with a sly smile, and when we last saw him, he'd left his autorickshaw parked in the middle of a lane and was hobbling away with the money in his hand, presumably to find a joint to replace the one that he'd been forced to finish off so quickly in order to get us home.