madurai, 11 august 07

after another classic breakfast of idly and pongal and an early checkout, achieved only after some serious wrangling with the guy at the desk on the subject of improperly imposed luxury taxes, we caught our bus out of trichy. after a quiet and sleepy ride, we finally got in to madurai. the hotel was the cheapest yet, and simple, but with a view from the roof over into the meenakshi temple complex. we went wandering about madurai: poked our heads into unsigned offices and peeked around corners in search of the tourism office (never found), ate a miserable lunch (never trust l.p. guide food recs ugh somebody here so got paid off), sat about in our hotel room (so hot, what to do?).

finally, motivated by our early planned departure the next morning, we set out for the therumalai nayak palace, a ruin really, a twenty minute walk away. what was left tho left me wishing i could have seen the original, this one remaining hall such a huge impressive hulk, putting me in mind of an opera house or somesuch thing, great white pillars and grand archways and all done up in (what at least looked like) stucco work. tourists, mostly probably in madurai for the meenakshi temple, sat around on the stairs and milled about vaguely under the vaults...

we saw a museum dedicated to gandhi, off on the other side of the city. it was fine. it featured the blood stained loincloth gandhi had been wearing at the time of his assassination. and endless other memorabilia and pictures and informations that involved too much text and attention at that point of the day.

and round towards evening time we made it back to the temple. a similar sort of thing to ranganathaswamy temple in trichy, but that it was better preserved, smaller, and had some absolutely incredible stone carving. the best part was the room of a thousand pillars, which they called a museum and charged an entrance fee for. which was totally worth it, because it was lined with these pillars that were bursting out into life, what might have been simple ordinary supports of stone transformed into gods, mythical creatures, each one unique and elaborate and dynamic. we wandered among these, and finally out into the proper temple itself, amidst all the mess and movement of pujas going on, following the streams of people. across from the entrance to where the most holy of the shrines was (blocked to non-hindus), there was far below a tank dug and full of water, with a man-sized gold lotus ornamenting it. we walked around this, walked behind all the commotion into the lesser temples where a few straggling pilgrims also wandered, and then left, back to our hotel.

the next morning after a night of some rumbly tummy time among certain of our party, we collected ourselves as best we could and left madurai before the sun was full in the sky. i think we were ready for something different. no more of these dusty tamil nadu cities, and no more idly n pongal, at least for a little while. on to the cool of the hill station, the clean of the air, the calm of the forest. on, to kodaikanal.