When all roads led to Mamallapuram: Hordes of tourists descended on the town

Kasthuri rolled out a piece of plastic sheet on the side of the road and carefully placed the caps and Stetsons, made of straw, plastic and felt, in a casual heap. It was more than two weeks since she had been asked to stop plying her trade for security reasons. Her husband, Loganathan, a tour guide, had also been whiling away time at home. A scarf tied around her head, she leaned back against the freshly painted wall.She didn’t have to wait too long. On Sunday morning, as the blazing sun beat relentlessly down on an immaculately groomed Mamallapuram, tourists poured into the ancient town in droves.
With the 8th century Pallava-era monuments, sparkling and all lit up for the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, tourists from neighbouring districts, besides foreigners and other domestic visitors, arrived at the town with a determination. The parking slots burst at the seams as honking cars and tourists vans spilled out. They swarmed Arjuna’s Penance, climbed over its rocky top, posed for selfies near the Butter Ball, stomped over the green carpet that only hours ago had been dewy and dust free.

Workers pulled down the temporary walls decked with garlands of orange marigolds and pillars of fruits and vegetables. As they piled up the bullet-proof sheets that protected Modi and Xi during their dinner near the dazzling Shore Temple, tourists streamed towards it to check if the monument was as magical as it appeared on TV on Friday.

By evening, their numbers exploded, resulting in traffic jams on East Coast Road and leading to a vehicle pile-up from Pattipulam, about 10 km north of Mamallapuram. “It was an unprecedented crowd. It was like waves of people all over the town,” said R Subramanian, who runs a photo studio in Mamallapuram. Though the number of police were less in the morning, their presence was scaled up after hundreds of vehicles ferrying tourists entered Mamallapuram. Visitors complained that dry flowers, plantain trees and trash were littered all over the place.
While the local town panchayat estimates that the number of tourists who visited Mamallapuram on Sunday would be many tomes the usual 10,000 on weekends, the volume of garbage is likely to touch two tonnes. The average garbage collection at the town is seven tonnes every month.
With the number of visitors to Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) ticketed monuments increasing dramatically, authorities were forced to switch off the lights in the evening to the keep the flow in check. ASI sources said the number of tickets purchased for a tour of the monuments doubled from an average 7,000 during weekends to more than 14500 on Sunday. But, hundreds of visitors left disappointed as the fine sculptures that came alive in their living rooms did not look so glamourous in real.
Mobbed by tourists for her caps, Kasthuri momentarily leaned back on the wall that had a poster painted on it by the Mamallapuram town panchayat. It simply said: ‘My Town My Pride’.
(With inputs from Yogesh Kabirdoss)