SpiaggiaMarina Beach

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# 1 dell' 1 Spiaggia a Chennai

Opinione dettagliata di koshkha

koshkha(46)
Northampton, Regno Unito

97%

molto bene

I've never really been a beach-lover. Admittedly my long-held ambition to one day retire by the sea with a couple of dogs could suggest otherwise, but that's not about loving beaches, it's about loving the sea. I can't abide all that sand in your food, hair, clothes and baggage. And parading my gravity-battered flesh for the derision of strangers is no picnic either. So if someone says 'Do you want to go to the beach?' they'll do well to get more than a grudging grunt from me.

One place where I found my kind of beach was in Chennai in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Before going to the south of India I'd seen a lot of other parts of the country but I'd not really been exposed to much of coastal India. A Brazilian colleague of mine had been a few months before I visited and was horrified to discover there were no 'pretty ladies in little bikinis' on Chennai's beach. He was from Rio de Janeiro and really couldn't imagine beach life without boobs and bikinis. But in a country where 'modesty' is a virtue much prized and flesh is not for public display, what can you expect to find when you pack your bucket and spade and head for the beach?

First things first, here's what you won't find; thousands of screaming children, loud radios, yobs tanked up on too much beer at 10 am in the morning, lobster red freckled people with peeling skin, sewage floating in the sea and gentlemen of a certain age clad in inadvisably tight Speedos.

Chennai's Marina Beach would be world famous if it were - to put it bluntly - almost anywhere else; specifically somewhere less modest and somewhere that tourists actually go to. At risk of upsetting local people, Chennai isn't a great city to visit. It's short on charm and attractions but one thing it's long on is beach. It's a spectacular stretch of sand. At 12 km long it's ranked as the second longest urban beach in the world beaten only by Brazil's Copacabana Beach. It also benefits from being really wide - 437 m at the widest point apparently - and very gently sloping. There's plenty of space for people to do what Indian people do best setting up small businesses on the beach.

On the day we visited it was a weekend, a Sunday if I recall correctly. Our bus dropped us at the promenade and we headed off across the beach to find all manner of unexpected delights. Stalls were set up selling drinks and snacks, toys and trinkets, balloons and balls. A tiny fairground carousel seating just a handful of kids was being turned manually by the owner. Scores of fishermen were sitting on their dug-out canoes, folding and mending their nets whilst just a few meters away their catch was on offer, barely a few minutes out of the water. Men with old mechanical contraptions were making juice right in front of their customers.

At the waters edge small children and their mothers paddled in the waters. Some braver souls were attempting to swim in quite rough water which is no mean feat when wrapped in six and a half meters of sari fabric or a salwar kameez. Remember life-saving classes in the school swimming pool dressed in your pyjamas (who ever got caught in an emergency drowning incident in pyjamas)? Well it's a bit like that. Officially though you aren't supposed to swim in Marina Beach because of the shockingly strong currents which cause frequent fatalities.

Chennai is on the eastern side of the southern end of India and so the beach was one of those hit badly during the Tsunami of 2004. We saw video footage of the wave's arrival on the beach on television not long after our visit and couldn't help but think of how many people could have been on this massive beach the day after Christmas and wonder how many were lost. Statistics show that the Tsunami claimed the lives of 206 people on Marina Beach. Down the coast at Mahabalipurum, the site of ancient shore temples, the waves unearthed deeper levels of long buried ancient buildings and the locals found a Thai Buddha statue carried all the way across the ocean by the wave. It's fair to say that an Indian beach experience is somewhat more spiritual than its European equivalent.

Marina Beach8