Anna Zoological Park

As I mentioned in one of my last blogs, one Saturday we decided to go to the zoo. So Penri, my mum and I walked to the main road to get an autorick (still our most frequent way of travel) and hailed one. Penri did all the negotiating, as he is much better at it than either my mum or myself. When they agreed on the price we got in the rick and set off. With the autoricks, you must always set the price before you start on your journey otherwise you get to your destination and they will completely rip you off. It happens so often that you agree on a price with a rick driver and when you get to the other end they say ‘very far madam, very far, more money’ and my response is always ‘no, we agreed on the price and you knew where you were going’. Nine times out of ten, they will try and get more money out of you. Anyway, back to my story. Here we are, the three of us in a rick heading to the zoo. We got there and it wasn’t the zoo at all, it was Guindy National Park. Penri then had to argue with the driver that this wasn’t the zoo – this was a park and we wanted to see animals. The driver then realised where we meant and said ‘Ah, zoological park … very far’. We agreed on a price (after Penri haggled with him for a while) and set off again. We drove and drove and drove, out past Chennai airport and kept driving. After an hour Penri said ‘I can’t believe I battled with him over the price; it can’t be much further’. But we kept on driving. It didn’t help that this rick wasn’t particularly fast and we seemed to be chugging along at about 40 miles an hour! We arrived at Anna Zoological Park after an hour and 40 minutes in the rick! So, in we went, telling the driver we would be a couple of hours. Inside the zoo we bought our tickets and had a look at the map. There were several different routes to take depending on how far you wanted to walk. Bearing in mind it was scorching hot and we’d just sat in a rick for an hour and a half (on plastic seats), we chose the shortest route (2 ½ miles). Off we went. We must have walked for about 15 minutes before we even saw an animal and even then, the enclosures were so large and shaded that you couldn’t see a lot of the animals. So after walking for two and a half hours we only saw about seven or eight animals. As we were walking around we saw a lot of school trips (must have been at least ten) and with every single one that passed us they stopped to talk to us and asked us our names and where we were from. My mum told two little girls that her name was Lakshmi (a typical Indian name) and they went running back to the teacher saying ‘Her name’s Lakshmi, her name’s Lakshmi’ – they were so cute! As we were walking back to the exit, we saw these massive trucks driving around taking people on a guided tour. We couldn’t believe we hadn’t seen them before. We also found out that you can hire a motorbike to drive yourself around … that would have been much cooler! Anyway, overall it was a nice day!