January 23-26, 2014: Tiruvannamalai and Gingee

Early on the morning of the 23rd I returned to Vellore's fort, walking in front along its moat and eastern wall and then entering the gate, climbing the inner, higher wall, and walking along the circumference of the walls back to the entrance.  About 11 I caught a bus south to Tiruvannamalai, a two hour trip over 50 miles with rocky hills to the west.  Just west of Tiruvannamalai looms the 2600 foot high Mount Arunachala, maybe 2000 feet above the plains below, an extinct volcano seen as a lingam of Shiva.  On the plains at the mountain's eastern edge sits the huge Arunachaleswar Temple.  I passed this huge, high walled temple as I took an auto rickshaw to a nice hotel about a mile south of the temple and near the Ramana Ashram, very popular with westerners.

After lunch I went onto the peaceful grounds of the Ramana Ashram, founded in 1922 by an ascetic known as Sri Ramana.  He was born in 1879 and at age 16, living near Madurai to the south, had some sort of afraid-of-dying episode that led him to come to Tiruvannamalai, living at first at the temple and then eventually in caves on the mountainside from 1899 to 1922, when he established and moved to the ashram. The ashram has lots of photos of him, the earliest at age 21 and the latest just before his death in 1950.  He is almost always wearing what looks like a diaper and nothing else.  The room where he died is now a shrine with the date and time of his death noted.  Fairly tame peacocks and other birds almost the size of peacocks, but white, roam the grounds.  The pilgrims there were mostly western, some staying in the ashram but many staying outside. Outside are lodges, restaurants, internet cafes, and the like catering to westerners.  

From the back of the ashram a path leads up Mount Arunachala to the cave where he lived with his mother, who became one of his many devotees, from 1916 to 1922.  The path, a gentle climb of about 450 feet, passes through forest and red rocks, very pretty.  Near the cave you get a great view of the city and the temple below.  The cave is no longer just a cave, but a room or two built around the cave where people can come and meditate, and about  half a dozen westerners were silently sitting in the small area inside.  I looked around a bit and then sat on a rock with a great view of the town and temple in the late afternoon sun.   The temple covers almost 25 acres, with nine gopuras, the easternmost and highest almost 220 feet high, with thirteen levels, the first two of stone and the rest of brick and plaster.  All the gopuras are white, with just plaster on the high stories with no painting.  The temple consists of three concentric walled rectangles, with a sanctuary building at the very center.   On the way back to the ashram, just before sunset, I passed a group of westerners sitting on rocks facing the sunset and meditating, or some just sitting.  Many walk on the mountain barefoot, as the mountain is considered sacred.  I watched the sun set into the haze and then came back to the ashram, where an evening puja was being sung in the main hall, with different parts, and seating, for men and women.  I'd say the audience was at least half western.  

The next morning I walked along the busy road to the Arunachaleswar Temple.  I first reached its southwestern corner and then walked along its southern wall.  Carved nandis lay atop the high walls.  I took a photo of three pig tailed, school uniformed, but barefoot little girls.  They smiled and one said, "Welcome to India."  The southern gopura was open for entry to the temple, but I continued to the southeastern corner where men were bagging a big mound of yellow marigolds into burlap sacks.  The eastern entry to the temple, with the tallest gopura, is the main entry and I walked to the somewhat open area in front of it, filled with merchants and beggars, mainly of the beggars orange clad.  A large group of uniformed school girls of high school age arrived and lined up on the street.  Some of the Muslim girls were covered in black chadors. 

Mount Arunachala looms over the temple, its summit cloud covered this morning, though it soon cleared.  On the full moon in November or December a giant fire is lit on the summit, using a 100 foot long wick and something like 500 gallons of ghee.  Maybe a million pilgrims show up for this, circumambulating the mountain and some even climbing barefoot to the top.  I would like to see them carrying up all that ghee on the steep, rocky path to the top.  

The entrance gopura was built by the Vijayanagars, with wonderful sculpture on the stone lower part.  Inside the arch are 140 panels showing dance postures, some of which look impossible.  All the dancers are bare breasted, and I would have to say displaying the "well rounded breasts" favored by the ancient texts.  I wonder if it was the Victorian British who convinced the Indians that bare breasts were immodest. 

Inside the gopura is another of those Vijayanagar pillared halls, but locked up.  I looked around a bit and then entered the second walled enclosure, with smaller gopuras at its cardinal points.  They are thought to be 14th century. Just inside the gopura a small temple stands, and on the terrace brahmin priests were conducting some sort of puja.  Many pilgrims were crowding up to the sanctuary, but I couldn't see inside. Below this little temple many ghee lamps were aflame, some in little clay pots, others in half cocoanuts.  I watched for quite a while.

I then entered the third enclosure, with only one small gopura, at the eastern entrance.  I walked around the central sanctuary, which is thought to be, at least in part, from the 11th century, and on the way met up with an older Indian man from Hyderabad whom I had met the afternoon before on the slopes of Arunachala.  He led me into the sanctuary, open to non-Hindus, and even insisted on paying the 20 rupee fee for both of us to take the special entry, quicker than the 2 rupee ordinary entry, though the sanctuary was not crowded. Inside, metal bars were everywhere, to direct pilgrims when there are masses of them.  We wound our way to the central altar, with Shiva in a ring of fire and a brahmin priest to press white ash onto your forehead. Afterward, we wandered around and talked, visiting several other of the temples in the enclosure.  He was very interesting, and, among other things, explained the Telugu alphabet to me.  

On the way out, we stopped in the second rectangle and had some sweet pongal, a hot rice and sugar dish, and then walked to the now restored temple in the first enclosure where Sri Ramana had first stayed after arriving in Tiruvannamalai in 1896. Then it was in ruins and Sri Ramana is said to have meditated so deeply in an underground chamber that he didn't notice the insects and rats gnawing his flesh.  

The guy from Hyderabad left, but I stuck around some more, finding a very interesting wooden model of the temple and then again watching the pujas at the little temple just inside the second wall.  Priests were handing out some sort of rice offering to a sea of hands.  I watched a man prepare a lamp using a melon cut in half, sprinkled with red powder, and then filled with ghee.  He inserted white cotton wicks and then lit them. There were several other lamps like that, plus scores in cocoanuts and even more in little clay pots. 

About 12:30 they begin closing the big doors to the third enclosure and I headed out of the temple, getting a good vegetarian lunch for about a dollar in a restaurant just outside the eastern entrance.  After lunch I walked along the temple's high northern wall and then up a path that leads to the caves where Sri Ramana lived from 1899 until 1922.  The path is shorter but steeper than the one from the ashram.  Macaque monkeys appeared now and then on the trail.  I reached the cave, also now with rooms built in front of it, where he lived from 1899 to 1916.  Again, people were meditating inside.  A bit further up is the cave where he and his mother lived from 1916 to 1922, the one I had visited the afternoon before.  I found a rock nearby with a great view of the town and temple below and sat there for about two hours, with a few little walks around when sitting on a rock became a little too uncomfortable.  Towards sunset I walked back on the trail to the ashram.

The next morning at 8:30 I took a bus headed east for a day trip to Gingee, about 25 miles away.  Arriving at that small town about an hour later, the bus dropped me off in town and I had to walk out of town to the magnificent forts sited just west of town, the way we had come.  These forts, all connected by walls and the whole complex once called the "most famous fort in the Carnatic," date from the 15th and 16th centuries under the Vijayanagar Empire, though it seems the hills were fortified as early as the 13th century by local rulers.  In time the forts were taken over by the Nayaks, the Marathas, the Moguls, the Nawab of the Carnatic, and the French before the British East India Company took it in 1762.

The three hills were all fortified with walls linking them all, three miles in length and 60 feet wide in places. The walls remain and the flat space inside and between the rocky hills is filled with the remains of temples and palaces, and some rice paddies.  About 10 I began to climb the boulder covered hill to the northeast called Krishnagiri, a climb of about 350 to 400 feet.  I entered the walled enclosure on the top and spent almost two hours there, with great views in all directions, especially towards the buildings on the flat lands and the much higher and steeper fort topped hill called Rajagiri to the southwest.  Rajagiri has an almost vertical 500 foot high slope on its north side.  Inside Krishnagiri's walls are a couple of huge granaries, plus temples and palaces.  Few others were up there, which was nice.

I walked all around and then walked down about noon, passing some women harvesting rice, crossing the road from Tiruvannamalai, and then heading to the buildings on the flat lands with the steep Rajagiri in front of me.  I was able to buy another liter of water just before entering the three gates and passing the high walls that lead to the buildings on the plain below Rajagiri.  Just inside one of the gates I sat in the shade, resting against a pillar, and ate the box of cookies I had brought with me for lunch.  Inside, the most impressive building is the 90 foot high tower of the Kalyana Mahal, with arcades and other remains of the palace around it.  Nearby are more huge granaries, a tank of water surrounded by an arcade, a magazine, and some small pillared halls.

On its north side, Rajagiri has an almost 90 degree slope, impossible to climb,  On its southeastern side you can ascend through a boulder strewn slope, passing through two more gates at the foot of the slope.  Maybe 300 feet higher you reach another two gates at the top of the boulder strewn slope.  There are great views of the palace buildings below all the way up.  From there the path is more or less level as you wind your way around the almost vertical slope above you to the west side of the hill, passing temples and even a few caves with stone stairs leading down into them.

On the western side of Rajagiri you have another 350 feet or more to ascend to reach the top.  Five more gates have to be passed, with impressive walls.  The views are great and the second to last gate is reached after climbing a stairway built of stacked stones leading to a wooden plank walkway over a chasm.  This was a very well defended fort, with 13 gates on the way to the top.  As at Krishnagiri, at the top of Rajagiri are massive granaries, plus palaces and temples.  The views are great, though the atmosphere marred that afternoon by noisy adolescent Indian males, some throwing rocks at the macaques.  Nonetheless, I spent quite a while up there before starting down about 3:30, a beautiful walk down during which I could more readily appreciate the amazing fortifications than I did while huffing and puffing my way up.

Back on the flat lands I walked through the 13th and last gate and then a little further to the east to a huge Vijayanagar temple that I had been able to see from Rajagiri.  Its gopuras had stone lower stories with interesting bas reliefs.  The plaster on some of the higher stories had worn off, exposing the brick work.  The huge temple was almost deserted, a forest of pillars in places.  It is no longer used for worship and I was able to keep my sandals on while walking around.  From there I walked a little further east to a big gate in the fort walls, with a moat beyond the fort walls, and rice fields beyond the now dry moat.  I got back to the highway about 5, hoping to catch a bus back to Tiruvannamalai, but two sped by without stopping, so I walked into town and got a bus back about 5:30.  The orange orb of the setting sun hung low in the sky most of the journey and as we approached Tiruvannamalai the silhouette of Mount Arunachala appeared against the sky at dusk.

The next day was mostly a rest day.  It was Republic Day, with the big Republic Day parade in New Delhi on television.  I had watched the parade on television the past two years and enjoyed the pageantry and commentary, but had no television in my room this time.  Usually, I think it is a good thing not to have a television in my hotel room, because if I have one, other rooms will have one, and Indians are disposed to turn on their televisions as loud as possible and then leave the doors to their rooms open so all can hear.  I spent part of the day in an internet cafe and in the late afternoon spent some time at the ashram, watching the pilgrims, the peacocks, and the end of the day pujas.

January 20-22, 2014: Kanchipuram and Vellore

After eight days in Mamallapuram, I finally left just after noon on the 20th.  That morning I had slept late and walked to the beach about 8.  The sun was out and all the fishing boats had already come in. Only a few fishermen were still on the sand untangling fish from their nets.  I walked along the beach and then along the huge breakwater around the Shore Temple to get to the beach just south of the temple.  Hundreds of Indians were already on that very dirty part of the beach.  A lone outcrop of rock with ancient bas reliefs on it stood out from the sand.

From Mamallapuram I headed by bus inland, northwest about 40 miles to Kanchipuram, the ancient capital of the Pallavas.  The two hour trip passed through flat, green, rice growing terrain, but with small hills along the way.  Kanchipuram has something like 200,000 people and is considered one of India's seven holiest cities, with 70 or so temples.  It was the Pallava capital from the 4th to 9th centuries and continued to flourish thereafter under succeeding dynasties.

After lunch, I rented a bike (five rupees, less than ten cents, an hour) and about 4 biked just outside the western end of town to the Kailasanatha Temple, built by the Pallavas in the early 8th century.  The tower over the sanctuary and some portions of the walls have been excessively restored, but there are many original parts filled with interesting sculpture and bas reliefs.  The inner side of the wall surrounding the sanctuary has 58 shrines all along it filled with figures from Shiva stories.  On some figures plaster, which covered the stone, remains and there are even traces of paint.  Many stone nandis, Shiva's bull, sit in the courtyard.  Non-Hindus cannot enter the sanctuary itself.

I spent about an hour and a half looking around and then biked back into town and to the huge Ekambaresvara Temple, with a southern gopura (entrance tower) almost 200 feet high.  Most of this temple dates from the 16th and 17th centuries, but some portions from Pallava and Chola times.  I walked through the large courtyard to the central Thousand Pillared Hall (supposedly with only 540 pillars, which is still quite a lot) next to a large tank full of water.  It was getting dark as I walked first through the entrance portico and then into the long dark (but lit with electric lights) pillared corridors of the temple.  Again, the sanctuary at the center is closed to non-Hindus, but I walked to a courtyard near the back with a sacred mango tree in it.

My guidebooks have two different stories about the origin of this temple.  One is that Shiva, in his form as Kameshvara, the Lord of Desire, married a local goddess named Kamakshi under the mango tree.  Another version is that it celebrates Shiva's consort Parvati making a lingam of earth and as penance worshiping it despite a flood sent to test her.  The sanctum is said to contain the lingam of earth.

I thought this temple might be busier at end of day, and there were quite a few worshipers, but not large crowds, there.  The altars at the back tended by bare chested brahmin priests weren't very busy.  The sanctuary was busier.  I biked back in the dark to my hotel sometime after 6:30.  That night as I was trying to sleep a large group of pilgrims noisily arrived to spend the night outside in the courtyard next to my room. They banged cooking pots and constantly operated a noisy old fashioned water pump right next to my window.  Fortunately, I was able to change rooms.

The next morning about 8:30 I biked back to Kailasanatha just to see it in the morning sunlight.  Coming back into town, I passed a man fishing with a long net in a pond.  I returned to the Ekambareshvara Temple and looked around until around 11.  As I was standing looking into the sanctuary, an angry brahmin priest, thinking I was taking a photo, which is not allowed, started yelling at me.  These old brahmin priests can be quite cantankerous, although many are friendly.  They are always much lighter skinned than the ordinary population.  Tamils are especially dark skinned for Indians.  The theory is that Tamils and other relatively dark skinned Indians are the descendants of the Indus River civilizations of 4000 years ago, pushed south by the invasion of the lighter skinned Aryans something like 3500 years ago, who subsequently formed the priestly and warrior castes.

From there I biked to a nearby, smaller, almost deserted, old temple under a grove of trees and then eventually to the Kamakshi Amman Temple, originally Pallava but greatly modified in the 14th and 17th centuries.  The sanctuary is closed to non-Hindus, but a painted elephant stood just inside the entrance bestowing blessings to all who would offer a coin, which she would grab with her trunk, bestow the blessing with her trunk on top of the head of the offeror, and then give the coin to her handler.

I walked around the courtyard, passing a large tank full of very green water, and entered a pillared hall, with beautifully carved pillars covered with figures.  A gray haired, gap toothed man and his wife, with a small girl with them, asked me to take their photos.  They were very friendly.  As I was leaving the elephant's handler was feeding her handfuls of some sort of food, dropping it into her trunk.  A bunch of friendly, black clad, bare chested male pilgrims asked for photos.  The gates to the temple closed about 12:30, but I stood outside watching the pilgrims leave, passing the beggars and a cow at the entrance.  Stalls of flower sellers stood all around.

After lunch I biked around town, going to the post office and searching for an internet place, before heading a couple of miles through the busy city streets to the Varadaraja Perumal Temple on the southeast outskirts of town.  Biking on the streets of an Indian town is a little harrowing.  People pay attention, but there is a lot of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, and there is always a bike or motorcycle, and sometimes even a car, coming along on the wrong side of the street.  So you have to pay attention and go slowly.

Inside the high entrance gopura of this walled Vijayanagar era temple is a 96 pillared marriage hall with superbly carved pillars, now marred by an ugly metal fence put up between the outside pillars.  At least half the pillars have figures of men, and even some women, mounted on rearing horses.  Other pillars have other very interesting and well done figures on them.  Again, non-Hindus cannot enter the building with the sanctuary, but I did see a procession of bare chested men in dhotis leave it carrying idols on palanquins. They circled the sanctuary building and then entered another, smaller, temple.  Lots of brahmins wearing dhotis and their brahmin threads (a sort of cord worn only by brahmins) across their bare chests came and went.  I wandered around, taking photos of pilgrims.  A large group, probably from Maharashtra (the men were almost all wearing the distinctive "Gandhi topi," worn by Nehru, which I saw a lot of in Maharashtra) came through.

The pillars of a temple just outside the sanctuary are covered with Krishna stories, including him stealing the clothes of gopis (girls tending cows) while they are bathing.  One pillar depicted the oddest act of coitus I have seen yet on an Indian temple, and that is saying a lot.  The woman was bent over backwards, with her belly to the sky and both her hands and her feet on the ground.  The man, with one hand inserting his penis, was blowing a long curved horn, which he held with his other hand.  I biked back to the town center before dark and stopped at one more ancient temple, but it soon was dark, so I headed to my hotel.

The next morning I did bike back to that temple, the Vaikunta Perumal Temple, built by the Pallavas in the 8th century after the Kailasanatha Temple.  The sanctuary, with a pyramidal tower on top, is closed to non-Hindus, but the cloisters around the sanctuary can be visited.  The cloisters have lion pillars (pillars with carved lions on the lower portions of the pillars) and panels of bas reliefs featuring hundreds, probably more than a thousand, figures.  Many are badly worn, but others not.  The prevailing theme seems to be the battles between the Pallavas and their enemies the Chalukyas.

I left Kanchipuram shortly before 11 on a bus headed west to Vellore, about 40 miles and less than two hours away.  We passed by the town of Arcot, where Clive first made a name for himself in the Carnatic Wars.  Vellore is situated below rocky hills and has a large hospital, the Christian Medical Center Hospital, in the center, founded originally as a one room dispensary in 1900 by an American missionary named Ida Scudder.  The street in front of the hospital is called Ida Scudder Road.  It took me a while to find a hotel with a vacancy, as many were filled with patients and their families.

After a chicken biryani lunch at a friendly little Muslim restaurant, I walked to Vellore's huge 16th century fort, with two sets of walls (with a circumference of, I think, about a mile) and a moat in front, only partly now filled with water.  Built by the Vijayanagar Empire, the fort passed into the hands of the sultan of Bijapur in the middle of the 1600's, the Marathas in 1676 and the Moguls in 1708 before the British occupied it in 1762.  Inside is a church and a museum of middling interest and a large Vijayanagar era temple.  Just inside the outer wall of the temple is another spectacular pillared hall, again with riders on rearing beasts.  The beasts seem to be of three kinds:  horses, lions or perhaps the fanged yalis, and some sort of animals with lion or dragon heads but with elephant trunks and tusks.  Inside the second enclosure brahmin priests were conducting pujas, religious ceremonies, at several altars.  I watched several of them, with the priests pouring milk and yogurt over the idols and then washing them off with water, while a drummer and an oboist played. I looked carefully and I am fairly sure it was an oboe and not a traditional Indian instrument.  After the ceremonies, the priests carefully dressed their idols and then applied little circles of orange clay here and there on them.  In this temple non-Hindus are allowed into the sanctuary, so I went in.  Afterwards I walked along the east side of the outer fort walls just before dark and then returned to the Muslim restaurant for another biryani for dinner.  About half way through my meal the waiter brought me an extra little piece of chicken.  

January 12-19, 2014: Mamallapuram

I left Chennai on the 12th, after an idli breakfast served on a banana leaf in a little restaurant and then a half hour bus ride to the bus station.  The bus station was the picture of confusion and I was given several conflicting directions on where to find the bus to Mamallapuram on the  coast about 30 miles south of Chennai.  I finally found the right bus, which left about 10:30, taking two hours to reach Mamallapuram, about half that time still is the city and suburbs of Chennai.  I was amazed by the huge number of billboards and posters featuring Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.  It was good finally to reach rural areas. Nearing Mamallapuram I even had a few views of the blue sea from the bus.

I found a very comfortable hotel, with a big room, a large and comfortable bed with a mosquito net, and hot water for a little less than ten dollars a night.  (The rupee was at 62 to the dollar when I arrived in India, though it is now at about 61.5.  It was about 44 to the dollar when I began this long series of travels in India in 2010.  I think it was about 8 to the dollar when I was first in India in 1979.)

Mamallapuram, which was called Mahabalipuram when I was first here in 1979, has utterly changed from my first visit.  I remember just one simple little hotel.  Now there are scores, both upscale and budget, and lots of restaurants.  Lots of tourists, too, some of whom apparently spend months here.  In fact, I believe I may be below the median age of the western tourists here.  They are generally an old bunch, with lots of groups coming through.  But an older profile is true even for the tourists staying here.  I remember that when I first traveled across Asia from Istanbul to India and Nepal in 1979, it was the 30 somethings who were the old guys.  I remember just one guy older than that, a 60 year old guy named Bill whom I traveled with from Erzurum in eastern Turkey to the Iranian border.

Mamallapuram is just a small town, with a population of 12,000 or so, though on some days it must get at least that many tourists.  I had lunch and then walked to the beach; with many colorful fishing boats at rest upon the sand.  I walked back to my hotel and sat on its roof top in the shade until about 4:30, when I returned to the beach.  I walked south along the beach, with lovely white sand but, as with all Indian beaches, dirty, towards the 8th century Shore Temple.  Mamallapuram was one of my favorite spots when I first visited India in 1979 and the Shore Temple, sticking out into the sea at water's edge, was a particularly romantic spot.  Since then, its romance has been mostly destroyed.  The authorites have built a huge breakwater around it and a high green chain link fence, destroying the ambience.  I suppose they did that for preservation's sake, but the temple did survive without such a monstrous breakwater for 13 centuries.  Other than the Chinese, noboby is better than Indians at uglifying beautiful places.  I walked to the end of the breakwater, outside the fence, and then walked back the way I had come.  The cool wind off the sea was lovely and the sea very blue.  A few fishing boats were out on the water and a moon a few days short of full was rising.

I had been told that there was a month long dance festival going on in town, with free performances on a stage a little west of the Shore Temple.  I got there about 6:30 and stayed until the end of the excellent performances at almost 9.  I missed the earlier folk dances, but saw two troupes performing the classic Tamil dance style called Bharatanatyam.  This classic dance style has been revived over the past two centuries and is based on the ancient dances of temple dancers called devadasis, whose dances were derived from an treatise written more than 2000 years ago.  It displays spiritual and not erotic love and emphasizes not only movement but also facial expressions. Plus the women are beautifully dressed in very colorful saris, with a sort of fan shaped or accordian style garment connecting the two pantlegs.  (And apparently the dancers today wear a lot more clothes than they did in ancient times.)  They are heavily made up, and adorned with jewels everwhere.  They also wear a mass of little bells around each ankle and paint not only their finger nails, but the top part of their fingers bright red, with a big red spot painted on each palm.  Feet, which are bare, are also largely painted red.  I really enjoyed the performances and the locale was lovely under the moon with a cool breeze from the sea.  Unfortunately, the backdrop displays not only the Shore Temple and an elephant bas relief, but also the pudgy faced Jayalalithaa, so you have to look at her all during the performance.  I ate dinner afterwards.  Restaurants are relatively expensive here, but good.  I'd been in India only a few days and already was happy to forego Indian food for western fare.

The next morning I walked to the beach about 6:30, sunrise.  The sun, however, was hidden by the high, dense bank of clouds over the sea.  Few boats were on the beach.  I walked along the beach, trying to avoid the piles of human excrement along the beach, always a feature on Indian beaches.  Eventually, fishing boats began to return to the beach through the surf.  Some fishermen came in paddling furiously on little rafts of perhaps six pieces of timber lashed together with rope.  The bigger boats had long tailed motors.  Beaching, they would drag their boats up, hall out their nets onto the sand, and begin plucking out the entangled fish as they unwound their long nets.  Very small fish were thrown away and gobbled up by waiting crows.  The largest fish I saw entangled in the nets was less than a foot long.  I left sometime after 8 and by then the sun had just come up for good.  There had been brief sightings of it between the clouds before then.

I had breakfast and then about 9:30 walked to the rocky outcrop of hills, rising to at most perhaps a hundred feet above sea level, at the town's western edge.  I meant to get there earlier but was delayed by the activity on the beach.  Mamallapuram was the port of the Pallava kingdom with its capital at Kanchipuram about 35 miles inland to the northwest. The Pallavas ruled northern Tamil Nadu from the 4th to the 9th centuries and reached their height in the 7th and 8th centuries, building southern India's first stone temples.  The outcrop of low, rocky hills at the edge of town has several temples and rock carvings.  The best date from the reign of the king called Mamalla (which means "wrestler"), who ruled from 630 to 668.  Some date from the reigns of two of his successors, up to about 730.

The most impressive rock carving is located on a giant rock face about 23 feet high and about 96 feet wide. About 150 figures are carved in bas relief, including two huge elephants.  The subject of the ensemble is in dispute.  An emaciated figure stands on one foot with his arms raised, doing penance to the larger figure of Shiva nearby.  A cleft is the rock is carved with nagas (snakes gods and goddesses with multiple hoods, symbolizing water).  Apparently, at one time water did flow down this cleft from above.  Some see the emaciated figure as Arjuna doing penance by the banks of the Ganges to be granted Shiva's bow, which can fire a continuous stream of arrows.  Others see the figure as Bhagiratha doing penance and being granted the gift of the Ganges falling to the earth to wash away the ashes and sins of his ancestors.  In any event, it is a wonderful ensemble of figures.  Under the belly of the biggest elephant are several baby elephants.  Nearby a cat stands on his hind legs mimicking Arjuna or Bhagiratha doing pennance, with rats kneeling before him. Lions, deer, monkeys, and birds are depicted, as is Surya the sun god, Chandra the moon god, dwarves attending Shiva, hunters, and several flying figures of men and women.  Along the banks of the Ganges are a man with  water pot on his shoulders and another wringing out a garment.  Nearby are three sitting men with their heads chopped off.  The speculation is that they depicted Mamalla and his father and grandfather, and were decapited when the Palavas' enemies, the Chalukyas of present day Karnataka, captured Mamallapuram in 674.

The rocky hills contain several mandapas, which are shallow halls cut into the rock.  Nearby is one with Krishna depicted raising a mountain to protect people from a heavy rain threatening a Noah style covering of the earth.  The figures are again very graceful and naturalistic.  Part of the ensemble shows a man milking a cow, while the cow licks its calf.  The cow's tail is raised, which is what cows do when they urinate or defecate.  The sculptor was discrete enough not to depict the result of the tail raising.

After the Krishna Mandapa, I walked next to the Ganesh Ratha, a temple carved out of a single big boulder, perhaps 20 feet high.  It stands all alone.  Up the slope is the Varaha Mandapa, with four panels of carvings, two depicting avatars of Vishnu, Varaha the boar rescuing Prithvi (the Earth) from the sea and Vamana the dwarf expanding to colossol size to take back the earth and the cosmos from a demon.  Other panels show fearsome Durga, an avatar of Shiva's consort Parvati, and Vishnu's consort Lakshmi being bathed by elephants.  Above that mandapa are the remains of a temple from the much later Vijayanagar Empire, centered in Hampi in Karnataka.  You can see the sea from that temple.  A couple of other mandapas have no sculpture.  In fact, it seems almost every temple is unfinished.  Even the huge bas relief on the rock face has its lower left portion unfinished.

Further south is a modern light house on a rock and nearby an ancient structure though to be a 7th or 8th century light house.  There are good views from each.  Below the ancient light house is another mandapa with excellent panels on each end, one showing the battle between Durga and the buffalo demon Mahishasura while the other shows Vishnu asleep under a five hooded serpant.

I walked back the way I had come and then went further north, passing a huge boulder standing alone on a rocky ridge and known as Krishna's butterball.  It does look very round from one angle, but irregular from other angles.  A little further one were two other mandapas, one with three sanctuaries with carvings of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.

I spent about four hours wandering through this rocky outcrop of low hills.  In 1979 I remember pretty much having the place to myself, but this day there were hundreds of tourists, both foreign and Indian.

I had lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon in an internet cafe.  Before 5:30 I headed to the dance site and got a front row seat.  The Indian guy sitting next to me proudly told me his 12 year old daughter, who has been studying dance since she was 5, would be dancing that night.  But folk dances came first, and they were quite primitive compared to the Bharatanatyam.  In fact, they reminded me of African tribal dance.  The two hour long Bharatanatyam dances, however, were particularly elegant.  First, an extremely good, but rather (how can I put this politely?) large woman danced several solo pieces.  It appears Indian dancers don't aspire to the prima ballerina physique, although I have also read that the ideal Bharatanatyam dancer is youthful and beautiful with "well rounded breasts."  Next a troupe of about twelve girls, tall and short, performed.  They are all students of a master dancer and were very good.  The music at these dance performances was sometimes taped, but more often live, with four to eight musicians and singers seated at the far left of the stage.  They featured drums, a flute, a violin (which looked like a western violin and was called a "violin" while all the other insturments had Tamil names), small cymbals  maybe two inches in diameter, and for one performance I remember, a veena, a traditional Indian stringed instrument that looks to me something like a sittar.

The next morning I got out about 7 to walk to the rocky outcrop before too many tourists arrived.  However, this was the first day of the three day harvest festival of Pongal, and in front of many thresholds of houses in town were very colorful and elaborate Pongal rangoli.  Rangoli are drawings made in the morning with some sort of chalky powder, usually white, in front of thresholds to guard against evil spirits.  The ones for Pongal here in Mamallapuram, however, were particularly elaborate with many colors of powder and intricate designs.  Featured prominently in almost all, however, were pots of rice boiling over and sugar cane stalks. The first thing you do early in the morning on the first day of Pongal is boil rice and milk in a new pot.  I walked around town looking at all the beautiful and interesting rangoli.  Some were still being made, and it was very interesting to watch the women making them by expertly dropping the colored powder into place.

I spent about an hour looking at all the rangoli and by the time I reached the rocky outcrop at the town's western end, there were many tourists.  Pongal, I've been told, is Mamallapuram's busiest period, flooded with Indian tourists from nearby villages.  I spent a little while enjoying looking at the huge rock face carving of the Ganges and then went to breakfast.  I spent pretty much the rest of the day reading newspapers and my guidebooks and at an internet cafe, avoiding the crowds.

Before 5:30 I did make my way to the dance venue, got another front row seat, and stayed until it ended three hours later.  An almost full moon rose above on a lovely evening.  The first performance, by a folk troupe, was again very primitive, like the night before, with lots of drum beating and line dancing.  The second performance featured several pieces performed by a woman who has been studying Bharatanatyam for 40 years.  Out of breath between pieces, she nonetheless took a microphone and explained the subjects of her dances.  She explained that Bharatanatyam derives its name from bhavam, meaning "expression,"  ragam meaning "melody," and thalam meaning "rhythm."  Natyam means "dance."  She was an excellent dancer.  The third hour featured a group of girls, students, who were rather amateurish, though one older, taller one, was very good.

The next morning I was out about 7:30,  hoping to see cows with painted horns.  The second day of Pongal is devoted to caring for livestock, and cows are fed special foods and have their horns painted bright colors. However, none of the several cows I saw on my way to the rocky outcrop had painted horns.  I walked through those low, rocky hills until about 10.  Even early, there were lots of Indian tourists.  Because of the big crowds I spent the rest of the day reading and at an internet cafe.  My hotel had a very nice little courtyard shaded with cocoanut trees and nearby is a very good restaurant run by a French expatriate. There are lots of French tourists here, mostly elderly or at least middle aged.

The dance performance started earlier that evening, at 5, and I got there in time again to get a front row seat. Another rather primitive, drum banging folk troupe came first, followed by a young and very pretty Bharatanatyam soloist.  A group of dancers, including her, came next, followed by a performance by about six older Bharatanatyam dancers   A full moon, or nearly full, came up.  A puppet show came next, but wasn't very interesting, so I left part way through even though a final Bharatanatyam performance remained. Lots of Indian kids had gathered for the puppet show, but there wasn't much laughter from the audience.

I was out the next morning about 7:30, the third and final day of Pongal.  I walked to the rocky outcrop west of town.  Trash, left over by all the Indian tourists from the day before, lay all around, even inside temples. And there were already lots of Indian tourists.  The third day of Pongal is meant for family gatherings and outings and is supposed to be Mamallapuram's busiest day.  (I later saw a photo in the newspaper of Chennai's beach with a massive crowd on the third day of Pongal.  A temporary fence was erected to prevent them from going into the sea, since in the past so many have drowned.)

I visited the temples I had been to before and then searched for three rathas (temples said to be in the shape of wooden chariots) further to the west.  This area was almost devoid of tourists and I finally found the three rathas, carved out of single boulders perhaps 20 feet in diameter.  Neither of them seemed completely finished and one had lots of crude scrape marks on it.  I wandered around the rocky outcrops in this area, lower than those to the east.  A pond filled with while lotuses stood beneath some partially quarried rocks with very straight edges, some of the sharp edges with the little notches made to help break the rock.

On my way back to breakfast, I stopped and watched a bare chested man applying a sort of orange clay to a two foot or so high Ganesh (the elephant headed son of Shiva) carved onto a low rocky outcrop.  He daubed the clay onto twenty or so coin sized locations and a couple of larger ones. Next he put a little dot of red powder into the middle of each orange clay circle.  He drapped a garland of yellow marigolds over the bas relief and then placed some sweets and pieces of coconut meat, along with two small bananas, one of which he partially peeled, in front of the idol.  He lit a handful of incense sticks and stuck them in the dirt.  I was impressed when he picked up his litter, the pieces of paper and plastic that some of his offerings had come in, and placed them in a plastic bag.   Then he threw the plastic bag a short distance away.  Having finished his elaborate preparations, he then prayed before the idol and walked around it several times before heading off.  He didn't seem to mind me, his only audience, watching and taking photos.

I made it back for a late breakfast, after 10:30, and spent the day afterward reading and at an internet cafe. Before 5 I made it to the dance venue.  For the first time, it was crowded early, with Indians, and I had to settle for a third row seat.  A folk troupe was already performing and they were more interesting than the previous ones.  Two great big guys in dhotis blew very long horns, perhaps four feet long, and there was the obligatory drumming.  A theme of this troupe was balancing acts, with girls with pots on their heads stacked high with elaborate depictions of birds trying not to lose their pots as they balanced themselves on various things placed before them.  A tall man performed all sorts of balancing feats.  At one  point a girl stuck a cucumber into her mouth  while a blindfolded guy with a large knife approached and sliced it in half without disfiguring her.

Next came a woman and man from Odisha perfornimg Oddissi dances, followed by three troupes of Bharatanatyam dancers, from Chennai, Kanchipuram, and finally Mamallapuram itself.  In the first troupe danced both men and women, the first time I have seen Bharatanatyam danced by men.  The last group, from Mamallapuram was the reason for the big crowds, as the town turned out to see its own.  There were lots of guys taking photos up in front, unconcerned about those behind them.  Some of the little girls, maybe 5 to 7 years old, were cute, but the group was pretty amateurish.  The crowd was noisy and I left before the performance ended.

The next morning I walked to the rocky outcrop of hills about 8.  An immense amount of trash covered the area, left by the thousands of Indians visiting on the third day of Pongal the day before.  There were considerably fewer Indian tourists this morning compared to the days before.  I wandered around and found a couple of sculptures I had missed before, including a carving of a free standing lion, called the Lion Throne, and a bas relief on a big rock of elephants and other animals.  By the time I started back about 9:30, woman sweepers were dustily sweeping all the trash into piles.

After breakfast and reading the newspaper, I spent some time in an internet cafe, had lunch, visited a very poor sculpture museum not even worth the five rupee admission charge, and then got a haircut for 100 rupees, my first haircut in more than two months.

Before 5 I again made my way to the dance venue and got a front row seat.  The crowd was much smaller than the evening before.  That night's performance lasted almost four hours, with four Bharatanatyam performances.  The first two were soloists, first a rather hefty woman who was nevertheless a good dancer. The second was younger, but still chubby, but also very good.  She portrayed five of the incarnations of Vishnu, the fish (his first incarnation), Narashima the half man, half lion, Vamana the dwarf, and then Rama and Krishna.  Next came a mediocre group of school girls, perhaps twenty of them, though one of them, the tallest and perhaps oldest, was very good.  Finally, after much of the small crowd had left, performed a soloist said to be the great granddaughter and granddaughter of famous dancers.  She was wonderful, the best dancer I've seen here.  Both her movements and facial expressions were fascinating, and she gave very good explanations of the stories of her dances before she performed them.  One long dance she performed, about a gopi (milkmaid) distraught at not gaining Krishna's love, was just mesmerizing.

The next morning I finally made my way to the southern edge of the town and to the Five Rathas, temples and animal statues hewn out of boulders.  These temples were covered with sand until discovered by the British about 200 years ago.  The previous temples and sculptures I had visited in Mamallapuram can be seen without charge, but getting close to the Five Rathas and the Shore Temple require a 250 rupee entrance fee, so I put them off until after the Pongal deluge.  I got to the fenced enclosure with the Five Rathas about 7:30 and had the place almost to myself for the first half hour or so.  These five little temples were cut from an outcrop of rocks with the workmen working from the top down.  They date from the 7th century, Mamalla's reign, and are some of the first stone temples in southern India.  Previously, temples had been made of wood or bricks or other material.  Incomplete, they are called rathas, which means chariots, because they are said to have been designed after wooden chariots, but I don't see that.  No wheels are depicted and to me they look more like temples than chariots. The five of them are of different sizes and structures and form a very nice ensemble.  They range from about  one story in height to three.  One of them has a roof reminiscent of thatch.  Three of them have large animals carved out of stone next to them, including a lion, a beautifully done elephant, and Shiva's bull mount Nandi.  Some of the  temples have figures carved on them, including the half Shiva, half Parvati  figure.  I spent about two hours there.  By the time I left, the compound was filled with hundreds of tourists.

Walking back to my hotel, I passed another large bas relief on two rock faces with a cleft between them.  Perhaps as many as a hundred figures are depicted, though the qualitiy is not as good as the bigger bas relief depicting the Ganges a little further north.  Many of the figures appear unfinished or eroded.  Elephants are again featured, along with many of the figures in the larger bas relief, including an emaciated man standing on one foot, holding his arms up to do penance to Shiva beside him.

I had a late breakfast about 11 and didn't get going again until after 4 when I walked along the beach to the Shore Temple compound and entered it.  I spent almost two hours there, until about 6.  The temple is thought to date from the 7th century and then have been rebuilt in the early 8th century.  It is considered south India's first temple made of blocks of stone, and the culmination of Pallava temple design.  It has two towers, the highest maybe 50 feet high, with a smaller one to the west.  The carvings are much weathered by the sea and the wind over the centuries.  It has three sanctuaries, two for Shiva at the east and west ends, with a reclining Vishnu in a sanctuary in between.  There were quite a few tourists, mostly Indian, wandering around while I was there.  I heard one guide say to his client, as they stood at the eastern end of the temple, that in 1974 his brother had caught a fish from there.  Now the sea, behind that awful breakwater, is hundreds of feet away.  In fact, you can't even see it from the temple.

I made it to the dance venue about 6 and got a second row seat.  A folk troupe, which did a variety of mildly interesting dances, was just starting.  Next followed a young woman soloist performing Bharatanatyam, who was very good.  Finally, an ensemble of about twenty students performed Bharatanatyam dances, and they, too, were very good, especially the older dancers.  They were very colorful.  The performance lasted until about 9, so it was another late dinner for me.

The next morning I walked again to the rocky outcrop at the town's edge soon after 7.  The sky was cloudy, and not just over the sea.  As I wandered around revisiting the temples the rain started.  It rained for about fifteen minutes, five of them pretty hard.  I sheltered in a mandapa.

After breakfast, I rented a bike, for all of a dollar and a quarter a day, and about 10:30 started pedaling north on the coast road to the Tiger Cave, three miles from Mamallapuram.  It took me about 20 minutes to get there on the flat road and was not a bad ride once I got past the heavy congestion of the town.  The Tiger Cave is a mandapa cut into a long outcrop of rock maybe 20 feet high.  Around the cell in the center is a ring of eleven giant heads not of tigers but of lions, or rather the mythical fanged lions called yalis.  It is quite a wonderful site, with that ring of giant yali heads.  To the left on the same rock face are two much smaller cells with elephant heads depicted underneath them.  A bit to the north is another mandapa cut into another rock face, with a very nice bas relief on a small stone in front of Durga on her lion with her forces fighting the bull demon Mahishasura and his forces.  Little dots of red powder covered the bas relief.  The beach is just to the east, and as always in India was filty.  Down the coast I could see the Shore Temple barely sticking out from its massive breakwater.

I got back to town about 12:30.  After lunch I found the shop of a Kashmiri guy (Kashmiris can be found selling their wares at almost all the big tourist spots in India), a friend of a friend of mine.  He was able to direct me to the spot where the hotel where I had stayed in 1979 (I had its name from an old aerogram) was located.  I stopped by and was told it was torn down two years ago, replaced by a much larger hotel, with its name changed fro Mamalla Lodge to Mamalla Inn.

I made my way to the dance venue before 5 for my final night of dance and again got a front row seat.  A folk troupe came first, again somewhat primitive with drum beating and balancing acts.  This time a blindfolded guy with a knife sliced bananas (rather then cucumbers) inserted into the mouths of two other guys.  A  group of five young women from Hyderabad performed Bharatanatyam next and they were very good.  They were followed by three women and two men dancing together and they, too, were very good. Finally came a troupe of about twelve girl students who performed a dance based on the Ramayama. Despite some of them being very young, they were good dancers and very entertaining.

January 8-11, 2014: Mandalay to Chennai

I finally left Burma on the 8th, flying out of Mandalay 14 days after the time permitted by my visa.  I had planned to leave earlier than the 8th, but when booking my flights on the internet in Bagan about the third night I was there, the earlier flights were either quite expensive (because of the Christmas-New Year's tourist deluge, I suppose) or not available.  Plus, I wanted to fly from Mandalay to Bangkok and then Bangkok to Chennai in India on the same day.  Leaving on the 8th, however, gave me plenty of time to see Bagan and Mandalay.

Air Asia provided a free shuttle bus from the city center to the airport, which is a good thing as the airport is almost 30 miles south of the city.  The bus left about 9 and took about an hour to reach the airport.  For a short while it traveled on the new four lane, almost deserted highway that runs from Mandalay to Yangon.  A mileage sign indicated 366 miles to Yangon.  The immigration staff at the airport didn't seem the least upset at my overstaying the period of stay allowed by my visa.  One guy filled out a form for me and I was charged $3 a day for my 14 days of overstay, so $42 in all.  My $91 flight to Bangkok was full and left at 12:45.  As we flew southeast towards Bangkok, I could see the deserted new highway below and soon we were over the mountains.  The only feature I recognized was the Salween River in its mountainous gorge.

About a flight of an hour and twenty minutes we landed in a very hazy Bangkok.  My flight to Chennai did not leave for more than five and a half hours and I was happy to sit and wait.  My ribs were a bit better, but still hurt.  Air Asia uses Bangkok's old airport and appears to have a very big operation there.

My $154 flight from Bangkok heading almost due west to Chennai left at 8:15 in the evening and took three hours, arriving at 9:45 in Chennai (in a time zone one and a half hours earlier than Bangkok).  It took a while to change some money at the airport before taking a taxi to a hotel where I had reserved a room via the internet.  The smoggy air on the way made me cough, which hurt my ribs.  I checked in and took a cold water bucket bath, not too bad, as Chennai is further south than Mandalay, at about 13 degrees north latitude versus between 21 and 22 degrees.  I got to bed after midnight and slept under a fan for the first time in weeks.

It was past 9 the next morning when I finally left the hotel, wearing shorts for the first time since mid December and searching for an ATM, which took some time.  It is much cooler here now than in it was when I was here in late March last year.  The newspapers have been showing highs of about 86 or 88 degrees and lows of 68 or 70.  As always upon arrival in India, I was struck by the filth of the streets.  Not that Burma was spotlessly clean, just the opposite, but India seems to take filth to a whole new dimension.  I remember somewhere in Burma seeing a sign proclaiming "Raise Your Country's Grace By Cleaning."  Odd that it was in English.

Chennai, called Madras until 1997, has almost seven million people and is the capital of Tamil Nadu, with about 75 million people, thus more populous than any nation in Europe save Russia.  Tamil Nadu is the heart of India's Dravidian south, very different from the north.  When I arrived in Chennai in late March last year, the weather was heating up and I had less than two months left on the period of stay allowed by my visa, so I decided to postpone traveling in Tamil Nadu and Kerala for the time being and instead fly to the Andaman Islands and thence to Calcutta and onto the Himalayas.

The last couple of years I have arrived in India in November, but Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the two southern states I have yet to visit, are hit by the northeast monsoon from October to December.  This monsoon is quite distinct from the main southwest monsoon which wells up from the Arabian Sea and hits India from June to September or October.  The northeast monsoon proceeds from the Bay of Bengal and brings rain just to Tamil Nadu and Kerala.  So I decided to travel in Burma first and delay my arrival in southern India until late December, delayed until early January by my overstay in Burma.  I have heard that the northeast monsoon was very light this year.

After breakfast I took an auto rickshaw to Chennai's main museum, with large portions badly lit or closed off.  Foreigners play 250 rupees for the privilege of entering while Indians pay 15.  The museum is largely in a colonial brick building dating from the 1890's which would be quite handsome if there was any maintenance at all.  Cannons captured in Britain's colonial wars in India ring the building.  One building, a new one, however, is very well lit and maintained.  It contains superb Chola bronzes, including a Nataraja ("Lord of the Dance"), Shiva dancing in a circle of fire with one leg raised as he swirls, his long hair and a garment around his waist flying.  The gallery includes many other wonderful bronzes made by the lost wax technique and featuring Shiva and his consort Parvati together, Vishnu, and others.  One shows a combination Shiva and Parvati, one half of the figure male and the other half female.  There are even bronzes of Buddha.  The oldest of these bronzes, including the Nararaja, date from about a thousand years ago, when the Chola Empire was at its height.

From the museum I walked to Egmore train station, built in the 1930's, and then to the nearby St. Andrew's Kirk, dating from 1820 and modeled after St. Martins-in-the-Field in London.  It has a lovely bell tower and a dome ceiling and its walls are lined with interesting colonial plaques.  Under the dome the pews fan out before the altar in a semi-circle.  I walked around a bit more, then took an auto rickshaw to near my hotel and walked the rest of the way through narrow streets of that Muslim neighborhood.  There are not many Muslims in Tamil Nadu, maybe five percent of the population.  The Muslim influence in the north of India rarely made its way this far south.

The next morning, after a breakfast of two plates of puri and potatoes, I walked towards the seaside, passing the big modern cricket stadium and the ruinous Chepauk Palace, once home to the Maharaja of the Carnatic.  This part of India. along the coast of the southern Bay of Bengal, was once called the Carnatic, and the British and French East India Companies fought a series of wars here in the mid 18th century for supremacy.

Chennai's seafront has a long promenade with a very wide beach, maybe a quarter of a mile wide in places, between the promenade and the sea.  Fisher folk live on the beach.  I remember walking on the beach at the edge of the sea when I was here in 1979 and watching all the fishing activity, and being somewhat astounded by all the people taking a crap at the water's edge.  Now, after all  my time in India, I have seen more than my fair share of Indians crapping on the seashore, so I decided not to walk along the beach at water's edge. I stopped first at the MGR and Anna Samadhis, beachside memoriasl to Tamil Nadu politicians.  The Congress party governed Tamil Nadu until 1967, when a Tamil regional party, galvanized by an attempt, vociferously opposed by southern Indians, to make Hindi the national language, won the state elections.  The Dravidian southern languages have nothing in common with the Indo-European northern Indian languages. The DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kakagham), the party that won the election in 1967, was led by a man named C. N. Annadurai who died in 1969.  The party split soon after, and in the 1972 elections, the AIADMK (All India Anna DMK), led by a movie star named M. G. Ramachandran but universally known by his initials, MGR, won and continued to win for at least two more elections.  Recently, the two parties have been alternating in government.

MGR had played Robin Hood roles in his films and adopted the same persona in politics.  In fact his 15 years in power (he died in 1987 after remaining in office for a time after suffering a paralizing stroke) was known for its great corruption.  He is almost always pictured wearing black sunglasses and a fur hat, and that is the way he is depicted on the gold statue of him at the entrance to his samadhi, which I think is the word used for a place of cremation.  It is quite a modern shrine, at the center of which is a block of granite or some similar stone with his name, birth and death dates, and the legend "Diligence Makes Eminence." Flowers lay upon the cubical block of stone.  A group of colorfully dressed women, all in saris of red and yellow, asked to pose with me, and I was happy to oblige.  The Anna Samadhi next to MGR's was simpler.

MGR's successor as head of the AIADMK and current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is another former film star named Jayalalithaa, a former co-star of MGR and his former teenage mistress, when he was something like 30 years older than she.  She is now obese and apparently just as corrupt as her former lover.  She has served several terms as Chief Minister.  She is the daughter of a Brahmin, which is somewhat surprising in that these two big Tamil parties started out as not only regional but also anti-Brahmin.  Also Marxist, and the son of the leader of the long time leader of the DMK, being prepared for the leadership of the party, is named Stalin.

I walked south along the promenade, with the wide and dirty beach to my left.  I had hoped to stop in at the Vivekanada Museum, housed in a pink colonial building that once served as an ice house, but it was closed for restoration.  Vivekanada was a holy man who wandered around India and even made it to the United States, where he spoke at the Congress of Religions at the 1893 Chicago World Fair.  He took a universalist approach to religions and made a tour of the United States, spending some time in California. One story I read about him during his American tour mentioned a man leaving one of his lectures and overheard saying, "We are sending missionaries to these people?  They should be sending missionaries to us."  India celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth last year.  Oddly, despite his universalist approach to religion, Hindu nationalist have taken up heralding him.

Eventually, I reached the San Thome Cathedral in what was once the city of Mylapore, now just a part of Chennai.  Mylapore was an important port trading even with the Romans two thousand years ago and St. Thomas, the disciple of Jesus known as "Doubting Thomas," is believed to have come to India in 52 A.D., arriving on the coast of what is now Kerala and traveling to Mylapore, where he was martyred in 72 A.D. The present church dates from the 1890's, replacing a Portuguese built one from the 1500's.  In the modern crypt under the church supposedly rest the bones of St. Thomas.  A few relics, small pieces of his bones and the spear head that is supposed to have killed him, are on display.  A mass was going on in the small modern crypt and was full of Indians.

I walked inland to a Hindu temple, in which I could walk around the courtyard but not enter the sanctuary, and then about 1 took a train north to near Chennai's old fort, a ride of about fifteen minutes.  I walked to a nearby restaurant famous for its good "meals," the word used in the south for thalis.  It had maybe eight different dishes, including yogurt and sweets.  You buy a ticket (for 95 rupees, about a dollar and a half), sit down at any table where you can find a seat, and the waiters bring you your meal.

After lunch I walked by the colonial era Law College and High Court buildings, sandstone buildings with white domes and high towers that tourists can no longer enter, and eventually reached the Fort St. George. The British East India Company was granted this site in 1639 by a local ruler and started building its first fort in 1640, and it became Britain's headquarters in India until replaced by Calcutta more than a century later. The present fort, dating from 1666, is not all that impressive.  The walls seem low and it now looks out onto port facilities rather than the sea.  Also, it is Tamil Nadu's state government center and was thronged with people.  The main building in the fort, an 18th century colonial building with black columns, is the now the main state government building and cannot be entered.  A nearby building, also 18th century, is now a museum but was closed.  I made my way to St. Mary's Church, built in 1678 but renovated in 1759, which I remember visiting in 1979.  It is very stout, with thick walls and a low vaulted ceiling, built that way to shelter the inhabitants of the fort during French sieges.  Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University, was married here in 1670 and the old, yellowed marriage registry page is on display.  Born in America, he served as Governor of Fort St. George from 1687 to 1696.  Lots of interesting colonial plaques line the walls, and gravestones line the courtyard outside, the earliest I saw dating from 1689.  Many of the gravestones were densely covered with bird droppings.  Also inside the church is a nondescript plaque, ugly compared to all the colonial ones, stating that the church was renovated in 1968 due to the Class of 1924 Yale classmates of United States Ambassador Chester Bowles.

I stayed at the fort until about 5, and then walked back to my hotel, which took over an hour.  I stopped again at the MGR Samadhi, crowded at the end of the day.  That afternoon my ribs finally stopped hurting with every step I took, which felt great.

I would have left smoggy, dirty Chennai the next morning, but I wanted to see the Fort Museum, so I took an auto rickshaw there at about 10, spending about two and a half hours in the museum.  The 1790's building, formerly an exchange house, was interesting and so was the collection inside, with statues, portraits, arms, coins, porcelain, old uniforms and other things.  It contains a colossal statue of Lord Cornwallis, who after his debacle at Yorktown served as a rather more successful Governor General of India, defeating Tippu Sultan in the Third Mysore War.  A large upstairs room contained giant portraits of several viceroys, along with Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, King George V, and Queen Mary.  There were excellent diagrams of the expansion of the fort over time.

I walked north, retracing the route I had taken the afternoon before, passing the High Court and stopping in at an 18th century Armenian church and a Catholic church before reaching the same restaurant I had eaten in the day before.  I had lunch there about 2 and then took the train back to near by hotel and rested the rest of the afternoon.

January 2-7, 2014: Mandalay

In Nyaung U on the 2nd, I got up at 5:30, had some tea and pastries at a tea shop about 6, and then took a taxi to the large, relatively new train station, three or four miles from town.  My train for Mandalay left at 7.  I had bought an upper class ticket for $10 for the trip.  The buses to Mandalay are a little cheaper, I think, and leave later in the morning, but I wanted to take the train.  So I took the railroad, rather than the road, to Mandalay.

The train wasn't completely full and the sun had risen just before we left.  Dawn did not come up like thunder, but then Kipling never actually traveled the road to Mandalay.  The train traveled northeast, along the east bank of the unseen Irrawaddy.  We did pass over a few sandy stretches that obviously fill with water in the rainy season and flow to the Irrawaddy.  Some are quite wide.  I also saw in the distance the new Pokukku Bridge over the Irrawaddy.  It is the longest in Burma, over two miles in length.  The train passed harvested rice fields and sugar palms by the thousands.  I also saw quite a few wooden bullock carts with wooden wheels.

We reached the town of Myingyin, on the Irrawaddy, a little after 9 and stopped in several other small towns.  The train stations were all relatively new, compared to the ones I'd seen further south.  As usual, the train carriages rocked and rolled.  I subsisted on quail eggs, banana chips, and beans cooked in a batter, all bought from vendors.

We reached the outskirts of Mandalay and then the city center, arriving at 2:30.  I walked to a hotel and got a good room, with two comfortable beds and hot water, for $15 a night.  The only problem was that it was on the top floor, 90 steps up, with no elevator.  I took a walk from about 4:30 until it got dark at 6, visiting a temple with a mosque next door and a church across the street.  Eventually, I reached the southwest corner of Mandalay's palace walls and moat.  The palace quarter enclosed by the walls is immense, with 26 foot high brick walls for more than a mile on each of four sides, forming a perfect square.  A 230 foot wide moat rings the walls.  The walls are all intact, and there are multi-roofed pavilions at the corners and other parts of the walls.  I walked along the moat, lit up by the setting sun, as far as the bridge leading to the west gate, and then turned back.

The next morning I rented a bike, for two dollars a day, and biked to the palace's east gate, the only one foreigners can enter.  I biked through the busy streets along the moat and walls to the south and east of the palace and despite the heavy morning traffic I found it fairly easy biking.  For the most part people were good at yielding to others.  There were other bicyclists, but mostly cars and motorcycles.

I had to park my bike at the eastern gate and walk to the reconstructed wooden palace at the center of the big square palace enclosure.  I am fairly sure the palace reconstruction wasn't done by 1994, as I remember we were not allowed to enter the palace enclosure, which is mostly an army base.  Mandalay was founded and made the capital of Burma only in 1857, though Burmese capitals had been located in the area just a bit south of Mandalay for almost 500 years before.  The original wooden palace burned down in 1945 during the fighting in the city in World War II.  The reconstructed palace is quite an effort, with forty wooden buildings reconstructed.  It is not maintained very well, with rusting metal roofs and pealing paint, but I found it all interesting.  There are some interesting photos taken about 1900 of some of the original wooden palace buildings.  A seven tiered roof throne hall is located near the eastern end and you pass a round watchtower and several other interesting halls before you reach the Glass Palace, the huge hall at the center that was the bedchamber of the king.  I've read it was called the Glass Palace either because the king slept on a bed made of glass (the frame, not the mattress!) imported from France or because lots of small pieces of glass adorned the outside of the building.  Two young and very small pink clad nuns asked to take photos with me and I happily complied.  I think if you stacked one on top of the other, they just might have been taller than me.  At the back (the western end)  is a small museum with the original glass four poster bed and mannequins dressed in Burmese court attire, which were interesting.  You can't visit any of the rest of the palace compound beyond the forty reconstructed wooden buildings because of its military use.  I did see a military marching band practicing while I was walking to the wooden palace from the eastern gate.

I had planned to climb Mandalay Hill, just northeast of the palace walls, after visiting the wooden palace, but I spent more time at the palace than planned, so headed to a restaurant south of the palace where I had a very good lunch of fish curry, plus a good group of side dishes  For once the fish was not overcooked, or at least not too overcooked, and the side dishes were good, too.

After lunch I biked west towards the Irrawaddy, stopping at a couple of pagodas and passing Mandalay's busy street market.  I got to the dusty and hot eastern bank of the Irrawaddy in mid afternoon, so didn't stay long to watch all the activity, but biked back east and then headed south trying to find an 1895 teak monastery built by two Chinese jade merchants.  Finally, an old man also on a bike had me follow him to the gate, then turned around and headed for wherever he was going before I asked him directions.  Workmen and women were repairing the area around the monastery, with the women carrying big rocks on their heads and depositing them in trenches, eventually to be filled with gravel and cement.  The multi-roofed monastery had interesting carvings on the exterior and was very dark inside.  As I left about 4 three monks began chanting in the dark interior.

I biked to another, smaller teak monastery nearby, where young men were playing chinlon outside.  A friendly old monk showed me around.  The monks' beds with mosquito nets were inside.  I headed back to my hotel and stopped at one last pagoda, with a mini-Golden Rock and a 17 foot high bronze Buddha dating from 1823.  I got back to the hotel through the evening commute traffic just as it got dark at 6.

The next morning I slept late and awoke with a renewed sinus infection.  I had been battling sinus infections and congestion ever since that first cold and dusty night bus trip across the mountains in mid December from Pyay to Taunggok in Burma.  I biked to the foot of Mandalay Hill, arriving about 10.  Mandalay seems to be almost pancake flat except for this one hill just northeast of the palace walls.  There are several covered stairways to climb up to the top.  I used the so-called nat entrance and leisurely made my way up, about a 500 foot climb.  Mandalay Hill has an elevation of 760 feet and my guidebook gives Mandalay's elevation as 244 feet.  As usual, vendors lined a large part of the stairway and the rough surface was a little hard on my bare feet.  Part way up is a temple with a very tall golden standing Buddha pointing towards Mandalay below.  Burmese believe Buddha visited Mandalay Hill and prophesied that a capital would be built below it in 2400 years, which came true in 1857.  It took me a leisurely 45 minutes to an hour to reach the top, with good views of Mandalay on the way and at the top.  Because of the haze I could just barely make out the hills to the east but not to the west.  I could barely see the Irrawaddy to the west.  A brown plain loomed to the north.  The huge palace compound and its walls and moat could be seen below to the southwest and a couple of golf courses just to the west.

I stayed on top for about half an hour.  There were lots of Burmese at the monasteries at and near the top, but only a few foreigners.  As I was coming down the steps, almost near the end,  I came across a ceremony with very colorful dressed children and women.  The children were all grouped together in front of an altar, with their splendidly dressed mothers behind them.  The fathers were dressed in ordinary clothes.  As I watched them as they went to a second altar.  Two of the girls were in splendid costumes reminiscent of the clothes worn in a famous photo of the last king and queen of Burma.  At the end of the ceremony, as the group was beginning to descend, a ten year old girl in one of those costumes, after being prodded by her mother, came up to me and spoke to me in very good English.  I talked with her for a while and then posed for a photo with her and her family and then I took a family portrait of her, her very pretty teenage sister, her mother, and her grandmother.

As they all descended the steps, another group similarly clad came up and I watched the brief ceremonies they had at each of the two altars.  The girls and the women, and even some of the little boys, wore quite thick make-up, including very thick eye lashes for some of the girls.  I wonder if they had trouble keeping their eyes open.

At the foot of the stairs were stationed several pick-up trucks with plastic chairs in the beds, with many of the chairs occupied by the beautifully attired women and children.  A woman tour guide told me that the procession came bearing children who are going to spend some time in a monastery and that on the way to the monastery they make stops at the Mahamuni Pagoda, the most important in Mandalay, and at Mandalay Hill.  She said the children would have their heads shaved when they entered the monastery, but most wouldn't stay for long, just a few days or weeks.  It is a sort of rite of passage. I watched for about an hour as groups went up the stairs and then came down.  There were some beautifully attired young women sitting waiting on the plastic chairs in the beds of pick-ups.  One in a bright green dress was shaded under a bright green Pathein style parasol.  Finally, the vehicles and their occupants all took off.

By then it was about 1:30 and I was hungry, but instead of finding a place to eat I bicycled to the nearby Shwesandaw Paya.  This beautiful teak building, about 200 years old, is the former palace of King Mindon, who died inside in 1878.  The building had been moved from the former royal capital at Amarapura to the palace in Mandalay.  King Mindon's successor, fearing his ghost, had the building dismantled and moved outside the palace walls to its present location, converting it to a monastery.  It is a good thing he did, not only to avoid his ghost but also because all the other wooden palace buildings were burned to the ground during World War II.

The multi-roofed teak building is spectacular, covered on the outside with thousands of carved figures, many now badly worn.  It also was once covered with gems and pieces of glass.  It sits upon 150 teak pillars and you can walk around underneath among the bottom ends of the pillars, which reach to the rooftops.  Inside the dark interior are more wooden carvings, including ten panels of Jataka scenes, very finely carved.  I spent about two hours there wandering around, inside and out.  Across the street is a huge brick and stucco pagoda, rebuilt by the government in the 1990's after it had been mostly destroyed by fire in 1890.

After 4 I finally biked to the good restaurant where I had eaten lunch the day before and had another excellent meal of fish curry.  After lunch I biked back to my hotel, first along the long southern wall of the palace and then taking a detour along the western wall lit up by the late afternoon sun.

The next day I took a $15 motorcycle tour of the three ancient capitals south of Mandalay.  I even got a crash helmet.  We left about 9 and headed seven miles south to Amarapura, the Burmese capital from 1783 to 1823 and then again from 1841 until Mandalay became capital in 1857.  Not much remains of the former capital.  Burmese kings apparently liked to dismantle their old capitals when they moved to another.  We stopped first at an 185 foot high pagoda, now covered with scaffolding.  Then we headed south along the western shore of the big lake in Amarapura, with many little fishing boats on the lake.  Eventually, we reached the U Bein Bridge, a teak pedestrian bridge across the lake that is about three-fourths of a mile long.  Before spending any time at the photogenic bridge, my driver took me to a monastery just to the west, where something like 1200 to 1500 red-clad monks, and a very few young ones in white, where lining up double file, all with their begging bowls in their arms, ready for their mid day meal.  Even odder were the hundreds of western tourists, mostly bus groups I think, surrounding them and taking photos of them.  It must all seem very odd to the monks.  They marched in and had their meal in a hall, though some took their meals, in their begging bowls, outside with them.  I noticed the ones departing had a sweet roll of some kind atop their begging bowls.

Afterwards I walked about half way across the long teak bridge and then came back.  The parts of the lake where the water has receded are now vegetable beds.  During the height of the rains the bridge is said to just barely clear the water, but now it is quite high over the water.  The teak is all very worn and faded.  I watched one of the fishermen in his boast laying out a net in a wide circle and then, once he had finished, lying back in his boat and putting his conical hat over his face to take a little siesta.  At the western end of the bridge I noticed several wicker cages holding owls, two species, one larger than the other.  Their yellow eyes above sharp beaks stared out.  It cost 5000 kyat, about $5, to free one.  I saw a couple being released.  Each fluttered up to a nearby tree.

From Amarapura we headed about four miles southwest to Inwa, another former capital at a westward bend of the generally south flowing Irrawaddy.  Inwa, known to the west as Ava, was capital of Burma for about half of the past 650 years, but almost nothing remains.  My motorcycle dropped me off at a ferry crossing across a small tributary of the Irrawaddy and I took the ferry across.  The ancient city was bounded by the tributary, the Irrawaddy and canals.  Horse cart drivers implore you to use their services, but instead I walked past a restored gateway to a stucco covered brick royal monastery dating from 1822.  It wasn't very attractive up close, but nearby was a good view to and across the Irrawaddy to the hilly, stupa-covered town of Sagaing.  I also walked to a leaning, lopsided watchtower, the only remnant of the old palace, now judged too dangerous to climb.  The former royal capital is now a simple village, with lots of annoying vendors.

The next place I wanted to to in Inwa was a long way away, so I hired a motorcycle to take me on some very bad roads, passing outside of the remnants of the city walls and the old canal and then rice fields, to a monastery called Bagaya Kyaung.  This multi-roofed 1834 teak monastery, 188 feet by 103 feet, rests on 267 teak pillars, the biggest ones 60 feet high with a circumference of 9 feet.  The weathered teak exterior seems to be stained with something.  It smelled like creosote.  The exterior had wooden carvings, but not nearly as many as Shwesandaw in Mandalay.  Peacocks and lotuses were the usual motifs.  It was very dark inside, with an altar under the high ceilinged center.  On one side was a little school room with about ten children, some in monks robes and some not, tended by a glasses-wearing monk teacher.  They all recited loudly, as the many tourists who came through snapped their photos.  I spent about 45 minutes looking around and then took the motorcycle to the ferry.

From Inwa we headed to Sagaing, just over the Irrawaddy.  Two bridges cross side by side, one built by the British carrying both trains and cars and a new one without train tracks.  Sagaing is a hilly place, just inside the bend of the Irrawaddy.  Its many hills are topped by lots of pagodas.  It, too, was briefly capital, in the 1760's.  I was dropped off at the foot of Sagaing Hill, the town's highest, and it took me about 15 minutes to climb up to the pagoda on top, an ascent of about 350 feet.  The views from the top were excellent.  It was hazy to the west, but I could see the golden stupa to the west supposedly modeled after the breast of a queen.  I could see the wide bend of the Irrawaddy to the south.  The views were best to the east, with the pagoda covered forested hills below and beyond the blue Irrawaddy, with boats and islands of sand and vegetables.  I could see Mandalay and Mandalay Hill to the north, and also Inwa and Amarapura's lake across the river.  I also had good views of the two bridges over the river.  I enjoyed the late afternoon views and then walked down.  It was after 5 when we started back to Mandalay, a trip that took almost an hour.  Fortunately, I had brought my windbreaker with me, as it was chilly on a motorcycle just before nightfall.

The next morning I took care of a few errands, going to the bank and the post office, and it wasn't until after 11 that I took off on my bicycle heading south to Mahamuni Paya, reaching it about 11:30.  Mahamuni is Mandalay's main temple and one of the most important in Burma.  The recently rebuilt temple itself isn't that interesting, but the activity inside is, and I spent about two and a half hours there.  At the center is the most important Buddha image in Burma, a 13 foot high seated Buddha believed to be 2000 years old.  It was brought to Mandalay by the Burmese from Rakhine after they conquered it in 1784, a point that still irks the people of Rakhine.  I sat in front of the statue in the men's section (women to the back, of course) for quite a while and enjoyed the atmosphere.  Men (women aren't allowed) were constantly applying gold leaf to the statue up on its pedestal.  In fact, except for its shiny face, which is washed every morning at 4, it is so covered with gold leaf that it looks almost furry.  Photos of the statue in 1901, 1935, 1984, and 2010 show its progressive furriness.  Besides sitting and watching, I walked around the complex and even took the little ladder up to the idol where men were applying gold leaf.

Sometime after noon a procession arrived, with the women in the lead carrying huge stacks of flowers on trays atop their heads.  Following were beautifully dressed children and women, similar to what I had seen before on Mandalay Hill. The procession proceeded around the courtyard surrounding the inner building of the pagoda and then they all posed for a group photo.  Another procession appeared later, with little kids brightly adorned and carried around inside the temple in the corridors surrounding the inner sanctum.  The little kids (maybe around five years old) looked quite bewildered. 

A couple of buildings on the outside of the courtyard are interesting.  One had 1950's paintings of the history of the Mahamuni idol, including its transport over the mountains and over water (the Irrawaddy, presumably) from Rakhine.  One painting showed the building of the present main building, after the original burned down in the late 19th century.  Among the figures is a blond man, in a western suit, standing over a table with the building plans on them, pointing out something to the Burmese onlookers.  He is barefoot, with his shoes and socks just off the platform he is standing on.

Another building has seven more than life size bronze figures, including two men, a three headed elephant (this one less than life size, though I guess we don't really know the size of three headed elephants), and a lion.  People were almost constantly rubbing them, rubbing the parts that corresponded to what ailed them.  One of the bronze male figures had a huge hole where his genitalia would be, so I suppose for those ailments you are on your own.  I was still suffering from sinus problems, so I rubbed one of the elephant trunks.  Perhaps I should have rubbed all three.  These bronzes were captured by the Burmese from Mrauk U and are said originally to be from Angkor.

From Mahamuni I biked north to the gold pounders district and stopped in a shop, spending about an hour there.  These shops are where workers make the gold leaf applied to Buddha images.  The procedure is very interesting and was very well explained.  Using seven pound hammers, men were constantly pounding the gold into thinner and thinner leaves.  The first two poundings are half an hour each, the third five hours.  Two hundred gold leaves are pounded at a time, packed between bamboo paper and bound in a leather casing, the whole packet maybe two inches thick.  One of the hammerers let me feel how hot the packet was after half an hour of pounding.  The gold leaves become thinner and thinner and eventually are so thin you can make them curl up just by blowing on them, which was demonstrated.  A 32 gram piece of gold is eventually reduced to 4600 thin sheets of gold, sold at 7000 kyat ($7) each.  I watched women applying the thin gold leaves to little squares of a specially made bamboo paper.  They expertly cut the thin gold leaf to fit the bamboo paper squares.  I was told gold leaf is also used for medicine and for facial make-up.

From there I biked north towards the restaurant that I liked for a late lunch/early dinner.  I had very much enjoyed biking around Mandalay and was impressed at how well everybody slowed at intersections, the overwhelming majority of which have no stop lights or signs, and let people get through on a more or less a first come, first go basis.  As I slowed at a not very busy intersection just a few blocks short of the restaurant and then began to pedal across the intersection, a motorcycle came up behind me to my left and crossed in front of me, turning right.  He clipped my front tire with his back tire and sent me sprawling onto the road.  Fortunately, I was not going fast, though he was.  I landed on my right side and arm and at first thought my right arm might be badly cut, but it was only mildly scraped.  I had a few cuts on my hands, but no broken bones, so counted myself lucky.  My right side hurt, though, and I was afraid I had bruised my ribs and they would hurt much more later on, which they did.  I picked myself up, refrained from beating up the guy on the motorcycle who stopped and muttered "sorry" before speeding off, and made my way to the restaurant where I could wash out my cuts.  I had my usual fish curry at around 4 and then biked back to my hotel about 5.  My ribs did hurt quite a bit by nightfall, but I slept well (on my left side).

Of course, my ribs still hurt the next morning, and I had a little pain in my right shoulder and knee.  I walked to the Irrawaddy and just after 9 took the tourist boat that heads upriver about five miles to Mingun.  The hour long ride on the river was chilly in the morning.  Mingun has the ruins, easily seen from the river on approach, of what would have been the world's highest pagoda.  Construction continued from 1790 to 1819, but then terminated once the king who had started it died.  It is now a colossal pile of bricks, 240 feet square and I don't know how high, but more than a 100 feet.  An 1838 earthquake left huge cracks in the structure.  There are four small entrances to little chambers at each cardinal direction, but only the eastern one has an altar.  The one on the west had drawings and graffiti on the back wall:  a huge peace symbol, a giant hammer on what appeared to be a tripod, but with only two legs, and "The Beatles," and "Doors."  The ruins of what would have been two giant chinthes (lion-snake combinations that typically guard Burmese pagodas) stand in front.  I walked around the structure.  A modern stairway leads up an earthquake provided cleft on the northeast corner, but is now blocked off for safety reasons.

A little further north is the world's largest intact bell.  Moscow has a larger bell, but it is cracked, with a big chunk fallen out.  Mingun's bell is 13 feet high and sixteen feet in diameter at the lip.  It is hung from a beam and you can crawl under the lip to the inside and stand there while it is rung with a wooden ringer.  The inside is covered with Burmese graffiti, except at the very top where there is a big English name, probably dating from more than a century ago.

A little further north is another pagoda, which I climbed and had good views over the dry countryside and the hills just to the west and the Irrawaddy to the east.  I ate lunch nearby and then took the tourist boat back to Mandalay when it left after 1.  I walked back to my hotel and my ribs were hurting quite a bit.  I wouldn't dare cough.  I spent the rest of the afternoon at the post office and an internet cafe and again slept well despite the pain in my side.

December 27, 2013 - January 1, 2014: Bagan and Mount Popa

I got a late start on the 27th, my first full day in Bagan, as I was tired from the long trip to get there.   I rented a bike from my hotel ($1.50 a day) and about 10 began pedaling from my hotel in the town of Nyaung U.  I headed down the road to Old Bagan, three miles away, on a road parallel to the Irrawaddy.  The road was a lot more crowded with vehicles than I remembered it from 1994.

Bagan was the center of Burma's first great kingdom, which reached its height from the mid 11th century to the end of the 13th century.  During this period of more than 200 years a frenzy of temple building occurred on the plain of Bagan next to the Irrawaddy.  There are supposed to be over 3000 temples, big and small, on the plain.  Many are now restored, or over-restored, with some piles of bricks being built into pagodas with little historical basis for their new construction.  Even the big ones have been considerably restored.  Still, the plain covered with temples is an impressive sight.  Apparently, there is some dispute about what caused Bagan to decline. The story that I am most familiar with is that the king in 1273 foolishly executed envoys sent by Kublai Khan, leading to a Mongol army conquering the city and ending the kingdom in 1287. 

The walled city of Old Bagan, at a bend in the Irrawaddy, was the site of the royal palace and some of the many temples.  Parts of the walls remain and I entered through a restored gate guarded by the statues of two nats, Lady Golden Face and Lord Handsome.  Nats are the pre-Buddhist spirits worshiped still today in Burma.  Burmese Buddhism co-exists with the veneration of nats.

Just inside the walls is a recently constructed palace meant to be a replica of the palace of the vanished kingdom.  It is a huge, gaudy place that costs five dollars to enter.  Nearby are the excavations of what little remains of the real palace. I biked past those to Gawdawpalin Pahto, a 197 foot high temple dating from the late Bagan period.  I remembered climbing this temple at sunset in 1994 as it had a good view of the many temples, big and small, to the east in the soft light of the setting sun.  It is heavily reconstructed and now has a modern altar.  You can no longer climb up beyond ground level.  From there I biked to the Irrawaddy and a reconstructed golden stupa.  The place was packed, mostly Burmese.  I hadn't picked the best time of year to visit Bagan.  Not only was it full of foreign tourists, many in Burma for the Christmas and New Year holidays, but many Burmese were there on their end of the year holidays.  The big crowds were quite a change from twenty years ago. 

I next biked just outside the walls to Ananda Pahto, one of the biggest, finest, and most revered temples.  It was built about 1100 and rises to 170 feet with a corn cob type shikhara, or tower, now gilded.  The central square measures 174 feet long on each side, with terraces rising above it, though you can no longer ascend to the terraces. Inside the cube, at the four cardinal directions, are standing Buddhas made of teak, coated in gold, and rising to 31 feet in height.  Only the north and south ones are original.  The other two are only a couple of centuries old.  I spent quite a bit of time looking around, including at glazed tiles on the outside of Jataka tales (tales of Buddha's past lives).  Just outside the walls of the temple compound are all sorts of sellers of souvenirs, post cards, tee shirts, and all sorts of other stuff.  They can be quite persistent.  There were buses and other vehicles parked in the dusty area near the entry.  Nearby are several restaurants and I had a long wait for what I ordered at a vegetarian restaurant called Be Kind to Animals the Moon.  

After lunch I found a small temple just north of Ananda Pahto  with murals inside of palace life and everyday scenes.  I biked back into Old Bagan and approached its southern exit and explored some of the temples inside the walls.  It was getting to be late in the afternoon.  I explored one big, dark temple with a Buddha inside and then visited the small Pahtotamya, with superb murals of Buddhas and palace scenes.  It was dark inside and I had to use my flashlight to see the murals. Next I visited a temple that had been a Hindu temple.  The flourishing of the Bagan kingdom came at the time Buddhism was being established as the state religion.  The story is that this temple was used by the king to imprison the nat images, though eventually he compromised and allowed nat worship to continue, but subsidiary to Buddhism.

Next door is Bagan's highest temple at 207 feet, the monumental Thatbyinnyu Pahto, with two boxy stories one on top of the other and a gilded corncob shikhara.  It is dated from Bagan's middle period, built in 1144.  It is not particularly impressive up close or inside.  The upper terraces are now closed to visitors.  Just north is the smaller Shwegugyi, built in 1131, an elegant temple with a teak Buddha that you can ascend to a terrace.  From the terrace are great views of the plain full of temples.  I stayed up for the sunset, which was behind the inappropriately high new government museum to the west.  The views of the other temples in the late afternoon sunlight, however, were great.  It took me about 25 minutes to bike back to my hotel in Nyaung U after sunset, a tiring ride as one of my tires had gone flat.  There was a lot of traffic, too.  That road was so much more pleasant to bike along at the end of the day 20 years ago, with hardly any cars, just bikes, a few motorcycles, and horse carts.

I got an earlier start the next morning, taking off on my bike at about 8:30.  (Sunrise was just before 7 and it was chilly in the mornings.)  I stopped first at the only Bagan era temple in Nyaung U, Shwezigon Paya, dating from the 11th century.  However, the large stupa is restored and gilded and the temple is an active one. It was filled with people, mostly Burmese but lots of foreigners, too, that morning.  In little shrines facing the stupa at the four cardinal directions are 13 foot high bronze Buddhas cast in 1102.  I walked around the large stupa three times, watching all the activity going on.  In addition, on the temple grounds is a building housing images of the 37 principal nats.

I spent over an hour there and then biked towards Old Bagan, searching unsuccessfully for three temples but stopping at some others before reaching Htilominlo Pahto, built in 1218 and 150 feet high.  It is an attractive temple, with a square base 140 feet long on each side topped by ascending terraces, but more impressive on the outside than inside.  Again, you can no longer ascend to the terraces.  Nearby is Upali Thein, a small 13th century ordination hall with excellent late 17th or early 18th century murals.  Apparently, Bagan was not completely abandoned after it late 13th century fall.  I heard one guide say that the later murals used green, a color not available when Bagan flourished in the 11th to 13th centuries.

I ate lunch at an outdoor restaurant near Ananda Pahto where you sit on little stools under a large tree.  It is very popular, with good, cheap Burmese food.  The clientele was about 90% Burmese, if not more.  I ordered chicken curry, with rice and several side dishes:  corn, soup, vegetables, salad, and a couple of dishes with chillies too hot for me.  I drank a glass of freshly squeezed sugar cane juice.  My fellow diners were very friendly and helped me order.  It all cost me less than two dollars and was much faster than eating at the more expensive place I had had lunch the day before.

After lunch I headed into Old Bagan again, stopping at one temple and then passing some of the temples I had visited the previous afternoon before heading out the south wall and biking south on dusty dirt roads to a little middle period temple with excellent murals called Lawkahteikpan Pahto and then, just beyond, to Shwesandaw Paya.  Shwesandaw Paya has five terraces topped by a big stupa, all in white.  I climbed up the steep steps to the viewing platform 60 feet above the ground.  There were great views in all directions.  The large terraces make this Bagan's prime sunset viewing location.  The views were great in mid afternoon, too, with far fewer crowds.  I sat there and enjoyed the views before heading off.

I headed west to massive Dhammayangyi Pahto, but first stopped  and climbed a nearby temple for its great views of Dhammayangyi.  Dhammayangyi dates from the 12th century and is an impressive pile of bricks.  Its inner corridors are all bricked up, some say as a sort of insult to its builder, but perhaps only to make sure the huge structure did not collapse.  There is a very high, dark interior corridor around the periphery that is not bricked in and has bats.  There is not much to see in the corridors.  There are Buddhas at the cardinal directions, including two together at the west.  You can no longer ascend, as you could in 1994.  I left about 5 and there were maybe ten buses parked outside.  I biked on the dirt roads to a paved road heading back to Nyaung U, but stopped at a relatively small temple that a few people had climbed to view the sunset.  I always prefer the views not towards the sunset but towards the temples lit up by the setting sun.   Heading back to town, the traffic on this road (which I'm fairly sure did not exist in 1994 and certainly not as a paved road) was not as bad as the road I had taken the evening before.  I got back to my hotel just at dark, at 6.

I headed back down that road the next morning and found a couple of the temples near town that I had looked for the previous morning.  One had excellent early murals, with no green.  Some of the murals had been cut out in 1899 by a German.  Hindu figures appeared on the temple spire.  As I left the simpler second temple, a wooden wheeled cart pulled by bullocks passed by.

I biked down the road some more and turned off onto a dirt road and stopped at Buledi, a temple with very steep steps leading to great views.  Then I continued south on dusty, sandy roads (the sand halting my bike in places) before reaching Sulamani Pahto, a particularly appealing temple.  It was built around 1181 and has two squarish stories each topped by receding terraces and spires.  The brick work is particularly fine.  (You can often tell what parts of temples have been reconstructed by the very poor brickwork of the reconstruction.)  I walked around the outside of the temple, inside the perimeter wall, and then I walked around the inside corridor, covered with big murals dating from the 18th and 18th centuries.  The murals contained giant Buddhas, including reclining ones, and lots of smaller, interesting figures such as animals and boats.  I walked around twice inside to appreciate all the details of the paintings.  I spent about an hour and a half there.  You can't climb up any more.

I was hungry, but didn't want to bike to the restaurants near Ananda Pahto, so I settled for some pizza crackers, peanut and sesame seed brittle, and a large cocoanut for lunch at one of the snack shops outside Sulamani.  The major temples now are besieged by vendors, often quite persistent ones, imploring you to buy post cards, tee shirts and all sorts of trinkets.

With my less than hearty lunch consumed, I biked on dusty, sandy roads around the southwest and south sides of Sulamani, with great views of it and encountering a man and two small children getting water from a muddy pond.  There are households among the temples. I continued to Thabeik Hmauk, a temple just east of Sulamani.  It is similar to Sulamani, but smaller, and was deserted.  Its interior was damaged in the great 1975 earthquake that did do much damage to Bagan.  An attendant with a key opened the grated gate to a dark passage that led up to the top, where the views were wonderful.  Inside on the top level was a dark U shaped corridor where I encountered two bats.  They were only a few feet above me, hanging from the ceiling.  My flashlight disturbed them and they fluttered from place to place.

From there I headed southeast on a very sandy road to Pyathada Paya.  By then, one of my tires was flat and it was hard going.  Pyathada Paya is a huge rectangular brick temple, with a large terrace on top.  It is late Bagan, from the 13th century, and inside are large double arches giving more space and light than in earlier temples.  I climbed to the terrace and the late afternoon views were great.  Only two others were on top when I arrived about 4, but soon lots of people in buses and other vehicles began arriving for the sunset.   It is a long bike ride back to Nyaung U from there, so sometime after 4:30 I got on my bike and headed in the direction of Nyaung U, passing Thabeik Hmauk and lots of horse carts and goats, and after about 20 minutes reaching Buledi near the paved road at about 5.  I stopped and ascended the steep stairs to the top of Buledi.  There were many people on the narrow, down sloping terraces at the top, and quite a few horse carts parked below.  Horse carts are a popular, but slow, way to see the temples.  The sun set into haze and I biked back to town and my hotel.

I took a break from temple exploring the next day and joined a group of five others taking a minivan to Mt Popa, southeast of Bagan.  Mt. Popa is about 5000 feet in elevation, compared to Bagan at perhaps something over 200 feet.  We ascended gently through pretty country with lots of sugar palms.  We stopped at a tourist oriented place where they were making palm sugar and it was very interesting.  Lots of other minivan groups were also stopping there and at similar places on the way to Popa.  In a hut liquid sugar was boiling, tended by an old woman sitting on her haunches and smoking a cigar.  In another corner were two stills distilling palm whisky, with the whisky dripping into used whisky bottles.  I tried a sample flavored by honey and it was strong, 40% alcohol.  I also tried some warm cocoanut flavored sugar and that was much more to my taste.  I looked around and enjoyed seeing it all.  Outside a man with a bullock was leading it in circles, grinding peanuts into oil.   Somewhere in this area I remember stopping in 1994 and seeing a palm sugar operation that wasn't at all tourist oriented.

We continued past lots of sugar palms, many with bamboo ladders leading up to the top, where the sap is tapped.  We were not headed to the top of Mt. Popa, but to a volcanic plug on its western slope that rises to a little over 2400 feet.  The climb became a bit steeper as we rose from about 1500 to 2000 feet and we had good views of the mountain and its rim.  We stopped for an excellent view of the monastery-topped volcanic plug before reaching the stairs that climb up the steep, rocky plug to the monastery on the top.

Before ascending I stopped in at the little hall across from the steps where there are colorful images of the principal nats.  I believe you have to die violently to become a nat.  One is particularly known as a drunkard and had whisky bottles attached to his statue.

It took me about 20 minutes to ascend the covered steps up to the monastery at the top, a rise of more than 400 feet.  Lots of vendors lined the path at first.  There were very good views from the top and there were lots of people there, both foreigners and Burmese.  It was sunny and windy.  You could see Mt. Popa to the east, the plains to the west, and the little town below.  There were some interesting donation plaques, several from San Francisco and others from Europe.  One was from "Anou Ymous Planel Earth."   I spent about a half hour on top.  We were back in Nyaung U by about 2.

I had lunch, rested at my hotel, and then biked to the jetty to check about ferries.  Three large barges filled with huge logs arrived and anchored.  I was told that they are a hard wood, not teak, and that the barges anchor for the night here before heading further downriver.  The guy I talked to didn't know where they had come from.  I watched the fast ferry from Mandalay arrive.  It takes something like eleven hours downriver and I've been told there isn't a lot to see.  Tickets are expensive at $35.  There is also a slow ferry that I think takes more like 24 hours. 

Late in the afternoon I biked to Shwezigon Paya to see it all lit up.  When I arrived there a nat pwe, a ceremony to attract nats, was going on at the shrine to the 37 principal nats on the grounds.  An orchestra of drums, an oboe-like insturment, cymbals, a bamboo clapper and a sort of gamalan type instrument was playing while women danced, one after the other.  At least, at first I thought they were women, but they may have been transvestites.  I'm fairly sure at least some of them were.  These dancers, called nat gadaw ("nat wives") dance to encourage the nats to possess them.  I watched for quite some time, until they took a break, perhaps for dinner.  As far as I could tell, no one got possessed.  It was very colorful, with colorful dresses and offerings of fruit, cocoanuts, whisky, flowers and much else.  I walked around the illuminated gold stupa a couple of times.  In marked contrast to the morning I had been there, the crowds that evening were meager.  I left about 7 and the nat pwe had recommenced.

The next morning I got an early start, about 8:30, and biked south for about 30 minutes to get to several temples clustered on the southern part of the Bagan plain.  I spent about three hours there.  First I searched unsuccessfully for a temple I could climb for the morning view west.  There were not many tourists in the area, although one, Payathonzu, attracted some for its excellent murals.  In a field just beside that temple, four women were winnowing some sort of seed or bean pod and I went to watch them.  A wooden cart with wooden wheels and two grazing bullocks were nearby.  The women were all covered up, with long skirts, long sleeve shirts, and conical hats.  It was very interesting to watch how they did the winnowing, sometimes with wide, low baskets and sometimes just with their hands.

Payathonzu is unusual for Bagan, as it has three chambers, each topped by a tower.  The 13th century murals inside are excellent.  Next door is Thambala Pahto, with more excellent murals.  I then went into the small 13th century Nandamannya Pahto, with more excellent murals, including "The Temptation of Mara," with partially clothed woman doing their best to tempt the meditating Buddha.  This mural apparently particularly scandalized a French archeologist about a hundred years ago.  He should have seen some of the sculpture on temples in India.  Next door was an underground monastery, with tunnels hewed out of the rock with simple beds in them.  At an above ground building I saw several older monks enjoying what looked like a very good lunch.

My final stop was at a whitewashed pagoda, also with paintings on its walls.  By then it was noon.  I could have stopped for lunch at one of the little restaurants in the nearby village of Minnanthu, but decided to head to the outdoor restaurant under the tree near Ananda.  It took me almost 40 minutes to get there on sandy paths, heading west and passing Sulamani after about 20 minutes.  I made several photo stops and between Sulamani and Ananda got behind a large herd of cattle and goats being driven by three or four young women who liberally used their sticks on the herd.  They created a bit of a dust storm and a traffic jam.

I had another good lunch under the tree and then headed into Old Bagan and the Bagan Thande Hotel on the banks of the Irrawaddy in Old Bagan's southwest corner.  The Prince of Wales stayed in this hotel in 1922 and a sign notes the occasion.  In fact, the main teak building was built for his visit.  There are two Prince of Wales suites and one was open.  The guy waiting for a guest to arrive there let me look aroundinside.  The suite was very large, all teak, with an air conditioner and a flat screen television that would have puzzled the Prince of Wales.  On the hotel grounds was a very nice place to sit along the river.  Staff  were setting up for their New Year's Eve party.

I had another flat tire, which I was able to fill with air at a bike rental place, and then headed out the city walls to three temples south of Old Bagan.  The first one, Mingalazedi, has a bell like dome and about half of its original thousand or so glazed Jataka tiles in place.  These little Jataka tiles illustrate episodes from Buddha's past lives.  You aren't allowed to climb to the upper terraces to see the tiles there, or the view, which is a shame as the temple is near the river.

A little south, just north of the village of Myinkaba, is Gubyaukgyi, dating from 1113 with excellent murals inside.  In addition, inside the dark corridor with the murals was a light bulb on a piece of wood with a long cord that you could use to illuminate the paintings.  It was very bright and afforded excellent views.  Next door is a gilded stupa with a stone pillar in a little building with inscriptions in Pyu, Bamar, Mon and Pali on its four sides.  Pyu is the main Burmese civilization of the first millennium and Pali is the language of the Buddhist scriptures.  

From there I biked back north and then east to Shwesandaw Paya, Bagan's prime viewing spot for the sunset.  I arrived about 4.  It affords great late afternoon views, although to me the really spectacular views are of the plain full of temples to the east, lit by the late afternoon sun, rather than the sunset to the west.  I would guess that at least a thousand, maybe two thousand, people gathered on Shwesandaw's terraces.  Eventually, I counted about 20 buses parked below and at least that many minivans, plus cars, bicycles, motorbikes, and horse carts.  To avoid the after sunset stampede, I left about fifteen minutes before the sunset and biked back to Nyaung U, about a 25 minute trip.  I again had a flat tire, so it was a hard ride back.  I went to bed before midnight and slept through the start of the new year.  It seemed a very quiet New Year's Eve in Nyaung U.  I did hear some fire crackers, but slept through any that went off at midnight.

I got a late start the next morning and biked back to Myinkaba, about a 40 minute ride with stops for photographs here and there.  I stopped first at Manuha Paya in the village.  It dates from 1059 but has been modernized.  Inside are Buddhas encased in very tight chambers.  Three sitting Buddhas are at the front and a reclining Buddha is in a long, tight chamber in the back.  One of the sitting Buddhas was covered with pigeon droppings.  One pigeon sat on his head and two others on his arm.

Nearby is Nan Paya with excellent bas reliefs carved on the sandstone facing of the brick columns inside.  A three-faced Brahma is the main character, giving rise to speculation that it was a Hindu temple.  Others speculate that a Buddha stood in the center, with Brahma paying homage.  Other bas reliefs are of ogres with flowers streaming from their mouths.  This is an early temple with small windows, but you can use a shaft of light to reflect off your body and light up a panel of the bas reliefs.  A flashlight also helps.  Further south is Abeyadana Paya, an 11th century temple named for the Bengali wife of a king.  It, too, had excellent murals, some of the best. 

From there I biked south to New Bagan.  In 1990 the government moved all the people who had lived in Old Bagan to this new town.  I visited a stupa and shrine at the town's north end and then had lunch in town about 1.  After lunch I biked further south to Lawkananda Paya, an 11th century temple standing on the river above Bagan's old port.  It is now gilded and affords good river views.  Nearby are two unrestored stupas whose lower parts were excavated in 1905, leading to the discovery of vaulted chambers with unglazed terracotta panels of Jataka scenes, which were interesting.  It was also nice to see some unrestored stupas.

I biked further south, about a half mile out of town to Sittana Paya, a very large bell shaped stupa of brick.  At its southwest corner is a large hole leading into what I was told is a U shaped corridor.  I went in just partially, as I wasn't allowed to wear my sandals inside and the floor was very rough, full of bricks and debris.  I did see a few bats.  You have to take off your footwear to enter Bagan's temples and, in fact, temples all over Burma.  The problem is that so often the floors are rough and dirty.  I always seemed to be stepping on sharp pebbles and, one time, a sharp thorn.  There were bamboo ladders leading up to the upper levels, but I wasn't allowed to ascend.  Pity, as there would have been great views.

It was now past 3:30 and time to head back.  It took me about 15 minutes to bike back to Myinkaba to see two temples I had missed on my first go through.  Somingyi Kyanug is a brick monastery with good views from the top.  Two friendly girls from a nearby village were on the top and fun to talk to.  Across the road is Nagayon, with a Buddha sheltering under a naga (snake) and poor paintings in the dark corridors.  Just east was a temple you could climb, with fair views.

By then it was about 5 and I started to bike back, stopping about 15 minutes later at the temple where I had watched the sunset after my second day of temple exploring.  Only a few tourists watch the sunset from the top of that temple, so it is relatively peaceful.  The sun set behind the hills, not the haze, on the other side of the Irrawaddy at 5:37.  At the Bagan Thande Hotel I saw a chart with the sunset (and sunrise) times for every day of the year, with sunset ranging from about 5:30 in December to almost 7 in June.  That was my last sunset in Bagan.  I hadn't planned on staying as long as I did there, but I certainly enjoyed biking to and around all those temples on the plain.  In 1994 I think I had spent only two days here.