At the completion of our Cox & Kings Golden Triangle Tour, we flew via Indigo Air from Jaipur to Chennai in order to meet up with our Tamil Nadu Textile Breakaway Tour. We arranged our schedule to fly into the city a day early in order to give ourselves a little break between tours. Well at least that was the plan.

For our “free day” we arranged a morning Food Walk through Adyar, one of Chennai’s older, more comfortable, relatively quiet neighborhoods and had planned to “just chill” at the hotel that afternoon.

While you will see many of the same dishes as in the north on restaurant menus, the food of South India is quite different in general and in particular for Tamil Nadu and we thought a food walk would be a good introduction to the differences.

But on the afternoon before our flight we got a text from the Textile Breakaway Tour facilitator advising that the textile center we planned to visit on our tour day in Chennai would be closed on the day of our scheduled visit due to a local holiday and asking if it would be possible to visit there in the afternoon following our food walk.

We had booked the food walk with Chennai Magic, a different company than we used for the Textile Breakaway Tour but to make the transition easier, the Textile Breakaway Tour facilitator offered to provide us with our car and driver a day early (at no additional charge) so we could go from our food walk on to our afternoon textile tour seamlessly.

So at about 9:00 AM on the morning following our arrival into Chennai, we met our new driver Mohan Raj at our center city hotel for the 20 minute drive to the south to our meeting point in front of the Sri Anantha Padmanabha Swamy Temple in Adyar. There we met Food Walk Guide Sajan. Click the Food Walk through Adyar link for additional information and photos on our morning with Sajan.

Fortunately, the Kalakshetra Foundation and its Handloom Weaving, Kalakmari & Block Printing Unit is located in the same part of the city as our Food Walk through Adyar so it was a short ride there after lunch.

As the literal translation for the word Kalamkari “pen work” suggests, the paintings are done with pens made of bamboo or palm sticks; using a sharpened stick for the line-work and a rounded stick to fill in the color on textiles using all natural dyes. This tradition dates back to the 14th century, but in today’s world of cheap machine printed fabrics, it’s practice is limited to a very few workshops in the South India states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

On our visit we got the chance to see the “master printer” and other artisans hand drawing the outline of various designs and a team of lady craftsmen hand painting fabric. In addition there were other work stations we saw block printing on saris, typically requiring five to nine yards of fabric in length and two to four feet in width. First the outline is printed and as shown in this picture to the left, that is followed up with different colors added on top.

If you click on the above block print photo you can view a slideshow of our visit there.

Additionally, the first scenes in the video towards the bottom of our Tamil Nadu page are from our visit to the block and painted printing work room and also include a few scenes from the Kalakshetra handloom weaving unit.

After our visit with the Qualamkars craftsmen we drove north back towards the city center and stopped for a short stroll along the famous Marina Beach, which faces the Bay of Bengal. This is a long and extremely wide white sand beach from the water’s edge to Marina Beach Road. In addition to the sand and sea there is a line of simple carnival rides for children and fast food vendors including this fellow with a penchant for English Soccer.

It was a short ride from the beach back to our hotel located in the city center where we relaxed for a short while before heading out to dinner at the Copper Chimney restaurant.