Choose another map, showing:

• Sri Lanka
• India (south)
• Maldives
• India (east)
• India
• Asia
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Madurai

Dosa Festival

Having arrived at our pre-booked hotel at 2am, waking up the workers (who were all asleep on the floor in the reception) in the process, we got our room key, headed upstairs, pitched out mosquito nets and crashed out. I think it was about 12pm the next day when we finally stopped pressing snooze on our alarms and got out of bed. Our hotel was a bit of a dump to be honest, but at least they brought us dosas for breakfast!

Madurai - the "definitive" South Indian city - is home to the Meenakshi-Sundareswarar temple, one of the most famous temples in India, if not the world. It forms the centrepiece of the city, and is surrounded by a fort-like wall on each side - North, South, East and West. These walls are so high it makes it impossible to take a photograph of the temple from the outside. Each of the four walls has a huge tower (gopuram) built into it - the base of each gopuram is an entrance to the temple. When you see a picture of the 'temple' in guidebooks, you're almost certainly seeing one of these four gopurams. They are incredibly impressive. There is so much detail carved onto each one. You could study the details on each one for hours and hours. Unfortunately, the town is so densely built up in the area immediately surrounding the temple, it's really difficult to even get a decent photograph of the gopurams. The only way to get a really good shot is through one of the local shopkeepers (read: touts). And my God, there's swarms of them standing around outside, offering you the "perfect" view of the temple from the roof of their building, if only you'd care to step into their shop...on the condition that you spend a truckload of money on their wares before you leave. I was seriously tempted, just so i could get a decent shot...but resisted the urge in the end. Sadly it means all of my photographs are filled with trees, bushes, power cables...and all are so close up that they basically involve me craning my neck to the sky...i'm afraid you just can't get a real idea of what they are like from my pictures.

Still wary of falling into a temple-tourist-trap à la Mysore, we decided not to go inside until the evening, when it would be quieter and we'd be under the cover of darkness (stealth mode). Instead, we went to have a gander at the Gandhi museum. It's relatively small and mainly features thirty picture-screens with a brief written history of India, but it's pretty interesting. We spent an hour or so working our way through all the screens, whilst an orderly queue of schoolkids weaved it's way around us. The next room had some interesting artefacts - plates, spoons etc that Gandhi carried around with him on his travels - but the next room was the best. On one side, there is a case holding one of Gandhi's letters to Hitler, in which he wrote:

"It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?".

Finally, you go round the corner into a tiny little room, holding just one object in a glass case: the loincloth Gandhi was wearing when he was killed. It still has his bloodstains on it.

Leaving the museum, we were approached by a bloke with a cycle rickshaw. Caving into the desire to experience this little novelty, he sat in the back whilst the Boss worked up a sweat taking us across the city. I couldn't believe how much effort it required to go a relatively short distance - he must have been absolutely knackered by the end, dripping with sweat. Much respect to the guy for doing that day in and day out to earn a living.

As the evening wore on we decided it was time to explore the inside of the temple. Leaving our shoes at a little stall outside (marked as 'free' shoe-minding, it cost me 10 rupees), we walked under one of the fantastic gopurams, through a metal detector and into the temple. It was pretty spectacular inside, with many side rooms and corridors full of shrines. Sadly, being non-Hindus, we weren't allowed into most of these side rooms, but we were allowed to take pictures of the rest of the temple. Becaus it's indoors, it's really dark, although there's candles, flames etc dotted around lighting the place up. No matter how hard i tried, i couldn't get a decent picture inside the temple. I tried every setting i could think of to no avail. Taking pictures in the dark with the flash seems to result in pictures with lots of circular blobs ("ghosts"? Can any of you camera aficionados out there offer any advice on how to prevent this?). Using the night-setting works but everything has to be perfectly still (otherwise it comes out blurred), and with hundreds of people streaming past us down the corridors, that was never going to be an option. Madurai has been a bit of a write-off when it comes to decent photographs, which is a shame because there's some really good things here.

We wandered around the temple's many corridors and suddenly found ourselves face to face with an elephant - in the middle of the temple! Just sat there waiting with it's keeper. People would walk up to it, hold out their hand with a rupee in their palm, and the elephant would use it's trunk to pick up the coin, pass it to the keeper, and then pat the person on the head to say thanks! We watched for a while, and then as the temple started to close, the elephant was walked off down the corridor, presumably to wherever it lives.

The next day i was faced with something of a dilemma: i hadn't had any laundry done since Bangalore, so i was faced with the option of wearing dirty, sweaty, smelly t-shirts again, or joining Agent Dolac in shopping for some authentic garments. We popped into the first shop we saw and came out with a nice shirt each. Made from cotton, i think, although my textile-identifying skills have never been particularly good. They have long sleeves but are so wonderfully light to wear - i instantly felt a lot cooler (in terms of temperature, if not style) walking around in it. The only problem was that, with them being brand new, they have rather pronounced creases down the front and back, which we can't seem to get rid of. I guess we'll have to wash them...but until then, we've been walking around with these shirts that we've clearly just bought...a pair of walking tourist clichés, hah. Our pleastant shopping experince was somewhat spoiled when the guy who we'd just paid money to four our shirts sold us down the river to his tout friends over the road. We were told that our shirts just needed to go to the tailor over the road quickly to have the top bottom sewn on. We said we didn't mind it not being on, but were taken there anyway. When we got inside, they had us sit down and tried to sell us the most garish pair of trousers i have ever seen in my life - bright green, eugh! We walk into a bloke's shop without any coercion, spend good money on his goods, and that's the thanks we get! Infuriating.

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit

Photos / videos of "Dosa Festival":