Chennaı

Vanakkam, Chennai says, and for plenty of visitors that's about all the city gets before the train south pulls out. It has been the gateway to South India since the Victorian station went up, easier to pass through than to stop in – but it keeps its history out in the open, where nobody needs a ticket.

On Marina Beach, statues of poets and scholars look out over the Bay of Bengal while the evening crowd buys snacks at their feet, and the Tamil you hear on the sand has more than two thousand years of literature behind it. Inland, My Lady's Garden is all that's left of People's Park, where Christmas week once meant wrestling bouts and motorcycle stunts.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours put a guide in your ears for all of it – the seafront statues, the baobab that has stood in the Madras Medical College grounds for about 150 years, the second-hand book market where part of The Covenant of Water unfolds. Pause for a filter coffee whenever the walk calls for one.

Put your earbuds in and, as they say here, ippo nadakka aarambinga – start walking.