About 4 hours down the mountain and across the plains in Madurai, a city of over a million people centred around a huge Hindu temple, Sri Meenakshi. The city has been in existence for about 2500 years. It traded with the Romans and is still a major centre for silks and cloth.
Madurai was my first experience with an Indian city and even though it's a relatively small one, it was overwhelming enough. Coming down from 2000 m or altitude into the heat of the plains was the first shock to my system. Even though it's a change
from 20 degrees to 30, it really affects you for the first day.
I've already discussed Indian traffic and I'd like to again. In all of Madurai I only saw one traffic light. This city has insane traffic, once it took us 5 minutes trying to cross a street before we decided it was impossible and tried another route. Driving in the city her
e is like driving anywhere else in the country but with 300 times the traffic. If you're driving north/south and you reach the equivalent of a red light (you can tell
this when going through the intersection would surely kill you) you stop. Then you inch farther and farther into the intersection until all the people cut off the t
raffic going east/west. At this point everyone north/south surges forward and the process repeats. The only merciful thing is that most streets were one-way. Another word about Indian traffic; everyone honks constantly and in the city the noise NEVER dies down. This makes for some difficult sleeping.
The main tourist attraction in Madurai is the Sri Meenakshi Temple built in the 16th century. I don't know a lot about Hinduism but the place seems mostly dedicated to Shiva, or Siva as they spell it. The temple has a thick outer wall with gopurams (tall, ornate and colourful towers) at each entrance, north, south, east, west. The gopurams are all different, one with only brightly painted columns on it, another covered with people with striped
pants. When you go inside the temple there is a courtyard with the Golden Lotus Tank (see picture) at the bottom. Lets just say that the only nice thing about the
tank is the gold lotus statue. The water is brown and smelly. Not even the Hindu would get close to it. The temple itself is a maze of halls with carvings of various gods and phallic symbols that the people pray at, smear with ghee (clarified
butter), turmeric and sandalwood paste. There are quite a few areas that are Hindu only and there is a temple elephant who will bless you (touch his trunk to your
forehead) for a coin. He looks quite bored but isn't chained to anything. His trunk is quite scratchy!
Near the temple is the Tirumalai Nayak Palace, a palace built by the king of the same name. Architecture here was similar to that of the Meenakshi Temple since it was built during the reign of the same king. The palace used to be much bigger but the son of Tirumalai Nayak
robbed 2/3rds to the building's stone to build his own temple in Trichy. Two rooms were open to the public, a huge open air court with ornate carvings of gargoyle-type creatures (in the picture) and a smaller dancing hall. The court was absolutely covered in columns and the scale of the place was awesome.
I also took my first auto rickshaw ride (the only way to travel in India) to
the outskirts of town to the Phu (pronounced,
unfortunately, as poo but means flowers) Bazaar. It was quite small and filthy but it was worth it for the portraits of the vendors, each one with such a
beautiful character about their face. You could tell most of them are having a hard life.
In between visiting these places we walked around the streets. This is never a boring activity here. You have to dodge beggars, traffic and poo of every sort. The streets smell like incense, stale pee or frying oil, depending on the moment. I got asked a lot 'What country?', people are just really curious when they see a foreigner.
Finding fabric was surprisingly hard, considering Madurai is famous for it. I learned that all the money is in saris so there is virtually no by-the-metre stuff around. The saris were mind boggling though. Incredibly ornate in any colour you can imagine, I have no idea how women ever choose one! I also learned about the 'matching cenre'. This is where women go, after buying a new sari, to buy fabric for their choli the little blouse that is worn underneath... usually. I've seen old women who just wear the long cloth part with nothing underneath. These matching centres have literally every colour of plain cotton man has ever invented. Again, how do you ever choose?
Other curious things I saw were a disembodied goat head at a butcher shop, complete with black fur and ears. A funeral procession, an ambulance crammed with people shouting, whistling and scattering flowers on the road. And quite a few people who are losing pigment in their faces. This is apparently a genetic condition that is quite popular in this area. One man on a bus looked Caucasian except for some blotches on his cheeks.
