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.
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.
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