February 19-26, 2014: Ooty, Coonoor, and Mudumalai National Park

On the morning of the 19th the sun was out in Kodaikanal, though with lots of clouds in the sky.  After a short walk and a big breakfast I left on a 10:30 bus heading north on the steep road down the north side of the Palani Hills to the town of Palani, about 35 miles away.  The sky had clouded up by then, but the steep descent down the very narrow road was still very scenic.  For about an hour the bus skirted the mountainside, with views down to the plains and Palani 4000 feet below, before commencing the steep descent to the valley via fourteen hairpin turns (which were numbered).  It took us about two and a half hours to get to Palani, at about 1000 feet elevation, so an almost 6000 foot descent from Kodaikanal.

In Palani I almost immediately caught a bus headed northwest to Coimbatore, 65 miles away.  The route was more or less flat, with low hills here and there, and dry.  We passed through the town of Pollachi, near a gap in the Western Ghats leading into Kerala.  The bus took about two hours and 45 minutes to reach Coimbatore, a big city of one and a half million people.  I took a crowded city bus through town until getting a bus for the final 20 miles north to Mettupalaiyam at the southern foot of the Nilgiri Hills.  Arriving about 5:30, I walked to the railway station to ask about getting a train ticket for the steam train up into the hills the next morning.  I was told that there were no seats left, but that I should come the next morning at 4:30 to get a general ticket.  I did get to watch the steam locomotive, which had arrived from the hills just a short while before, pull out of the station and head into a shed for the night.  The station listed its altitude at 325 meters, so about 1066 feet.

I decided not to get up early the next morning to try to get a ticket, especially since there was no assurance of a seat.  I decided to take the bus up to Ootacamund, now renamed Udhagamandalam, though called Ooty by everyone.  Busses go every 15 minutes for the more than 6000 foot climb up to Ooty in the hills, but the first two after my arrival at the bus station were overfull.  I finally got a seat on the 10:30 bus, with dirty windows, up the steep road into the Nilgiri Hills and to Ooty, 30 miles and many hairpin turns away. ("Nilgiri" means "blue hills," so it is a little redundant to call them the Nilgiri Hills.)  The road up passed through beautiful forest, but was busy with traffic.  The sky was cloudy, with clouds obscuring the peaks in places.  We trailed and eventually overpassed several trucks full of gravel or bricks.  We reached tea plantations after about 4500 feet and reached the town of Coonoor at about 5600 feet after almost an hour of travel.   Though the train and road routes more or less parallel each other, I saw the train tracks for the first and only time as we passed through Coonoor.

We kept rising from Coonoor, though less steeply, and about an hour and fifteen minutes after leaving Mettupalaiyam on the plains reached Ooty in its little valley high in the hills.  Ooty is at 7228 feet elevation (at the railway station) and now sprawls unattractively all over its little valley and beyond, with over 100,000 people.  The first British planters arrived in 1818, when these hills were populated only by pastoral hill tribes, including the Todas, now almost invisible in these hills.  The planters grew rich growing tea and other crops and Ooty became the favored hill station in the south of India, known as “Snooty Ooty” because of the snobbism of its inhabitants.  The railroad was built from Mettupalaiyam to Coonoor from 1886 to 1899, and then the less steep portion from Coonoor up to Ooty from 1905 to 1908.

It was overcast and a little chilly in Ooty as I checked into a colonial era hotel and then walked to the train station to see about getting the train the next day or so down to Mettupalaiyam.  The train down leaves Ooty every day at 2 p.m.  I watched the train leave at 2 and made some inquires about getting a ticket for the next day.  I was told by the unhelpful staff to come back the next day at noon.  I walked to the busy and now ugly town center, with an intersection named Charring Cross, and then up to a national park office to reserve a room in Mudumalai National Park, north of Ooty.  From there I walked up to St. Stephen’s Church, built in 1830 with ceiling timbers said to be from one of Tipu Sultan’s palaces.  I checked out the plaques inside the church and the tombstones in the large cemetery overgrown with weeds on the hillside behind the church.  Nearby are a few old colonial buildings, no longer in very good shape, that give you some idea how quaint Ooty must have looked in colonial times.  I walked a little further towards the Club, social center of colonial Ooty, but couldn’t see it up a private road.  Finally, I walked down to dinner in the center and back to my hotel, about a half hour walk from the center.  At over 7000 feet, it was cold at night, but I slept warmly under three blankets. 

The next morning was sunny and, after a good breakfast at my hotel, I walked to nearby St. Thomas Church, with “1867” engraved on what I guess is its cornerstone.  It sits on a low hill overlooking Ooty’s man made lake, with a large cemetery all around it.  I looked around the graveyard and inside the church and made my way back to the train station before noon to see about getting a ticket.  I watched the train arrive from Mettupalaiyam before noon and was told I could buy a ticket for the 2 p.m. train down, but with no assurance of a seat.  I met two other tourists, however, who told me they had obtained seats at a travel agency about five minutes walk away. 

As I sat on a bench in the station pondering my options, an English guy living in Ibiza, whom I had met a year ago at Honey Valley in Coorg (nearby, in southern Karnataka) came up and said hello.  He and another guy, an American, had just arrived on the train from Coonoor, where they were staying.  He had bought a Royal Enfield motorcycle in Goa and was motorcycling through the Ghats.  I decided not to chance the 2 p.m. train and instead spent the early afternoon with Tim and Dirk as we walked to the travel agency and sat in a small restaurant.  They eventually left to see a little of Ooty, while I was told by the travel agency guy to come back two days before I wanted to take the train and he could get me one of the taktal tickets sold the day before the journey.   I had already made reservations at Mudumalai, so couldn't take the train trip in two day's time.  

By late afternoon it was cloudy as I walked up to Ooty’s botanical park, established in the 1840’s.  It ranges up a steep slope at the eastern end of the valley and may have once been considerably more appealing, but now is full of litter and hordes of noisy Indians, including adolescents running around screaming, apparently just for the fun of it.  I walked through the trees up the slope and then down, and then back to the center for dinner, reaching my hotel just before dark at 7.

The next morning was cloudy and chilly.  After breakfast and a chat with the hotel manager, a Bahai born in Yazd in Iran, but raised in Ooty and now with children in Seattle, I walked to the train station.  I left on the 12:15 train down to Coonor, less than 12 miles away, but an hour trip, and costing only 5 rupees in second class.  The Ooty-Coonor route uses not the steam locomotives but diesel ones.  The sky was still cloudy and the trip did not seem to me all that scenic, perhaps because I was in a carriage full of screaming Indians, though only a few were children.  And they screamed not only in the tunnels.  We passed tea plantations and, besides pine trees, lots of eucalyptus trees introduced by the British from Australia. 

From the train station in Coonoor, at 5614 feet elevation, I took an auto rickshaw up the hillside about 250 feet higher and tried to check into a 150 year old colonial building now a hotel, called the YWCA Wyoming Guest House, with a beautiful front sitting room full of pictures of Jesus.  There seem to be lots of Christians in the Nilgiri Hills.  I saw lots of churches, recently built ones.  The YWCA had no room for me, so I checked into a nearby modern and more expensive hotel.  After lunch there I walked down to the YWCA and spent the rest of the afternoon there, sitting in the big front room reading the newspaper and later chatting with a guy from San Francisco.  Tim and another guy, an American, also traveling through India on a Royal Enfield motorbike, were also staying there, and we all chatted on the front porch  until dark before going to dinner, traveling by their motorbikes down the steep road to the town center and then back.

The next morning I walked down to the YWCA and was able to check into a room in that wonderful old building.  I ate breakfast out on the front porch.  The morning was sunny and from the gardens in front of the hotel I could look down the hill into the town center and watch the steam train arriving from Mettupalaiyam about 10:30.  I could see it, after arriving, disengage from the carriages to be replaced by the diesel engine for the final ascent to Ooty.   Because the slope of the tracks between Mettupalaiyam and Coonor is so steep (a gradient of as much as 1:12.5, that is one foot of ascent over twelve and a half feet of distance, compared to 1:40 between Coonoor and Ooty), bars with cogs of metal teeth are in place between the rails that connect with the locomotive’s driving wheels.  Otherwise, I guess the train would slip off the tracks on the steep grades.  Because of this design, only the original locomotives built specially for this purpose can be used, and that is why the Mettupalaiyam-Coonoor route is the only steam locomotive route remaining in India.  I guess once the old steam locomotives wear out, that will be the end of it, unless new ones are specially built.

I spent the sunny morning at the hotel chatting with the other guests and then had lunch there.  Before the train from Ooty down to Mettupalaiyam arrived about 3 I walked down to the train station to see the train arrive and watch the steam locomotive being readied and then coupled to the carriages.  Before the train left about 3:30 I walked down the road a few hundred feet to see it come around a bend as it leaves town.  Of course, I noticed the bars with cogs of metal teeth running down between the meter wide tracks.  After the train passed, blowing its romantic steam whistle and hissing lots of steam, I walked back up to the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon there.  After a sunny day, it clouded up about 5.  To my surprise, in the late afternoon there was a gaur, also called an Indian bison, sitting at the edge of the tea plants on one side of the sloping garden.  These gaur are huge, the world’s largest cattle.  They are wild animals and can be very dangerous, known to kill people. 

I was up before 7 the next morning, another sunny morning.  All four of us foreigners were leaving that morning, though I would have stayed another day at that wonderful hotel if I hadn't had reservations for that night at Mudumalai.  After breakfast, the other three headed south, out of the Nilgiris, but I took the bus north to Ooty at 9 a.m.  The hour long ride seemed much more scenic in the sunshine than it had on my first trip up in cloudy weather.  In Ooty I went to the travel agency where I hoped to get a train ticket, but it was closed.  However, at the train station I was able to buy a second class ticket for 30 rupees (50 cents) for the train down to Mettupalaiyam in two days’ time.  Happy that I at last had a guaranteed seat on the train down to Mettupalaiyam, I left Ooty on a bus to Theppakadu, the entry point for Mudumalai National Park.  The bus was bound for Mysore in southern Karnataka, a five hour trip.  Leaving Ooty, at first it traveled northwest at over 7000 feet elevation and then down to somewhere over 6000 feet, passing lots of pine and eucalyptus trees.  The route was scenic, though with some ugly development here and there.  The road was rough and slow, with lots of twists and turns.  There were tea planations near Ooty and even more just as we started our steep descent down the northern slopes of the Nilgiri Hills, coming down to the town of Gudalur at about 3000 feet elevation in the hilly valley below.  We had great views of the valley as we descended. 

From Gudalur it was another ten miles northeast to Theppakadu, a crossroads just inside Mudumalai National Park.  The hilly, dry countryside was covered with teak trees, mostly barren of leaves in the dry season.  Arriving about 1:15, after a two and a half hour bus ride from Ooty, I walked to the room I had reserved about ten minutes’ walk from the crossroads and checked in.  It was surprisingly nice, one of four rooms in a little building next to a babbling river.  It had a comfortable bed and hot water, all for only 780 rupees, less than $13, a night.  A sign at the hotel listed its elevation as 878 meters, about 2880 feet. 

The only way to travel through the park itself is on minibus tours, so at 2 p.m., when the park office opened, I walked up to it and signed up for the first bus, which left at 3.  They gave me the seat in front for the hour long excursion that headed at first back along the highway the way I had come and then looped back on a dirt and gravel track.  We saw a peacock and several langur monkeys and chital (spotted deer), plus two big gaur (Indian bison).  The dry, hilly countryside was scenic, full of mostly leafless teak trees.  Near the end we passed a big, tusked male elephant with chains around one of its legs.  Through its trunk it snorted dirt it had scooped up with its trunk over its back

The minibus safaris cost only $2-3, so I took another one that left at 4:30, again with the front seat.  This one took a different route, heading first on the highway north up to almost the border with Karnataka before looping back on a dirt and gravel road, taking about 45 minutes in all.  We didn’t see anything until near the end, when we saw about ten gaur together, a few of those massive beasts running.  Soon after we saw a small herd of spotted deer, the males with impressive antlers, and a peacock. 

Back at the park headquarters, they feed the domestic elephants at the end of the afternoon, and I watched that.  There were five of them, two females, two males, and one small one, a male, I think.  All had chains around their legs.  While waiting for dinner, one of the males peed, sending out a torrent of urine.  Afterwards his penis dangled down between his legs and it was, not surprisingly, huge.  I guess I had never seen an elephant penis before.  It must have been at least two feet long. 

The elephants were fed by their keepers by hand with great big lumps, bucket sized, of a mixture of rice, millet, sugar, and some other stuff.  The caretakers placed these big lumps of food directly into their mouths.  Later they were given whole cocoanuts and stalks of sugar cane.  In the background grazed a few spotted deer, while wild pigs and peacocks and peahens moved in closer hoping to get any scraps the elephants dropped.  It was all very interesting to watch.  I was surprised at how tame the wild pigs seemed, getting close to us tourists, though never too close. 

After the feeding, the elephants were mounted by their mahouts and ridden away into the forest to wherever they spend the night.  I watched them walk away, loping into the forest, and then watched the sun setting through the trees atop a hill.  Walking back to my hotel, one of the male elephants, now carrying a big bundle of grass, came towards me and passed me.  It must have crossed the river.  It spent the night at the little settlement, just a few houses, right next to the highway.  Heading back to my hotel, I walked along the river, passing a rock filled spot where women had been washing in the afternoon.  One woman was still there fishing with a pole.  I passed a tree full of langurs, maybe 10 or 15 of them.  Getting back to my hotel just before dark at 7, I had a terrible dinner there, but did have hot water for a bucket bath before bed.  I kept hearing scurrying above the ceiling in my roof.  I had seen a gecko in my bathroom, so I hoped the scurrying was done by geckos or other lizards rather than, say, rats.  I slept well in that comfortable and quiet room, though an Indian family of about ten arrived in the evening and took one or maybe two of the other rooms, fortunately on the other side of the entry hall from where my room was located.  

I was up the next morning about 6 and about 6:30 walked up to the booking office for the minibus safaris.  I was the first one there.  The tree I had seen full of langurs the evening before was still full of langurs, so they must have spent the night there.  Near the booking office a flame of the forest tree, leafless but covered with big and bright orange red blossoms that do look like flames, was full of birds gathering their pollen or nectar.  I watched the sun rise through trees on a hill to the east a little before 7 and then watched macaques climb the flame of forest tree to eat the flowers, dropping petals and sometimes whole flowers.  They were interesting to watch, which was a good thing, because I had to wait until 8 before we had enough people to depart on the minibus safari.  By then it was cloudy and a little chilly.  We took the route we had taken on my second trip the afternoon before.  We saw some spotted deer near the highway, but nothing on the gravel and dirt road until the end, when we saw some more spotted deer, langur monkeys, and a peacock displaying his feathers. 

After the almost hour long trip I walked back to my hotel and had breakfast (omelet and dosas, much better than dinner) about 10, after the big Indian family had finished.  They had thoughtfully brought horns so the children could blow them in the forest.  After breakfast I walked around, crossing the river on a cement bridge no longer used by vehicles because the embankment on one end is eroded away.  Also, a big tree trunk, partly hacked away for firewood, lies atop the bridge, solid cement except for several culverts to allow the water to flow through.  The river is shallow and about 40 or 50 feet wide, with lots of rocks and a few little grassy islands.  I heard woodcutters up the slope on the other side and so walked up through the grass and trees towards them.  The sun came out.  One woodcutter warned me that I would be fined for being there if caught, so I walked back, stopping at a tall flame of the forest tree near the river.  Besides chirping birds of at least two different species, there were about 15 langur monkeys in the tree eating the flowers.  I sat in the shade of another tree and watched them, usually with my binoculars, for over an hour.  They would eat a while and then find a comfortable spot for a snooze, some of them huddling against others.   The sun was now hot, but I was fine in the shade, with an occasional cool breeze.  Women from the little settlement next to the highway kept coming by, carrying bundles of wood, or sometimes whole logs, balanced on their heads on the way down.  I got a few shy smiles from them.

I walked back to my hotel about 1 p.m. and sat in front of my room overlooking the river.  Soon a bus full of school kids arrived to eat lunch right in front of me, at a spot overlooking the river.  I, of course, became the center of attention, with the girls being shy and polite and the boys much less so.  After they left, macaque monkeys arrived to eat what they could find of the rice dropped during lunch.  Several had very small babies clinging to their undersides.  I sat in front of my room on that sunny afternoon until about 4 watching the activity along the river.  Besides the monkeys right in front of me, I could watch on the other side of the river spotted deer grazing and at least one wild pig walk by.  I also watched one of the work elephants being ridden downriver by its mahout. 

Before 5 I walked to the crossroads and left on a jeep safari I had arranged for 700 rupees, about $11.  Jeeps aren’t allowed in the park, but you can take them to areas just outside the park that often have animals.  We drove the four miles or so southeast to the small town of Masinagudi, just outside the park boundary, with great views on the way of the towering Nilgiri Hills to the south.  In the late afternoon and not illuminated by the sun, they did look somewhat blue.  From Masinagudi we headed northeast on a road along the Moyar River, traveling another four miles or so towards the Karnataka border.  In the late afternoon wildlife is often seen along the river, I had been told, and that made sense to me.  There was a lot of brush along the road, though, and that made wildlife spotting difficult.  There were only a few other jeeps doing the same thing.  We did spot a small elephant, mostly hidden by the bushes.  He or she must have had a mother around somewhere, but we didn’t see her.  We also spotted a few spotted deer, langur monkeys, wild pigs, and peacocks and peahens.  We reached a small temple on a cliff edge, with views towards Karnataka, just beyond the unseen river below, and then retraced our route back to Masinagudi.  On the way back we spotted a group of sambar deer, dark brown deer larger than spotted deer, plus spotted deer, wild pigs, and two big gaur mostly hidden by the bushes.  We headed back to Theppakadu from Masinagudi in the dusk, reaching my hotel just after dark about 7. 

The next morning I was up about 6 and walked out at first light.  I spent the morning around the riverside.  In the early morning light, before sunrise, lots of birds were chirping.  I watched a herd of maybe 20 chital (spotted deer) cautiously cross the 40 to 50 foot wide shallow river from a little downriver on my side to the other side, where they grazed on the grass.  Among them was one antlered buck, who seemed to be watching over the others.  I also watched a group of macaque monkeys cross the river via rocks a little upstream of the cement bridge and then search for food along the bank.  Two of them crossed much later than the others and took a different route across, with fewer exposed stones to hop across.  They got quite wet as they hit the water just before the far bank of the river.  A little later, on rocks downstream from the bridge, I watched several of the taller, thinner, more graceful langur monkeys cross the river from the other side to my side.  Some of them came at almost full speed, hopping quickly and expertly across the rocks to reach the other side.  I walked around and sat here and there, really enjoying the morning by the river.  Just before breakfast around 8, a male elephant and his mahout stopped by the river, the mahout washing the elephant before they rode off on the other side of the river.  

After breakfast I sat here and there on the low cement wall in front of the hotel and walked up and down on the rise overlooking the river.  A peacock came up the river bank and strolled right past me. I watched a spotted deer carefully cross the river below  from the other side to my side and then climb up the bank and disappear into the brush.  I was surprised to see it do so, as all the other deer were still grazing on the other side.  It came out of the bushes near me and looked directly at me for quite a while.  It turned its head and then looked again at me before turning its head again.  Then it disappeared into the bushes, but no longer ascending the bank.  I walked a bit downriver and saw an adult spotted deer and a fawn crossing the river to the other side, though I couldn't tell if the adult was the one that had come close to me.  I sat on a rock bench on the rise above the river downriver a bit, where several macaque monkeys arrived, some with little babies clinging to their undersides.  I sat quietly and the mothers and babies seemed quite relaxed, the little, bald babies leaving their mothers and wrestling with each other.  The mothers groomed one another. One of the macaques, perhaps a male, walked within two feet of me and then sat with his back to me.  One of the larger males had found a huge carrot and was chomping away at it.  Others looked on enviously, but didn't challenge him.  

Below, more langur monkeys were crossing the river, hopping rapidly on the rocks.  Eventually, they came up to and climbed a tree near me.  I walked up to the tree and they let me get close without climbing away. One had a skinny little baby clinging to its chest.  She sat on a limb next to another female and they let me get to within about three feet of them on the slope beside the tree.  They looked directly into my eyes, but didn't seem startled.  Langurs are such beautiful monkeys, especially compared to macaques, so that was pretty cool.  Usually, they are very shy, especially compared to macaques.  On the other hand, the langurs seem afraid of the smaller, but fiercer, macaques, who often chased them away.

I was enjoying watching the animals, the spotted deer still grazing on the other side of the river and the macaques and langurs all around me, but my hard to get train ticket on the 2 p.m. train from Ooty to the plains was for that afternoon's train.  I kept putting off my departure and would have stayed at least another day there if I didn't have that hard to get train ticket.  Eventually, soon after 10 I packed and walked to the crossroads, getting a share jeep to Masinagudi between 10:30 and 11.  From Masinagudi runs a very steep road to Ooty, called the "shortcut."  I left on a bus heading that way about 11:20.  The distance on this route to Ooty is only about 18 miles, but took us almost two hours.  A sign is Masinagudi says it is at 960 meters, about 3150 feet, elevation.  The bus at first traveled slowly through the dry, hilly, and scrub filled valley for about six miles over half an hour, and then began the steep ascent into the Nilgiri Hills.  It took us about an hour to make the steep climb of less than seven miles, climbing from about 3000 feet elevation to over 7000 feet elevation.  A big sambar buck crossed the road and then clumsily crashed into the brush on the other side of the road as we began our ascent.  There are 36 numbered hairpin turns on this climb, but the road is newly paved, with good barriers along the cliffs.  The views are tremendous, even with the clouds and haze. It was sunny at the top and in Ooty.  

In Ooty I had time for lunch before my 2 o'clock train.  My seat reservation was for an aisle seat, but the guy with the window seat, on the side of the train with the best views, wanted to change with me so he could sit nearer his wife and child, which, of course, was fine with me.  The sunny ride down to Coonoor, our train pulled by a diesel engine, was much more scenic and enjoyable than my previous train journey to Coonoor. (Going uphill, the locomotives push from behind rather than pull the carriages.  Going downhill, the locomotives are in front of the carriages, but with the front of the locomotive facing the carriages rather than facing in front.  So the locomotives travel backwards downhill.)  There was no screaming, despite all but five of the carriage passengers being Indian.  Passing forest and tea plantations, we reached Coonoor and stayed for about 20 minutes as they disconnected the diesel engine and substituted the steam locomotive.  We started down about 3:30.  There is something wonderful about a steam whistle.  Ours tooted loudly as we left.  Just below the station we stopped so the train personnel could check and make sure the locomotive was engaged with the teeth on the cogs on the metal bars aligned between the two rails. I certainly noticed how much steeper the slope of the tracks was from Coonoor down.  The scenery was beautiful in the sun, with tea plantations down to about 4500 feet elevation.  Below the tea estates we entered the narrow canyon through which the train descends, with great views of the steep mountains across the canyon and down to the plains.

At about 4:30, or an hour out of Coonoor, we stopped for about ten minutes at a little train station named Hillgrove, only six miles from Coonoor.  The locomotive was replenished with water from a pipe running out of an overhead tank while we could get out and stretch our legs.  There are supposed to be 11 stations along the 28 1/2 mile route from Ooty to Mettupalaiyam, but some are closed and even in ruins.  Wellington and Runnymede are the names of two of the stations.  We started down again passing steeply through the thick forest, with reddish orange flame of the forest trees occasionally appearing.  There are 16 tunnels and 19 to 31 bridges (my guidebooks differ), some of the bridges long curves along the cliffs.  The tunnels amplify the hiss of the steam and you can sometimes feel the droplets on your face.  There were only four carriages on our train, with mine the second to last.  The steam whistle echoing through the canyon was wonderful. Occasionally, but not often, we got views of the roadway down the hills.  The last five miles to Mettupalaiyam was relatively fast, with a much less steep descent of only about 300 feet over those last five miles, passing acres of betel nut trees and also lots of cocoanut palms.  We reached Mettupalaiyam at 5:45, having descended more than 6000 feet from Ooty. I stayed at the train station until about 6:30 watching the locomotive push the carriages onto a siding for the night and then, after decoupling, move into the steam locomotive shed, where workers checked it out in preparation for the next day's journey back up to Coonoor.  In Mettupalaiyam I checked into the same 250 rupee (about $4) room I had stayed in a week before, happy after the wonderful journey by train down from Ooty.  

February 13-18, 2014: Rameswaram, Madurai, and Kodaikanal

I left Karaikkudi about 11 on the morning of the 13th on a bus heading south to Rameswaram, 85 miles away.  The first three hours, heading due south to Ramanathapuram, were slow going through mostly scrub vegetation and small towns.  At Ramanathapuram we headed east for the final hour plus to Rameswaram.  Palm trees, both sugar palms and cocoanut palms, began to appear in much greater numbers as we got near the coast.  Rameswaram in on an island, and for the final part of the journey we crossed over a more than mile long bridge, with a railroad bridge right beside it.  A train was slowly going across.  To our north was the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka and to our south the Gulf of Mannar.  The water below the bridges looked quite shallow.  It was good to see the blue sea and feel the sea air.  Once over the bridge, it was another seven miles or so on the island before we reached Rameswaram sometime after 3.

Rameswaram has only about 40,000 people and is famous for its temple housing a lingam of sand said to have been built by Rama to worship Shiva, a god (Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu) worshiping a god.  The island and the rocks and sandbanks further east are believed to have been the route taken by Rama and Hanuman and their monkey army when they crossed to Lanka to rescue Sita from Ravana.  After Rama killed Ravana and rescued Sita, he was advised to worship Shiva in propitiation for killing Ravana, a brahmin.  (After all, Ravana, although the personification of evil, was a brahmin and it is a sin to kill a brahmin.  Too bad Rama hadn't had to kill a less important caste member.)  Rama allegedly sent Hanuman away to the Himalayas to get an appropriate lingam, but when he didn't get back in time, Rama made his own out of sand.  Hanuman later appeared with his, and both are said to be worshiped in the inner sanctum.

Rameswaram was also considered the southern end of holy India, one of the four holy directions of India.  Badrinath in the north I visited in November 2010, Dwarka in the west in February 2012, Puri in the east in November 2012, and now Rameswaram in the south in February 2014.

About 5 I walked around the temple compound, with the sea just to its east.  Pilgrims were bathing in the sea, part of the ritual of visiting the temple.  Big fishing boats were docked just offshore.  I think perhaps they are idle because Sri Lanka keeps impounding them for illegally fishing in its waters.  The large temple was originally Chola, but is now largely Nayak, from the 16th and 17th centuries.  Cameras aren't allowed inside.  The temple's most distinguishing features are its very long corridors running north and south of the sanctuary.  Each is about 675 feet long, with pillars on each side of the corridors, supposedly 1212 for each corridor.  Most are painted, though I have read the originals have mostly been replaced by cement replicas.  With those long corridors and many pillars, you do get a very interesting sense of perspective.  The other distinguishing feature of this temple is all the wet pilgrims.  There are 22 wells or small tanks of water scattered inside the temple, and pilgrims, all the women and many of the men fully clothed, parade in sequence from number 1 to number 22 to be doused with a bucket of water from the well, pulled up by a helpful man with a metal bucket attached to a rope.  The pilgrims are also supposed to drink a bit of the water from each well.  Showing a surprising preference for hygiene over cholera, the water smelled chlorinated.  The floors are wet from all the wet pilgrims, and so a little slippery, although there are lots of mats.  A unpainted gopura, with few figures, rises a little less than 150 feet over an inner wall.  At the largest of the 22 tanks, in a courtyard to the west, I could see an almost full moon rising over the gopura.  I walked around until about 7.  There weren't a lot of pilgrims. As usual here in south India, non-Hindus cannot enter the sanctuary, so I didn't get to see Rama's or Hanuman's lingams.

Maybe it was the sea air, or the previous day's long bus ride, but I slept until after 8 the next morning.  When I did get out and again walked around the temple and to the sea, there were lots of pilgrims out and about. Many were entering the eastern gate of the temple and many were at the small beach at the sea shore. Maybe a hundred or so were in the sea, including lots of old women and men, some having a little trouble keeping their feet.  Priests were conducting pujas on the beach and the concrete platform adjacent to the beach.  About 20 small sand lingams, some sprinkled with red powder, had been built on the sand, and I watched one man build one.

I walked away from the bathers, heading further east along the sea for a while, and then turned back and returned to watch the bathers some more.  A little later I went back into the temple again, enjoying the very colorfully painted pillars and statues and the long corridors.  It was also very interesting to watch the pilgrims getting soaked.  I have read that a pilgrimage to Rameswaram is second to a pilgrimage to Varanasi.

I had hoped to take a bus a further 12 or so miles to the far eastern end of the island, and the start of "Adam's Bridge" or "Rama's Bridge" to Sri Lanka, but I was told there no longer is a bus, only expensive jeeps for rent.  So at 2 I boarded a bus headed northwest to Madurai, about a hundred miles away.  We recrossed the bridge and headed inland on a fast bus, reaching Madurai in a little over three and a half hours, although it took me almost another hour to find the right bus from the bus station to the city center and find and check into my hotel.  Maduria is a big city, with almost a million people.  I found a non-veg restaurant and had tandoori chicken and butter naan and, for desert, much to my surprise, black current ice cream.  After dinner I saw a religious procession come through the crowded streets, with a chubby brahmin priest being carried on a silver palanquin.  People seemed to be giving him stuff, like articles of clothing, to bless.  I walked around Madurai's big Meenakshi Temple after dinner.  Lots of people were out and about on the four mostly pedestrian streets abutting the rectangular temple.  Pilgrims were still streaming into the temple shortly before the listed closing time of 9 p.m., but I didn't go in.

The next morning I again walked around the temple periphery and then went in.  A great hall, now mostly empty but with some stalls, stands in front of the temple and has some wonderfully carved pillars.  The security is heavy entering the temple and you are checked rigorously.  I couldn't take my camera in, and they also prohibited my flashlight.  You also have to wear long pants and, of course, go barefoot.  I walked all around inside, staying until noon. This temple, too, dates mostly from the Nayak era in the 16th and 17th centuries.  There are hundreds, probably thousands, of stone statues inside, many of them very well done and very interesting.  The temple has two sanctuaries, both of which cannot be visited by non-Hindus.  One of the sanctuaries is for Shiva, but the principal one is for Meenakshi, which means "fish eyed."  The story is that a king wanting a son instead had a daughter born with three breasts.  She was otherwise beautiful.  "Fish eyed" in Chola poetry means "beautiful."  While one doesn't normally think of a fish's bulging eyes as beautiful, what the Cholas were referring to are eyes shaped with the curve of a fish's body.  In any event, Meenakshi was prophesied to lose her third breast when she met her husband, which duly happened when she met Shiva, and they were subsequently married.

The temple was full of pilgrims, crowding the sanctuaries and smaller shrines and altars.  Some were prostrating on the stone floors.  A temple elephant with her forehead painted was available for blessings.  Elsewhere a cow with fantastically curved horns and with its back covered with a blanket was on display. There was a lot to see, both the pilgrims and the fantastically carved pillars and statues, including Shiva and Kali in a dance competition.  Late in the morning some men dragged out from little rooms a golden cow and a silver cow.  Thick bamboo poles were used to carry them around the temple grounds.  Near the main eastern entrance is another of those Thousand Pillared Halls, this one now converted into a museum and with 985 pillars, 20 or 30 of which are fantastically carved.  I wonder why they didn't go ahead and build the 15 more needed to make an even 1000.

I had visited the Meenakshi Temple in 1979 and remembered it as dark and dank, humid and smoky.  It didn't seem that way this trip, though still very interesting.  In 1979 I arrived in Madurai after a long day's bus ride from Madras, now Chennai.  It took me more than a month on this trip to get to Madurai from Chennai, with eleven stops on the way.

When I finally got outside just after noon, the golden cow was being paraded on the street on the eastern side of the temple.  It disappeared while I was picking up my sandals, camera, and flashlight.  I headed to lunch and then read the newspapers in the early afternoon.

About 3 I walked to the 17th century Nayak palace, said to have been designed by an Italian.  Only about a quarter of it remains, as the original king's grandson tore much of it down to build his own palace in Tiruchirappali.  What remains is impressive, with several cavernous halls and courts, though apparently largely remodeled by the British in the 19th century.  A couple of drawings of it from the 1790's made clear how much renovation the British did.  A lot of pigeon poop stained the floor here and there.

I got back to my hotel and sat on its rooftop for about an hour until it got dark, with a great view of the temple and its many colorful gopuras.  There are twelve in all, with the highest ones at the four entrances through the outer walls at the cardinal directions.  The highest is about 170 feet high and is said to have more than a thousand figures on it.  I wonder how often they paint all the figures.  Over the two sanctuaries are low golden vimanas.

After dinner, about 8, I returned to the temple, again very crowded.  Sometime after 9, as they do every night, brahmin priests carried an image of Shiva on a palanquin out from his sanctuary.  It was housed in a small silver casket, with purple cloth hiding the image within, and accompanied by brahmins carrying censors full of smoky incense, fanned by priests carrying fans and whisks.  The procession reached the entrance of Meenakshi's sanctuary, where it paused for quite a while while a drummer and an Indian style oboist played, with lots of incense filling the air.  Finally, Shiva in his palanquin was taken into Meenakshi's sanctuary to spend the night with her.  The oddest thing about this ceremony is that shortly before it started, large numbers of elderly foreigners showed up to watch, and in fact the palanquin was largely surrounded by elderly foreigners waving their cell phone cameras.  (Oddly, the temple authorities permit cell phone cameras, but not other cameras.)  Shiva safely inside with Meenakshi, I noticed the big doors connecting to the Shiva part of the temple were now shut, and we were all ushered out towards the eastern entrances.

The next morning I headed into the temple about 8:30.  The guard decided that my compass was too dangerous to come with me.  The temple was again very crowded and I wandered around until after 10.  In the afternoon I took an auto rickshaw across the city's almost dry river to the Gandhi Museum.  It was not very good, though, the usual poor quality photos and baffling prose.  The highlight is the blood stained dhoti he was wearing when he was assassinated.  I think I read that Madurai got it because it was in Madural that he started wearing khadi, homespun cloth.

The next morning I took a short walk near the temple, ate four idli for breakfast, and then took an auto rickshaw to the bus station.  I had to wait forty five minutes for my bus to leave, by far the longest I've had to wait on this trip to India.  Usually, they leave in five or ten minutes, a very efficient bus service.  My bus to Kodaikanal in the Palani Hills, a branch of the Western Ghats, left at 10:30.  For the first hour and a half we headed northwest about 40 miles through gently rising terrain with hills visible.  According to my altimeter, we rose from about 300 or 400 feet elevation in Madurai to about 1000 feet.  We then turned onto a narrow road climbing the side of a mountain to begin our final 30 miles to Kodaikanal.  The lower reaches were quite dry.  I noticed lots of yellow bamboo.  Views down to the valley below were good, despite the clouds and haze.  As we rose on that narrow road without much traffic, the jungle got greener and greener, with monkeys along the road here and there.  The sun did come out now and then, but mostly it was cloudy. It took us more than two hours to cover that 30 miles and reach Kodaikanal at about 6500 feet elevation.  We arrived a little before 2:30 and it was cloudy and a little chilly.

This area was apparently first surveyed by the British in 1821, with no settlement until 1845 when American missionaries from Madras, now Chennai, established a place to escape the heat and disease of the coast. Apparently, the mission, established in 1834, lost six missionaries to disease in its first years.  So Kodaikanal, at least initially, was an American, not British, hill station.  It remained small until about a hundred years ago, when a new road was built, enabling people to get from the railhead to the town during daylight hours.

I found a good hotel and then went for a late lunch, enticed by a Subway shop where I very much enjoyed my BMT sandwich and an oatmeal raisin cookie.  I walked down to the lake, about 60 acres in area with five or so arms, and walked around its three mile circuit.  The tourists there were almost all Indians, but it didn't seem very crowded.   April to June, when it is very hot on the plains before the monsoon, are the high season.  I've seen more young foreign backpackers here than I have seen all the last month in Tamil Nadu. The sky was still mostly cloudy, with a few appearances by the sun.  By about 6 I climbed up from the lake and took a walk on a little path along the cliffs called Coaker's Walk.  On a clear day they say you can see Madurai. Thick clouds hid Madurai and much else, but you could still see down the valley a ways.  I checked my thermometer and it registered only 64 degrees just before nightfall.

After a cold night, I got up the next morning between 8 and 8:30.  It was very foggy outside.  About 9:30 I walked to breakfast in the drippy, cold fog and then retreated to my room to read until lunchtime.  The low fog had lifted but the sky was still overcast when I went to lunch a little before 1.  After lunch I walked to a viewpoint, but the clouds were too thick to see anything.  I started walking west from town along a road, with ferns and pines and even lots of eucalyptus along the way.  It was fairly scenic, but with lots of litter here and there.  Eventually, I followed the road about four miles to the southwest to a viewpoint called Pillar Rocks.  I kept hoping the sky might clear a bit, but it only got foggier as I approached Pillar Rocks.  I not only had no view, I couldn't even see the Pillar Rocks, granite pinnacles said to rise 400 or 500 feet from the hillside.

I walked back the way I had come and saw lots of macaques and even four gaur, Indian bison, along the way.  The gaur were behind a fence in a forest preserve.  I got back to town about 5:30.  The sky had brightened a bit on the way back, but by the time I reached town the view from Coaker's Walk was fogged in.  I walked down to the lake, ate some of the fairly good chocolate sold here, and then went back to my hotel before dark.

February 3-12, 2014: Thanjavur, Trichy, and Chettinad

I spent the morning of the 3rd in Kumbakonan before leaving for Thanjavur.  About 7:30 I walked to the very large Mahamakam Tank, said to have been filled with the contents of the pot shattered by Shiva's arrow.  Ornate little structures painted white stand on each of the four sides, five of them to each side.  Only a few people were bathing in the tank, but I stayed a while and watched several pujas being conducted at the top of stairs leading to the water.  A lot of beggars were hanging around.

I walked next to the Nageshwara Swami Temple to see it again and to surreptitiously take photos of the magnificent Chola statues on the outside walls of the inner sanctum.  I'm not quite sure why you're not allowed to take photos of these statues, but the place was uncrowded and I had no trouble.  I headed next to the Sarangapani Temple again and spent some more time looking around there.

After lunch I took a bus southwest about 25 miles to Thanjavur, arriving about 2:30 after a trip of an hour and a quarter that passed through many little towns and not much rural area until the last part of the journey. Thanjavur, formerly known as Tanjore, is now a city of over 200,000 people, but a thousand years ago it was the capital of the Chola Empire  The great Chola Emperor Rajaraja I, who ruled from 985 to 1014, conquered the Cheras in what is now Kerala, and spread his empire even further, up to the Tungabhadra River in what is now Karnataka and even to the Maldives and northern Sri Lanka, commenced building in 1003 in Thanjavur the first monumentally sized temple in south India, much larger than the stone temples pioneered by the Pallavas.  In fact, the road signs directing you to it call it the "Big Temple," though officially it is the Brihadishwara Temple.  I got there soon after it opened for the afternoon at 4.

The temple, with its 200 foot high vimana, sits inside two sets of high walls, the outer massive fort walls built by the Nayaks six hundred years later  Two gopuras, decorated with figures but unpainted and relatively low, lead into the central walled enclosure, with two massive monolithic sculptured guardian figures standing on either side of the final gopura gateway.  I've read that in later centuries the height of temple gopuras increased and the height of vimanas decreased to protect the sanctuaries topped by vimana, surrounded by high walls, from the polluting views of outsiders.  In fact, until the past century untouchables, now called dalits, were not even allowed into Hindu temples.  In the big temple at Thanjavur is a signboard with a 1939 quote from Gandhi thanking the Raja of Tanjore, then custodian of the temple and several others in the area, for opening up the temples to untouchables.

The inner enclosure is huge, about 800 feet long and 400 wide.  The monumental temple in the center is almost entirely Chola, though the Nayaks or the later Marathas added a portico in front.  The temple has recently been cleaned of centuries of grime and the courtyard is part paved and part glass, and surprisingly clean and pleasant.  The place was crowded that afternoon.  I slowly walked along the wide courtyard around the central temple.  In front is a massive monolithic black basalt Nandi, 20 feet long and perhaps 12 feet high, on a plinth under a veranda with a painted ceiling.  It is also much later, dating from the Nayak era. In fact, there are about five other small temples surrounding the main one, only one of which was built by the Cholas. Some of them, too, are superbly decorated with sculpture.  The main temple has statues of gods in niches all along its outer walls.

Atop the 200 foot high vimana sits what looks like a single huge domed capstone.  Actually, it is said to be constructed of eight large stones weighing a combined 80 tons.  The speculation is that during construction an earthen ramp four miles long was built to reach the top and that elephants dragged the stones up to the pinnacle.  Along the inner wall of the courtyard run very long and attractive columned arcades.   The courtyard and the temples really make an attractive scene, especially nice in the late afternoon as the setting sun brought out the red tones in the stone.

Inscriptions in Tamil, and some in Marathi, cover much of the walls, both on the outside of the temple and on the walls of the huge courtyard.  Rajaraja was quite a detailed record keeper.  The inscriptions include a detailed list of the income provided for the temple and the hundreds of people working there, most famously the 400 devadasis, or temple dancers.  The inscriptions include the addresses of the houses provided for each one of them outside the temple.  "Devadasis" means "married to the gods," but from reports from later eras these devadasis, while maybe married to the gods, were available for rent by night to soldiers and others.

I eventually made my way through the two pillared halls from the eastern entrance of the temple towards the sanctuary. These two dark halls are relatively undecorated except for another pair of massive door keeper figures.  You can peer into the inner sanctum where, directly under the apex of the vimana, sits a 12 foot high lingam, decorated with three horizontal bands of silver and several garlands of colorful flowers.  Brahmin priests stood in front of the massive lingam conducting fire aartis for any worshipers who made their way to the sanctuary.

There are two levels of corridors that run along three sides of the inner sanctuary.  The lower one is covered with Chola frescoes, similar to those at Ajanta.  The upper one has stone bas reliefs showing 81 of the 108 classic dance positions, with 27 unfinished plaques.  The temple is said to have been completed in 1010, after only seven years of construction, but I guess some of the details weren't finished by then, and were left incomplete after the king's death in 1014.  Unfortunately, you aren't allowed into these two corridors.

Eventually, I found a place to sit at the southwest corner of the arcade along the courtyard walls and watched the vimana grow redder and redder with the setting sun.  Once the sun set, I walked around both outside and inside again until after it got dark.  As I walked by a puja being conducted outside at a little shrine near the south wall, a woman gave me a handful of delicious pomegranate seeds, a prasad from the puja.  Lights came on illuminating the temple, with a crescent moon descending behind it.  Quite a nice place. I left about 7:30.

I returned to the temple the next morning about 7:30.  It was cool and uncrowded and I wandered around until almost noon.  (It closes at 12:30 for the afternoon.)  Until 9 I just wandered around outside, then went inside to watch the 9 o'clock aarti when the priests open the curtain exposing the lingam.  Afterwards I spent quite a bit of time watching some pujas being conducted in the arcade along the south wall of the courtyard. The brahmin priests seemed particularly mellow at this temple.  At one puja was a plate filled with two bananas, rice, a mango, an apple, and a pomegranate, plus flowers.

The place was getting crowded by about 10 and I spent some time in the very informative interpretation center housed in a portion of the southern arcade.  It had photos of the big temple in Thanjavur taken in the 1955 and in 2005, and similar  photos of the big temple in Gangaikondacholapuram built by Rajaraja's son and successor Rajendra, so you could see how much reconstruction had occurred.  Not much, it seems, in Thanjavur; more, especially along the courtyard walls and the entry gate, at Gangaikondacholapuram. Rajendra, by the way, building on his father's conquest, expanded the Chola Empire not only to the Ganges but also to Sumatra, Java and other Indonesian islands.  You can certainly see the influence of Chola dance on Balinese dance.

I had brought a package of cookies with me and they served as my breakfast as I wandered around and sat here and there.  I watched the pujas some more at the southern wall, where worshipers were making and lighting lamps made of the halves of fruit and cocoanuts filled with ghee and cotton wicks.  I watched a closing ceremony at the little outdoor shrine next to the southern wall, at the end of which the priests drew a curtain in front of the idol.

I had been tired all morning, but still enjoyed wandering all around the temple.  I had a "meal," what south Indians call a thali, for lunch, served on a banana leaf, but not a very good one.  I am getting a little tired of the way Indians cook rice and their gloppy vegetables, though I suppose nobody cooks tastier gloppy vegetables than Indians.

About 2 I walked to the dilapidated royal palace built by the Nayaks and later renovated by the Marathas. Thanjavur went into a period of decline when Rajendra moved the capital to Gangakondacholapuram and subsequent Chola kings settled in other towns.  It revived under the Nayaks, first the governors under the Vijayanagar Empire in the early 16th century and then in power in their own right for about a century until 1685, when the Marathas invaded and took over.  They remained as kings until 1855, when an heirless king died and the British took formal control.  The British had already been the paramount power in the area for more than a half century.

The fort contains a colorfully painted, but dilapidated durbar hall, dating from the Maratha era, with painted statues of Hindu gods on the pillars and European looking angels on the walls. A portrait of a Maratha raja is painted on the wall.  The highlights, though, are a library showroom displaying part of the massive collection of an early 19th century raja, including Johnson's Dictionary and an early 1800's book illustrating Chinese tortures, and a gallery full of Chola bronzes, some quite spectacular.  I've read that most of the bronzes came from a trove dug up in the 1950's.  They had apparently been buried to prevent them from being plundered by Muslim invaders.  Elsewhere is a 92 foot long skeleton of a whale that was washed up at Tranquebar in 1955.  It was absolutely covered in pigeon poop.  Probably hadn't been cleaned since 1955.  I began sneezing, with a runny nose, that afternoon, and still felt tired.  I was afraid a cold was coming on.

I went to bed early and felt better the next morning  I had an idli breakfast and then walked to the big temple about 9, staying until 11:30.  It was much less crowded than the day before.  No pujas were going on in the arcade of the southern wall.  I enjoyed wandering around and sitting here and there, though again with the sniffles and a little tired.

For lunch I went to a fancy restaurant at a fancy hotel and had roast chicken in a mushroom sauce, with butter sauteed vegetables and french fries.  It was delicious, perfectly cooked and cost about $4.  Quite a surprise and a treat.

About 2 I boarded a bus heading west to Tiruchirappali, a trip of less than an hour and a half, mostly on a four lane highway.  We passed a small fort on a low rocky hill on the way.  Tiruchirappali (or Trichy, as everyone seems to call it) stands at the head of the Cauvery (or Kaveri) Delta.  The low rocky hills nearby stood out after days of the relentless flatness of the delta.  The city has close to a million people and on the way into town I caught sight of the Nayak era fort on a 250 foot high rock hill just south of the Cauvery.

I got a large comfortable room for 550 rupees, or about $9, a night in an old, ramshackle hotel with a nice courtyard.  It is said to be almost a century old.  Soon after 4 I took a city bus through the crowded streets of the city about two miles to near the base of the rock fort I had seen on the way into town.  It took a while to make my way through the crowded streets to the beginning of the steps leading up to the top.  The stairway is mostly enclosed, with at least a couple of gates as you enter the fort walls.  There is a big temple about halfway up, and a smaller modern one at the very summit of the almost pointed rock.  From the top you can see the bed of the Cauvery to the north.  The river did not seem to be flowing at all:  just large ponds of stagnant water.  The water must diverted by dams and canals further upstream.  The now mostly dry river bed is quite wide.  Beyond the river you can see the gopuras of two large temples maybe two miles away. To the west and not far from the rock fort stands a large church modeled after the church at Lourdes.  I watched the sun set (into haze, about 6:15) and then walked down and took a bus back to my hotel.

About 3:30 the next morning, after my third hot and restless night in a row, I finally had the sense to dig out my thermometer from my backpack and take my temperature, which was 101.4.  I wonder if I had had a fever for the past two days.  I had been hot and tired, but thought it was just because my room the first two nights in Thanjavur was stuffy and because India, with its constant filth, constant noise, and constant crowds, is always tiring. Plus temperatures had been warming up lately, with highs now in the low 90's and lows in the low 70's.  I took some Tylenol and spent the day in my room, mostly in bed.  I was tired, with body aches, sniffles, and a cough, but no stomach troubles.  About 6:30 in the evening I did go out to get bottled water and a few bananas to eat.

The next day I was better, with my temperature never rising above 99.3, but I spent another day in my room, much of it again in bed.  I still was quite tired.  I felt well enough to have a plate of chicken fried rice for dinner and slept well that night.

My temperature was back to normal all the next day, and I felt much better, though still a little tired.  I ate a wonderful cheese omelet, butter toast, and tea breakfast in the courtyard of my hotel.  I spent the day reading and at an internet cafe less than five minutes from my hotel.

After a three day hiatus I was back to sightseeing the next day.  About 9 I took a city bus north past the rock fort and over the mostly dry bed of the Cauvery River to Srigangam just north of the river, a trip through city streets of almost an hour.  I got out at the southern entrance of the massive Sri Ranganathaswami temple, honoring Vishnu and unusual in that it faces south.  It is composed of seven walled rectangular courtyards, 150 acres in all.  The highest of its 21 gopuras reaches 240 feet, and I think is the southern entrance one, built only in the 1980's.  The first three courtyards seem like city streets, with vehicles and lots of shops.  I had to leave my shoes at the fourth gopura and wall.  Just inside I could climb to the top of the wall for a look around.  The fifth courtyard just north is as far as non-Hindus can go, but I could see the sixth and seventh gopuras and the golden dome over the sanctuary, and I could look back south towards the four gopuras I had already passed under.  Beyond the golden dome I could see another line of gopuras to the north.  A high one rose to the east.

Back down in the fourth and fifth courtyards, full of pillared halls and lots of pilgrims, I looked all around. Most of this temple dates from the late 14th century, after a disastrous sacking in 1313.  On the east side of the fourth courtyard is a hall with pillars of beautifully carved horses and riders.  Just north is another Thousand Pillared Hall, this one in fact with almost a thousand pillars, 904, dating from the late Chola period, but closed to visitors.   (Usually, a thousand pillared hall just means it has a lot of pillars.)  The pillars in the hall are round and unadorned, really quite simple compared to all the others.  

In the fifth courtyard there is a large pillared hall right in front of the entrance into the sixth courtyard.  Lots of family groups were sitting on the floor, many with little girls with shaved heads with some sort of yellowish white paste spread over their shaved heads.  I was wondering why and finally found out.  One of the little girls, maybe two or three years old, was held by her father and several other relatives while a man used a needle to pierce her ears and then install gold earrings.  She didn't cry during the piercing, but cried just a bit when the first earring was installed.  Her mother quickly fed her a banana and she calmed down.

The shrines closed about 1, but you could stay inside the temple, and many people did, sitting on the floor and eating or sleeping.  Many brought food, but you could also buy food, and I bought two helpings of sweet pongal, hot rice cooked with sugar.  It was interesting watching all the people, and the carved pillars and other statuary were very interesting.

I stayed until about 3 and then took an auto rickshaw a mile or so east to the Sri Jambukeshwara Temple, a Shiva temple.  This is another large temple compound, though much smaller than the one I had come from.  It was much quieter.  It also is filled with beautifully sculpted pillars, with interesting and unusual figures.  There are five sets of walls, but non-Hindus aren't allowed into the innermost ones and the sanctuary.  This temple honors the element of water, with a lingam partially submerged in water.  I looked all around and enjoyed the place, staying about an hour and a half, and then took the bus back to my hotel.

The next morning a little before 10 I boarded a bus for a day trip south of Trichy.  I took the bus to Pudukkottai, about 30 miles to the south, a trip of about an hour and fifteen minutes.  This area is know as Chettinad, after the Chettiars, a caste that grew very wealthy during the Raj serving as colonial bankers. They are a merchant caste and initially grew wealthy in the 17th century handling trade between the coast and Madurai.  When the British came to dominate southern India, they spread their trading links in the 19th century to British colonies in Singapore and Burma, and soon throughout southeast Asia and even South Africa. I'm not sure why they in particular became so prominent in banking, especially as they come from such an out of the way area, but they plowed much of their wealth into fantastically decorated homes in their homeland.  The boom ended with World War II and independence, and many of the mansions are now derelict and semi-abandoned.

In Pudukkottai I headed to a museum in an old palace, but neither the museum contents nor the building were particularly interesting.  From Pudukkottai I retraced my route in part, taking a bus back north about ten miles to a series of rocky hills.  Getting off the bus, I started walking on a quiet country road to a temple on one of the hills, when a friendly young guy on a motorcycle stopped and offered to take me.  He didn't know where it was, but we asked several people and eventually he dropped me off at the base of the granite outcrop, just outside the little village of Natharmalai.  The low part of the outcrop was covered with a dozen or more very high haystacks, or rather stacks of rice stalks.  A woman was winnowing rice from chaff and rice still in the husk lay all over, in several places covering large areas on the rock.

To the west I could see the tower of the temple poking over the crest of the granite hill.  I walked through the stacks of rice stalks and up the solid rock slope, not a long nor steep climb, a climb of maybe 150 feet.  The views on the way were wonderful, of the harvested rice fields below and the rock hills in the distance. I reached the temple, said to date from the 10th century, and it was deserted.  It stands on a granite shelf below a steep escarpment.  I sat in the shade of the escarpment with two temple chambers cut into the escarpment and a mango tree growing nearby.  I ate some cookies and drank some water and eventually four Indian tourists showed up, followed by the doorkeeper who let us into the central temple, where there were traces of frescoes on the walls, and into the chambers cut into the escarpment, the larger one with twelve Shiva figures carved onto the rock.  I looked around and then walked a little farther with two young guys to a dargah, a Muslim grave in a cave now remodeled.  I wandered around a bit on the rocky hills.  The views were wonderful and the area almost deserted.  I walked back to the temple, looked around a again, and then sometime after 3 walked back the way I had come, stopping to watch the men and women working around the stacks of rice stalks.  A woman was still winnowing grain, while another one was sweeping the rice grains into piles.  People were very friendly, except for the doorkeeper who kept pestering me, but not the Indians, for a tip.

Eventually, I made my way to the road and watched an old woman herding cows.  It took me about 40 minutes to walk back to the highway, with lots of stops to watch things and take photos.  One guy walked by under a massive pile of rice stalks perched atop his head.  I got a bus back to Trichy about 4:30, an hour trip.

The next morning I finally left Trichy, after a final cheese omelet, buttered toast, and tea breakfast in the courtyard of my hotel.  It is cool there in the morning, with birds chirping, quite nice compared to the chaotic, noisy streets outside.  I jumped on a bus shortly before 10 and headed south about 55 miles to Karaikkudi, passing Pudukkottai again on the way.  As we left Pudukkottai we passed a big old palace that would have been much more interesting to visit than the museum.  About seven miles before Karaikkudi we passed through the narrow lanes of the little village of Kanadukathan, seemingly lined with a dozen or more derelict Chettinad palaces.

It took almost three hours to reach Karaikkudi and once there I had to take another bus from the new bus stand to the old one to get to a hotel recommended by the hotel folks in Trichy.  My guidebooks didn't have much information on Karaikkkudi.  The hotel proved to be a very nice one.  I rested a bit and then walked to lunch, finding a small hole in the wall biryani place that may have the best biryani I've had in India, with very hot (not spicy), moist rice with a piece of chicken and a hard boiled egg served on a banana leaf for all of 50 rupees, about 80 cents.  After lunch I went searching for an old Chettinad building called the Thousand Window Home, and found it, but it was closed and I was told it never opens.  I walked past other derelict old Chettinad mansions.  A caretaker at one told me it was built in 1942, but is in bad shape, the owners in America.  Another one now serves as a marriage hall, and a crowd of people were inside attending a wedding.  About 3:30 I walked back to my hotel, passing a textile shop featuring a signboard with not one, but two photos of Bill Gates, as if he had branched out from software to textiles.  I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in my comfortable hotel room reading the newspaper.

The next morning I took a bus back north about seven miles to the little village of Kanadukathan, full of Chettinad houses.  There are dozens of them lining the narrow streets, almost all in great disrepair.  A wedding ceremony, with guests from Chennai, was going on in one.  As I walked down a lane looking at the derelict houses, a brisk woman of about 35 invited me into one that was not so derelict, charging me 50 rupees to look around and another 50 for taking photos.  She told me it was 250 years old and that she lived in Chennai but came to Kanadukathan several times every year.  The ceiling above the long entry hall, she told me, is carved rosewood from Burma.  At either end of this long hall are wooden shutters that open up exposing Belgian mirrors, two at each end, decorated with silver, the mirrors making the hall seem so much longer.  The hall's black pillars are of Italian marble and the white walls covered with a smooth, cool glaze made of lime, egg whites, powdered shells, and a fruit.

She led me into an inner court with teak pillars and rosewood furniture, including two roll top desks.  Over the doors are carved wooden representations of the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, being showered by two elephants.  In fact, almost all the houses had Lakshmi prominently on their facades. A couple of houses had figures, both men and women, in European dress on their facades.  One man had a bowler hat, a cane, and a dog beside him.

A group of French tourists came into the house I had entered and were showed around.  During the past month or so of travel in this part of India, I have seen very few young backpackers; in fact, almost none. However, I have seen lots of older tourists, usually older than I, and mostly French.

I wandered around the village some more, looking at the old mansions. It was hot in the midday sun. Temperatures have been reaching about 95 degrees.  The biggest and seemingly best preserved building, the Raja's Palace, was closed.  I was told it has been closed for four years.  I did go into a nice old building now a hotel, with a big entry hall with overstuffed chairs in one half and dining tables in the other half.  At either end of the hall are portraits of the founder of the clan and of his second son, who built the mansion.  I looked around, finding three courtyards.  Above every room was a woodcut of Lakshmi and her two elephants.

I sat in an overstuffed chair in the entry hall for a while reading a book on the Chettiars and then made my way back to the bus stop, getting back to Karaikkudi sometime after 2 for a late biryani lunch.  I spent the rest of the afternoon in my comfortable hotel room, reading the newspaper and War and Peace.

January 31 - February 2, 2014: Kumbakonam, Gangaikondacholapuram, and Darasuram

I left Chidambaram on the morning of the 31st, but first I paid a final visit to the huge Nataraja Temple.  I got there about 7:30 and headed into the innermost courtyard.  A cow and her calf were tied to the rail in front of the shrine to Shiva as Nataraja.  A garland of flowers was entwined around the cow's horns.  While I and a crowd of Indians watched, about four brahmin priests placed a thin white sheet on the back of the cow and tied a smaller one around the neck of the calf.  More garlands of flowers were draped around the cow's horns and flower petals were dropped over both the cow and calf.  A big blob of yellow paste was plopped on the hindquarters of each the cow and calf, with some red paste later dabbed in the centers of the yellow blobs. A priest brought out a plate of fire from the temple and waved it around the cow and calf several times.  All this time the cow stood there placidly, while the calf was a bit more rambunctious.  The ceremony over, the worshipers pressed forward to touch the hindquarters of the cow and calf and to gather a bit of the yellow and red paste and place it on their foreheads. The white sheets were removed and the cow and calf led out into the pillared hall and then into the courtyard beyond to an enclosure for cattle on the south side of the outer court.  I followed them for a while.  One guy eventually carried the skittish calf.  On the way out, the cow crapped in the pillared hall, and the pile of sacred cow excrement was still there when I returned to the inner courtyard after following the cow and calf to their shed.

I spent about two hours in the temple, which was fairly crowded that morning.  Among other things, I watched another ceremony at the Vishnu shrine and watched two brahmins sitting on the edge of one of the Shiva shrines tending a fire and pouring liquids into it while chanting.

I left Chidambaram at 10:30 on a bus first to Mayiladuthurai and then another from there to Kumbakonam, a trip of about 50 miles over less than two and a half hours.  Kumbakonam is another relatively small city, southwest of Chidambaram with about 160,000 people and 18 temples.  It took me almost an hour to find a hotel to my liking, finally settling for the one I had first passed up without checking it out.  It turned out to be quite a nice one, for only 500 rupees, about eight dollars, a night.

At 4, when the temples opened, I headed first to the Nageshwara Swami Temple, started in 886 and finished early the next century.  The colorful eastern gopura entry is later, with quite a few sex acts portrayed in the brightly painted sculpture on top.  Inside is one of the earliest Chola temples.  The Chola Kingdom, which had ruled this part of south India before the Pallavas, revived in the 9th century and ruled again until the 13th century, creating a great classical civilization.  Hardly anyone was in the temple just after it opened.  On the outer wall of the central temple are excellent Chola statues, although some are a little worn  They seem to stand very languidly, not rigidly at all, looking out with half smiles.  Another hall, built later, is designed sort of like a chariot, with carved wheels and painted statues of horses and elephants as if to pull it.

I spent about 45 minutes there and then walked to the nearby Sarangapani Temple, with a colorful entrance gopura about 150 feet high, again featuring sex acts.  You hardly ever see those depicted, say, in the Vatican. Just inside the gopura entrance is a cow shed with cows with horns painted red.  I saw a couple of worshipers bring in greens to feed them.  The pillared hall just beyond the cow shed dates from the Nayaka era.  The Nayakas were governors under the Vijayanagar Empire centered in Hampi, and ruled in their own right for about a century after the Empire fell to the Deccan sultans in 1565.  This long pillared hall leads to the central temple, dating from the Chola period, raised on a plinth and built to resemble a sort of chariot.  On two sides are wheels and horses and elephants carved out of stone as if pulling the temple.  On the outer walls are fine statues.  This temple is dedicated to Vishnu, and I could see into the inner sanctuary.  I couldn't see Vishnu until a priest waved a plate of fire over him.  He is recumbent and had linen draped over him, plus a silver headpiece and breastplate.  I watched a few ceremonies here and there before leaving.  West of the temple is a large tank of water.

From there I walked further west to the Kumbeshwara Temple, named, like the town, after a pot (kumba) that Shiva shattered with an arrow.  The pot, originally atop Mount Meru in the Himalayas, had come to rest here after the great flood.  The contents filled a couple of sacred tanks of water.  Shiva used the pot shards and sand to build a lingam which is said to be in the sanctuary of the temple.  Because the lingam is made of sand, it is never washed with water or any liquid.  You approach this temple through an arcade of shops and at the entrance was an elephant with a painted forehead swaying back and forth, her necklace of bells jingling. Worshipers would offer her a coin or a bill, which she would grab with her trunk, place her trunk briefly on the head of the offeror as a blessing, and then give the money to her handler.

This temple is mainly 17th century, with interesting columns of yalis, those fanged lions, rearing up.  It was just about dark now, but I hung around until past 7.  Pujas were going on at different altars and I could go up to the inner sanctum and peer inside.  I couldn't see much but the little lamps of fire.  A group of women were singing as the priests conducted a ceremony at one altar.

The next morning about 7:30 I took an hour bus ride to Gangaikondacholapuram, about 25 miles north, passing a rather narrow river labeled the Cauvery (which breaks into many branches in the delta; I wonder why this very narrow branch is called the Cauvery) and later a very long bridge over a small stream that must swell during the monsoon.  Gangakondacholapuram was the capital of the Chola King Rajendra I, who ruled from 1012 to 1044.  The name means "the city of the Chola who conquered the Ganges," and Rajendra did lead a successful military expedition that reached the Ganges, unique for a southern Indian kingdom.  Now nothing remains of his capital other than a village and a huge temple he built to rival his fathers in Thanjavur (Tanjore).  These Chola temples do not have high gopuras, which became fashionable much later.  Instead, they have towers called vimanas over the sanctuaries and the one at Gangaikondacholapuram rises to 180 feet high, visible as I approached on the bus.

The temple is in a high walled enclosure, with grass covering the courtyard.  A huge nandi, perhaps 20 feet high, sits in front.  A large plaster lion, symbol of the Cholas, faces the nandi to the side, doing it homage as the vehicle of Shiva.  The temple is about 330 feet long and 130 feet wide, sitting on a high plinth with excellent Chola sculpture on the outside walls, though with scaffolding often in front of them.  The higher levels of the vimana look possibly restored, and the eastern part of the temple, except the plinth, is supposed to have been rebuilt later.  I walked into this dark pillared hall, and then into a smaller hall with doors to the north and south, and eventually reached the dark inner sanctum, with a lingam on a pedestal surround by lamps of fire.   Outside the north door is a statue of  what is thought to be Rajendra receiving a garland from Shiva with Parvati at his side.  They comprise a beautiful group of statues, but framed by scaffolding.

I spent over two hours there, walking around the temple a couple of times and walking back and forth through the dark halls.  It wasn't very crowded at first, but groups were showing up even before I left.  I had some difficulty getting back to town.  Buses were overfull and it was difficult to know which bus was going the way I wanted to go.  Eventually, I figured it out and took a very crowded bus to a nearby small town and from there a bus, in which I even got a seat, back to Kumbakonam.  I got back soon after 1, a much longer trip than going there.

When the temples in Kumbakonam opened at 4, I headed to the Ramaswamy Temple, from the Nayaka era, with magnificently carved pillars in the portico including figures of horses, gods and particularly big breasted, even for Indian temples, women.  The temple was fairly quiet, with not much activity.  Later I walked back to Kumbeshwara Temple and looked around some more, spending some time watching the elephant.

The next morning I got to the bus stand between 7 and 7:30 to get a bus to Darasuram, only three miles away on the outskirts of town.  But I got on the wrong bus (the guy who told me it went to Darasuram later told me, "Actually, I'm new to this place.") and so hopped off and eventually walked back to the bus station and got the right bus.  I got to Darasuram about 8:30 and then went to the wrong temple.  Actually, it was a very nice temple, but not the main one.  I looked around and kept wondering why the description in one of my guidebooks was off in some instances.  It took me about an hour before figuring out that I may be in the wrong temple, but I did enjoy it.

The much larger Airavaeshvara Temple is just beyond the temple I had spent an hour in.  It is the third of the great Chola temples, after the one in Thanjavur and the one in Gangaikondacholapuram.  It was built a century later than the temple at Gangaikondacholapuram, by Rajaraja II, who ruled from 1146 to 1172.  The temple is made of granite and sits inside a high wall enclosure, with arcades all along the inside of the outer walls and pillared halls at the corners.  It is smaller than the other two great Chola temples, 75 feet wide and 210 feet long, with a 75 foot high vimana, but is exquisitely decorated.  Friezes of musicians and dancers and other figures surround the base.  Stairs leading up to the pillar covered plinth have stone railings of carved elephants. One elephant is ridden by a dwarf and has its trunk being eaten by a crocodile.  On the sides of the temple, in niches, are beautiful black basalt statutes of the gods.

The pillared hall on the east has intricate carving on the pillars, of dancers, fighters and gods.  The ceiling, too, is intricately carved.  On the west wall of this hall are more black basalt figures of gods.  Beyond that is a narrow hall without much decoration and then a chamber with statues of club wielding guardians before the inner sanctum with a lingam.   A couple of priests hovered around and conducted short pujas for the worshipers.  I walked all around and stayed until it closed at noon and then took a bus back to town.  After lunch, during which I ate two parotas and was brought a free rice pudding desert by the friendly waiters, I spent the rest of the day resting and at an internet cafe.  

January 27-30, 2014: Pondicherry, Chidambaram, and Tarangampadi

I left Tiruvannamalai by bus about 9 on the 27th, heading southeast about 65 miles to Pondicherry on the coast.  The crowded bus passed the forts at Gingee on the way and reached Pondicherry before noon. Pondicherry, now renamed Puducherry, though it seems everyone calls it Pondy, was a French colony until ceded to India in 1954.  The French founded it in 1673 to engage in commerce with weavers in the area, cotton cloth exports being a lucrative trade at the time.  The Dutch captured it in 1693, but gave it back in 1699, after which the French built a large pentagonal fort.  The town grew to more than 100,000 people during the early 18th century
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During the Carnatic Wars between Britain and France, the French, under a Governor named Dupleix, who governed from Pondicherry from 1742 to 1754, conquered and occupied the English settlement at Madras (now Chennai) to the north.  But the  British eventually gained the upper hand, conquering Pondicherry in 1761 and destroying both the fort and the city.  The British gave it back in 1765, but during the next half century whenever war broke out between Britain and France, it was occupied by the British, from 1778 to 1785 and from 1793 to 1816, except for a short interlude in 1803 during a short break in the Napoleonic Wars.

I took an auto rickshaw to a hotel right on the seafront run by an ashram and got a room.  After lunch, I walked around town.  Many French colonial buildings remain, some now boutique hotels.  Others are restaurants, shops, and private homes, and most seem to be well cared for, except those possessed by the government.  Pondicherry is a territory, not a state.  The territory is small, and includes not only Pondicherry, but another small enclave about 70 miles to the south, plus two others, one along the coast of Andhra Pradesh to the north and another on the coast of Kerala to the west.  These were all that was left to France after it lost the struggle for India to Britain.

One particularly nice hotel, with a lovely courtyard and wonderful maps and prints all over the walls, had "Instruction Publique" carved on its facade, so I guess it was a school at one time.  Other French names remain on buildings, including the Douane and the Hotel de Ville, both in shabby condition.  The French Consulate, a large colonial building on the seafront, is in beautiful condition.  The city is divided by a now filthy canal about five blocks from the seafront, the former Ville Blanc for the French on the seaward side and the former Ville Noire for the Indians on the other side.  West of the canal Pondicherry is a typical chaotic and dirty Indian city, but between the canal and the sea it is quieter and some streets are even comparatively litter free.  I wandered around, stopping to check out some of the lovely old buildings, and eventually walked along the seafront avenue, with a wide sidewalk on the sea side.  The wind was blowing strongly, with whitecaps on the sea.  There isn't much of a beach, or in fact no beach at all, just a strip of red dirt maybe 20 or 30 feet wide and then a wide rock breakwater.  No one was swimming and there were no boats on the water.

I walked north along the seafront, passing the Hotel de Ville, a World War I memorial, the customs house, an old lighthouse, and a statue of Gandhi.  Some of the buildings along the sea were nice and some really shabby.  Near the northern end, near the French Consulate, I walked a few blocks inland to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, several blocks of gray and white buildings.  Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali born in 1872, came here for refuge from the British in the early 20th century.  He was later joined by a French woman named Mirra Alfassa, of Turkish and Egyptian parentage.  They established the ashram in 1926.  Aurobindo died in 1950, but "The Mother," as Alfassa was called, ran the ashram until her death in 1973 at age 95.  I entered the ashram headquarters building, where in the courtyard is the flower covered samadhi, or memorial, to the both of them.  Devotees were silently sitting all around, some right next to the samadhi.  I also went to the bookstore on the premises, full of books by and about the two of them.  Photos of the two of them are everywhere.  (In fact, in my hotel room were photos of the two of them.)  Another room, the entry roped off, has old fashioned furniture, including chairs and a sofa, and a rug.  I suppose this is where they spent time.  Flowers filled the courtyard.

From there I walked to the nearby Alliance Francaise Library, with some interesting displays on the history of the city, and then back south to a large plaza with the colonial era mansion of the Lieutenant Governor (the head of the territory) on one side.  Its an impressive, large white building, guarded by police in French style police hats, colored bright red.  The plaza is fenced, with only one entrance/exit, and was full of Indians and litter.  Lots of nice trees, though.  This was the center of the old fort.  A little further south is a pink church, built in 1855 about a block from the sea front.  A statue of Joan of Arc stands in front.  After checking out the church, I walked up and down the  seafront, crowded with strollers at the end of the day.  The avenue along the seafront is closed to vehicles from 6 in the evening until 7:30 the next morning, so that is nice.  The wind was still blowing hard.  I could feel the sea spray.  I had dinner in a roof top French restaurant, very nice in the breeze.  The weather here continues to be very nice, with highs in the high 80's and lows about 68 or 70.

I meant to get up the next morning before sunrise and watch the sun rise over the sea, but I slept until about 7.  I did walk along the sea front again before breakfast.  The sea was much calmer.  No whitecaps and the wind much less strong than the day before.  After breakfast I walked all over the old colonial part of town again, a very pleasant stroll.  Eventually, I ended up at the museum just north of the plaza.  It has some old French furniture and some  wonderful 10th century Chola bronzes, including three Natarajas, two of them with cobras coiled around one of his right arms.  I walked north again and then west, over the canal to a street full of old buildings, and then south to the cathedral, arriving there sometime after noon.

I had thought about leaving Pondicherry that afternoon, but my wanderings had taken me past the noon check out time of my hotel.  So I had a long lunch and read a couple of newspapers after getting back to my hotel about 1.  About 4 I did take another walk through the colonial streets and then along the crowded seafront until almost 6:30.  The wind had come up again and there were whitecaps on the sea.

The next morning I got up about 7 and watched the sun rise over the clouds and the palm trees outside my room.  I took a walk along the sea, had breakfast, and read the newspapers before leaving about 10:30 on a bus bound for Chidambaram about 40 miles south.  The less than two hour bus trip passed over several rivers and passed rice paddies and small towns.  This is the Kaveri (or Cauvery) River Delta area, a densely populated part of Tamil Nadu.

Chidambaram is a small town, with about 70,000 people.  It is famous for its huge Nataraja Temple, which I went to when it opened again for the afternoon at 4.  A high wall surrounds the 55 acre temple grounds, with four very colorful gopuras, one at each of the entrances at the cardinal directions.  The northern and southern ones rise to 150 feet.  I entered through the eastern one, which was fairly high itself.  It is said to date from about 1250, while the northern gopura is said to date from the 16th century.  I don't know about the others. These temples were usually added to over the centuries.  There are records of this temple before the 10th century, and inscriptions on parts of the temple date from the 11th century.  The gopuras' bottom two levels are made of stone, with the upper levels made of brick and plaster and painted in bright colors.  The stone archway I entered under the gopura has panels supposedly illustrating the 108 positions of classical dance, though I counted a bit more than 108 dance panels.  The other entrance gopuras also have these dance panels, and all seemed to vary from 108. Still, they were interesting to see.  Beyond the first wall and entrance is another high wall with a pillared entrance way on the east, but I first walked around the huge courtyard between the first and second walls.  Much of it is empty, with a few small temples, but on the northern side are several large ones plus a large tank of water.  I went into a couple of the temples, including one with a painted ceiling said to date from the 17th century.  The temple itself is earlier, though my guidebooks differ on the date.  A huge pillared hall, called the Raja Sabha, in the northeast is closed.

I spent more than an hour walking around before entering the pillared entrance into the second enclosure. Beyond this point photos aren't allowed.  Inside was dark, with corridors lined with pillars on plinths.  I walked around through these dark corridors and eventually entered the inner courtyard, partly open to the sky, with several small temples.  This temple worships Shiva in his Lord of the Dance incarnation, but one of the shrines the inner sanctum is a shrine honoring Vishnu.  The main shrines in the inner sanctum honor Shiva, though.  Two are side by side and you can see through the open pillared walls of one towards the inner sanctum, with Shiva as Lord of the Dance, swirling on one leg with his hair flying.  I think there is a lingam nearby, too.  The statue is surrounded little lamps of fire and brahmin priests seemed to be constantly conducting some sort of rites in front, often waving plates of fire.  It is dark inside the inner sanctum, but supposedly behind the statue of Shiva is a curtain of leaves, behind which is a lingam of ether, the fifth element after fire, water, earth, and air.  Sometimes this element is called space, as in the space between all the other elements.  The ether lingam behind the curtain is invisible, or at least that is the story.

The Shiva priests in the temple are from the Dikshitar sub caste, and there are lots of them around, easily distinguishable by their white dhotis and bare chests except for the brahmin sacred thread over their left shoulders.  Many have shaved part of their hair, with the remaining part done up in a top knot.  There are other priests in the temple, too, the ones tending the Vishnu shrine right next to the Shiva ones.  Shiva priests, and devotees, always have horizontal lines, usually one to three, on their foreheads while Vishnu priests and devotees have vertical lines, sometimes in a sort of V, on their foreheads.

In the inner courtyard, before the Shiva and Vishnu shrines, there was constant activity, with lots of pilgrims. About a quarter to 6 the Vishnu priests began a loud puja, with bell ringing.  Just outside the shrine loudly played two drummers, two guys playing those long Indian type oboes, and one guy playing those small cymbals, two or three inches in diameter.  It was quite a racket.  Eventually, the curtain before the idol was opened and the priests waved a plate of fire in front of it while the worhsipers clasped their hands and strained to look forward.  When the priests finished, worshipers were allowed to go into the shrine.  I eventually went it and saw that the image of Vishnu is recumbent, with silver plates on top of his head and on his chest.

About 6 the brahmins at the Shiva shrine began a noisy puja, with plates of fire waved in front of the Shiva idol.  The crowd again stood in front, straining to see.  The fire plates were eventually brought by the priests to the front of the crowd so they could pass their hands over them.  Some sort of prasad was passed out by the priests to the sea of open hands raised forward by the crowd. Other pujas were held around the temple and for about an hour it was very noisy with bells ringing and the musicians playing.  It was all very interesting to watch.  In one section of the courtyard about 20 priests sat in a sort of U and recited together.  Eventually, some currency was passed out by another priest to each of them, and then they each got a single banana before they broke up and left.  Other priests were sitting here and there in both the inner courtyard and the pillared corridors just outside.  Every once in a while the musicians led a procession to one altar or another.   At one altar in the corner of the pillared enclosure sat about five singers all by themselves.  I think they may have been members of a hereditary caste of temple singers.  There were several altars in this pillared area and at one I watched a priest pour some sort of thick brown liquid over an idol, completely covering it in brown before washing it off with pots of water.  I walked all around and sat here and there watching it all until about 8, when I left for dinner.

The next morning I went back to the temple about 7:30 and spent about an hour and a half walking around the outer courtyard, between the first and second walls.  I spent time looking at the statues on the gopuras, both the stone ones and the colorful plaster ones above.  People streamed in and out.  At the tank in the northern courtyard, some people were bathing in the dirty water, with garbage floating in the corners and green slime in places.  It is said that a king of Kashmir bathed in this tank in the 5th century and was cured of leprosy.  Now you would be more likely to get leprosy, or something worse, from the water.  I then spent about an hour in the two inner parts of the temple before leaving for breakfast.  The activity was much less than the evening before, but there are interesting bas reliefs to be seen.

The temple closes between noon and 4, so soon after 11, after my breakfast of puri, pongal, and vada, I took a crowded bus south about 35 miles, and an hour and a half, to Taragampadi, formerly known as Tranquebar, on the coast.  In 1620 the Danes, of all people, began building a fort at Tranquebar for trading purposes with the consent of the Raja of Tanjour.  A later version of the castle still exists, which the Danes held onto until 1845 when they sold out to the British East India Company.  Before reaching the fort I came to two spruced up churches, both dating from the early 18th century.  Lutheran priests from Germany were sent to Tranquebar by the King of Denmark and they arrived in 1706.  Monuments marked the 200th and 300th anniversary of the event.  The caretaker at one of the churches, containing the grave of the first Lutheran missionary, showed me a guest book with the signature of the Crown Prince of Denmark.  I told him I couldn't make out the name, but was it "Hamlet," to which I got no reaction.

The fort is right on the sea, but there is no beach.  There are some brick foundations at the sea front. Apparently, the sea is eroding what was part of the old Danish town.  There are some nice old tile roof houses along one street and two big colonial buildings facing the fort.  One was the Danish Governor's residence and one the residence of the Collector once the British took over.  Both are restored and the latter is a fancy hotel, which I walked around.  The fort is small and not all that impressive, with former warehouses and rooms on the first floor.  On the second level, on the side facing the sea, are rooms now housing a museum.  There is not much inside but there are interesting, if somewhat scattered, accounts of the history of the Danes in India.  You can also read the grant from the Raja of Tanjore to the Danes and the bill of sale from the Danes to the British.  The wind was blowing strongly off the sea and a river entered the sea just south of the fort.

About 4 I headed back to Chidambaram on a much less crowded bus than I'd arrived in, and so was better able to enjoy the green countryside, with lots of thatched houses.  Back in Chidambaram I went into the temple about 6 and stayed for an hour or so to watch the goings on.  It seemed less busy than the night before.