Wednesday 5 - Thursday 20 April 2000

We have spent our time waiting for shipping companies, looking into different hotels (conclusion: Madras is expensive for accomodation – stay put), rearranging airtickets, sorting out the finer details for shipping, processing paperwork, preparing the Landrover – this involved a complete emptying and thorough cleaning, before sorting and repacking.  There was a great deal of food remaining.  We have had to donate any unsealed packets to a worthy cause.  We concluded that the Oz customs would probably allow the items in factory sealed packets.  We also had to throughly clean the outside.  Achieved with minimum effort by a garage down the road that offered a cleaning service that included pressure washing underneath.  The Landie has never been so clean! 

Fighting bureaucracy and paperwork has been something of a headache.  It appeared that although the Carnet had been completed correctly when we entered India, the stamps in Freds Passport that were associated with the car had not been signed.  What a to do!!!  Customs couldn’t possibly process a car that wasn’t actually in India – despite the physical presence of the car and the signatures in the carnet!  It caused a delay of 1 ½ days but fortunately commonsense prevailed.  The alternative would have been for them to send Freds passport to the Wagah border and request that they check it and make appropriate amendments.  All of this would have taken at least 30 days and would have required us to apply for a Visa extension – tricky if you don’t have your passport! 

The delay almost caused us to miss the ship, as we had a 2 day Public Holiday to contend with.  Luckily, we were able to present the vehicle at Customs at the very last minute.  Customs were extremely thorough and for the first time, the vehicle was totally emptied and everything was unpacked.  It was 9pm by the time we had everything put back together and the vehicle had been stuffed and lashed in the container with a customs seal on the outside.  The lateness in hour was mainly due to the necessity to wait for various customs officials to be fetched from their residences to complete the process. 

We beat the Public Holiday and are presuming that the container is now on a ship heading to Singapore.  We celebrated with an excellent, buffet lunch at the Taj Connemara Hotel.  The remainder of our time in Madras was spent waiting for the remaining paperwork and invoice. 

We leave India on Thursday (20 April) for a 4 day holiday in Malaysia (despite being told otherwise when we bought our tickets, we were allowed a stopover in Kuala Lumpur when we changed the flight dates.).  This will be the first flight of our journey.  It would have been nice to have been able to travel to Australia without flying, but boats are rather expensive and I think that we would be bored by a month at sea!