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Published: October 7th 2009
So we arrived at Maduraim, a city of about 1.2 million people, with much more of a “big city” feel than Trichy, and more popular on the tourist trail (inasmuch as anything in Tamil Nadu is on the tourist trail). This city is famous for its massive temple, the Sri Meenakshi temple. By now you might have guessed that Tamil Nadu is famous for its impressive stone temples, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, with distinctive architecture and lively, intricate, artwork. While you don’t see that many “holy men” which you see in the photos advertising Northern India (I wonder how many are mainly trying to cash in on the tourist dollar and/or the money from the English-speaking corporate types who might feel disconnected from that side of India), every little neighbourhood seems to have a small temple, perhaps not as much as in Bali, and indeed one thing that I was a bit surprised wasn’t very popular were the little shrines that the Balinese have everywhere, in almost every house. Still, my impression of the state, not having seen all of it yet, is that it’s a homogenisation of a variety of devout religions. Muslims, both men and women, often
(for last week's blog)
don't think this uploaded properly last week - heaps of houses in the area of last week's blog (a few days ago) had this artwork outside their houses, done with white sandwalk around in distinctive clothes, and we also see massive churches (the ostentatiously yuppy-ish modern charismatic churches, the historical, white, catholic and Anglican churches), and discreet mosques in the suburbs. On the Internet I find that Chennai is also home to a disproportionate number of the Indian rationalist/humanist societies. It’s also very conservative. Outside of Chennai, we saw virtually no local women wearing anything approaching western clothes and even amongst the men, while, like everywhere else, many chose to wear business shirt and trousers, or even jeans, the
dhoti is very common, with, at a guess, somewhere around one-third of the men wearing them in Trichy or Madurai.
Restaurants too scream this religious conservatism. In Trichy you’re hard-pressed to find a bar, but all restaurants label themselves as either “veg” (vegetarian, but not fastidious about it), “non-veg” (serves meat), or “pure veg”. Sometimes there’s “veg and non-veg” also. In the suburbs instead of “non-veg” you might see “halal”. I think this is pretty common and in some towns in some states I hear it can be difficult to get meat or alcohol.
We would have been better spending a few days in Madurai, where you can get approximations
(for last week's blog)
one lady saw us admiring them and did this one for us. Took her about 10 minutes of western food, and where there are things to see, but we wanted to get across to one of the National parks further west, and Liz and Marty were only in India for a total of about ten days. So the plan was to go to the temple in the morning, and then out the Gandhi museum in the afternoon. This isn’t at all the only Gandhi museum, but as you might expect of a country that has his portrait on every banknote, there’s plenty enough interest in him to justify a bunch of museums around the country (and given the volume of his writings, enough to keep lots of Gandhi scholars busy for ages). Madurai’s claim to this Northern Indian mystic is that this was the area where he made the decision to wear nothing but homespun
dhotis (to support the Indian economy, particularly the cotton industry).
But as it was, my stomach still wasn’t doing too well, particularly after the dinner we had the next day, so Liz and Marty went off on their own. They also saw the flower market and a few other markets, which I didn’t get to see when I came back a
(for last week's blog)
in one small town a middle-class family with a nice car stopped, while driving past, and asked to get their photos taken with particularly, specially with Liz, whom even Indians can tell is more photogenic than me. week or two later (in next week’s blog), but they enjoyed the temple. They weren’t interested in the Gandhi museum. One thing I forgot to mention about Madurai that we noticed as soon as we got in is the number of touts. Everyone tries to get you to go to their tailor shop to get stuff made - I’ll talk about this in next week’s blog - and try to sell you tours, clothes, or toys. The beggars are also pretty aggressive. But it’s not too bad a town, it seems to work.
The next day we took a tourist bus up to Kodaikanal. This is a small “hill station” - a mountain up in the hills. The most famous and popular hillstation in Tamil Nadu is Ooty (officially “Udhagamandalam”) which is a fairly large city in its own right, regardless of the tourism industry, but that’s further away, half-way from Madurai to Bangalore, so we decided not to go up there. I’d have liked to do a day trip from Madurai down to Ramaswaram, the south-east tip of Tamil Nadu, a famous pilgrimage site for Hindus with some impressive bridges and beaches, but we decided to push on.
The bus, I guess you’d describe it as a large minibus, was full of tourists, all of them, except us, Indian. It took something like seven hours, I forget now, about half of that time winding up the hills, from approximately sea level up to 2100 metres. When getting near the town, we stopped for 20 minutes or so on the side of the road by a fairly scenic waterfall, where long lines of stalls were set up selling all kinds of ingenious children’s toys, balloons, postcards, camera batteries and film, and food. Then we got back into the bus where we were taken to the local museum where for an entry fee equivalent to less than $1 (same price for Indians and foreigners) we saw a little museum with the same weird stuff as in last week’s blog - heaps of stuffed birds and other stuffed animals, some photos, a bunch of other stuff I forget, and a weird display showing human foetuses preserved in jars, including one that would seem to have been a stillborn baby. There was also a very basic “tree of life” phylogenic tree, which seemed to be from the 1960s.
In the early
1990s, one of Kodaikanal’s more popular bakeries used to have a sign saying “keep Kodai beautiful - stay out”. I guess not enough people headed that advise, because it’s fairly pleasant, but it’s obviously a tourist town. As soon as we got off the bus we were constantly hassled by touts trying to get us to go to their hotels. I actually ended up staying in a different hotel from the one I had intended, because I’d found out about it through Lonely Planet, and we couldn’t locate ourselves on that map, and so when touts told me that it was in that direction, I assumed they were lying. This is an obvious trick, once a hotel gets in Lonely Planet, is popularity rises, its price rises, and its quality drops. Touts will often try to take you to one of LP’s best-recommended hotels, and then redirect you to an even worse one. Of course it’s unethical to stay at places that employ touts (hey if you can convince yourself that it’s unethical to give money to beggars you’ll have no problem with this one), and in many palces ends up costing you more as they jack up the prices
(a common trick all around the world is for a tout to see you going into a hotel and follow you up, racing to overtake you, so that the owner will think he brought you in). Over less than two days I had I think it was five people ask me if I wanted to buy magic mushrooms (only one tried to sell me dope or “anything you need”). This only happened when I walked down the street without Liz and Marty. I don’t know why people would mistake me for someone who ever even knew what the doormouse said!!
Kodaikanal was a nice break from the stifling tropical humidity. At its altitude, it is (I think most of the year round) nice, Spring, sort of weather. It did rain a lot though when we were there. I’d been out of the tropics for nearly five months by that time. People often assume that the Middle East, or most of Egypt, are in the tropics, but they’re not. So I was finding it a bit tiring, particularly in Chennai (Trichy and Madurai seemed marginally better). This week was particularly bad, on my way back it wasn’t as bad. My
on the road up to Kodaikanal
they were selling all sorts of stuff including flowers stomach was recovering though. But by then Liz and Marty got sick, worse than I did. So we stayed an extra day in Kodaikanal.
Other than hang out at the various cafes or shops, there’s not all that much to do. There’s treks you can do into the jungle with jeeps or even i think on foot with guides, but with only one (or, it turned out, two) days I didn’t feel like doing that. On the first day we arrived we walked up a hill near the town which has a good look-out over the valley, and over the lower parts of the town, and a nice park. Unfortunately the cloud came in so we couldn’t see much of the park. The next day I went for a fairly long walk around the lake. The lake is shallow, not too impressive, but it’s a nice area. Kodaikanal is refreshingly clean (plastic bags are banned) and there are lots of really fancy houses there.
Kodaikanal is primarily known as the site of a large international school. This brings a lot of rich expat kids and teachers into the town. However I discovered there’s any number of other retreats,
Monkey
I think this was in Kodaikanal colleges, “camps”, and health retreats, mainly from various churches. I guess this gives it its urbane feel. There’s quite a few foreign tourists, but heaps more obvious Indian tourists.
There’s also a fairly large Tibetan community. I’m not sure why Tibetans would go all the way to the end of India, but I guess if they had to I could see why they’d want to go to Kodaikanal, as the lower-lying areas must be hell for a Tibetan. On the bus all the way up we saw constant graffiti saying “Save Tibet”. We also saw this on a different road on the way down. In parts of Kodaikanal this was written down all the electricity posts. There’s a fair Tibetan market selling mainly Tibetan clothes, and three nice Tibetan restaurants grouped together in town, mainly catering for tourists. I ate
momos there twice (Liz and Marty ate there once and blame that for making them ill) and it was nice to have food that wasn’t unbearably spicy.
I was also able to buy an Indian SIM card there. Buying an Indian SIM card is a bit of a hassle because since they became paranoid about terrorism the federal
government mandates authentication for people buying a SIM card (I read somewhere the number that are sold on the black market but forget, I’m sure it was over 50%, but I’m not plugged into the black market). You need an address in India to purchase it. However I found one place that would sell me one, putting my address down as the hotel (which I was leaving later that day). They needed a receipt from the hotel, which I found a bit strange. I filled in some of my personal details (my name, address, and my father’s name, yeah I don’t know why either) on a form, signed it, and they took photocopies of my passport, visa, and the hotel receipt, and I have an Indian SIM that works. (By the way for my friends & family: if anybody’s been trying to contact me, Optus messed up my Australian SIM, soon after I finally got the replacement for the one I lost, and so it’s not working so don’t try calling me on that).
Liz & Marty seemed hooked on the idea of taxis now, so we took a taxi down from Kodai, when they were feeling a little
Kodaikanal
Lonely Planet says "Australians may feel at home..." bit better and dozed up on ammonium. They were actually ill I was a bit worried about them but they seem to have survived. So we headed down to Pollachi, a smallish city near Coimbatore, near the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary, which isn’t even in Lonely Planet (other than a passing mention). We were determined to get to a Wildlife Park before Liz & Marty had to go home. The trip was fairly uneventful, several hours down the mountain on narrow roads with lots of traffic - the first half of it in a torrential downpour. Instead of the driver we’d booked with, we got a very young guy (we thought it might be his son) which didn’t fill me with great confidence, especially near the end of the hills when his brakes started to overheat, but he drove well. Driving in India is a great skill, I have great admiration for anyone who can do it. Closer to Pollachi the area was covered in wind turbines. We must have driven through them for at least 10 minutes, and they stretched back as far as we could see.
Unfortunately Liz & Marty weren’t getting better, so we ended up
Kodaikanal
it would be a nice view if it wasn't for the clouds. you'll just have to imagine it.
(the path to the top of the hill) doing nothing for a few days in Pollachi. We also got sort of stuck, as we soon found ourselves in a position where we didn’t have time to go on to Kerala (at least a day’s journey each way, plus we’d want a day or two there) and be sure to get back to Trichy in time for their flight. They didn’t want to take really long train trips to go back past Trichy, so there was nowhere else much to go anyway. Plus we ran into two public holidays - one for Eid, and one for something else.
On the first day after we got into Pollachi, Marty and I went exploring to see if we could find any information about how to get to the Wildlife Park. We didn’t. An
auto driver took us to some run-down office where some minor government official who couldn’t speak English told us that it was shut and to come back tomorrow (it clearly wasn’t the right place, but we did make a half-hearted attempt to come back the next day, but couldn’t describe the place to the
auto drivers). The next day Liz was feeling a bit better so we
Kodaikanal
from near the top of the hill took an
auto out for the afternoon for a journey of maybe 30 km (I forget) each way. Along the way we stopped at one of many large dams. It was a fairly popular picnic spot, with gardens, food stalls, the nice lake set against the backdrop of some impressive mountains, and so on. There were lots of tourists there, all of them India. We became celebrities, as even the Indians were generally from more rural places in other parts of Southern India, and so weren’t used to seeing Westerners. Heaps of people asked to have their photo taken with us. After that we headed up to Monkey Falls, a fairly nice waterfall in the jungle on the edge of the Wildlife Park, where guys were swimming or mucking around under the waterfall in their trousers or underwear. Along the way we passed lots of small farms, guys peeing against trees, little villages, and once we got into the forest, lots of monkeys.
The next day, getting a bit worried that we were never going to find the Wildlife Park, we found a travel agent of sorts, and went there to book our bus back to Trichy. We ended
Kodaikanal
near the Tibetan market. "Save Tibet" up booking a taxi again as there’s no trains in Pollachi any more and Liz & Marty didn’t fancy an overnight bus back. They were also able to arrange a taxi to the Wildlife Park for us for the next day. We spent the rest of the day relaxing in the hotel and walking around town, which has all the normal things of a small Indian town - small shops everywhere, chaotic traffic, incredibly decrepit Internet cafes (yes, they’re mainly for locals, so you have them in places off the beaten track), fly-by-night English-language schools, markets, slums, guys peeing against walls. It was fairly neat compared to the part of Trichy we stayed in (the “Cantonment” area, which is probably the dirtier part of the city, but the part where all the hotels are, and the train and bus stations). Even here most of the signs are in English, with some in Tamil. None were in Hindi. It’s funny because so many people don’t speak English, but I guess a lot most not speak Tamil either.
So finally we headed off to the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Park. The entry fee was fairly cheap, I forget, but as always we
Kodaikanal
the main lake had to pay extra for the cameras. The unfriendly park ranger told us that we had just missed the bus tour, which goes into the depths of the jungle and sees Elephants, but that we could go on to the next National Park and do one of their tours and then come back at 15:30 for the afternoon tour. This seemed reasonable, so we got the taxi driver to drive us on another 10 km or so to the next National Park, on the only road on which private vehicles are allowed.
Here we had to pay another, much higher, entrance fee. The parks are basically connected, but are separated by state borders. Suddenly the signs were in English and Malayalam, not English and Tamil. I found this amusing because the only way into the park was through the Indira Gandhi park (in Tamil Nadu) so they weren’t be likely to have any more Keralans than the park in Tamil Nadu would have. Both languages are Dravidian, so I can’t hear the difference between them when spoken, but I suspect they were mainly talking in Malayalam. Here we were put on a big bus with a bunch of Indian
Kodaikanal
waterlillies tourists and taken for a tour of the park. The tour left a couple of hours late so we were a little bit worried about getting back to the Indira Gandhi park in time for their afternoon tour, but thought we could still make it.
Sitting near us on the bus was a group of Muslim men all around 30 years old from Kerala, mainly talking in Malayalam. Most could speak English. They were friendly and chatted with us. They were also boisterous and as the tour progressed and they got bored they began singing loudly in Malayalam and even briefly in English (“We shall overcome” and the chorus line from some old Broadway song, I forget which). The tour took us to a large teak tree (one sign said it was the largest in the world, another said it was the largest that’s still growing, which wasn’t really all that massive. I guess teak don’t get that big. It took us to some more hydroelectric dams, up a mountain, through a tribal village, and back again. Along the way we saw heaps of the common little brown monkeys, and a “Black Monkey” 9I think that’s what they called
it), several deer, peacocks, and a crocodile on the shore of a river far away.
We then jumped back in our taxi to get back to the Indira Gandhi Park for their tour of the elephants. The driver who couldn’t speak English told us that elephants had been sighted on the road. Sure enough, as we drove, he stopped, and there in front of us were a family of elephants eating on the side of the road, and slowly moving across. He stopped maybe a hundred metres back, making good photography difficult, and watched them for about 20 minutes. He seemed more interested than us, and also I think afraid of driving through them. Cars stopped behind us but no-one wanted to go past. Our driver was videoing them on his mobile phone - it really didn’t seem like a common event.
Because of this delay it meant that we arrived back at Indira Gandhi park at exactly 15:30. There were supposed to be later tours as well so we weren’t too worried, but when we got there the unfriendly park ranger told us very gruffly that we had missed the tour and they didn’t have another driver
so no more would be running. Every question was met with a rude pidgin English reply. I think Liz & Mary were a bit disappointed because it was their last chance, but the morning tour had been quite good and we had after all seen the elephants, probably better than we might have seen them on the tour.
By now we’d been staying at the same hotel in Pollachi for about four nights. It was quite good, probably more expensive than what I’d normally pay if I was travelling by myself (I forget the price but it was over Rs 800 - which is $AUS 20). It proudly billed itself as “Tamil Nadu’s best one-star hotel”. Because Liz & Marty being ill didn’t want to eat any dodgy food, we ate at the hotel’s restaurant each night, although they weren’t game to eat even much of that food (as it was still all South Indian and hence very spicy). I think we were a bit of a curiosity, and it was interesting to notice the level of service change over time. Different waiters had different techniques, but they seemed to put more and more effort into it as the
Indira Gandhi national park
on the outskirts of the park, on the way to Monkey Falls days progressed. On the second-last day, the waiter insisted on spooning the rice out of the bowl and onto my plate for me and then pouring the Chicken “gravy” over it for me, which I’d rather have done for myself (as is traditional). On the last night we found that our table was arrayed with about as many serviettes as all the rest of the tables put together and our drinks came wrapped in layers of serviettes. The whole table looked a bit like a papier-mâché dinner set.
So after this we headed back to Trichy, in the taxi, a big white old Ambassador (the most common type of taxi in Tamil Nadu, and other parts of India). Liz & Marty had one more day there before heading back home via KL. We found a nice restaurant that served save, properly cooked food, still mainly Indian food but plenty of North Indian food, in the most expensive hotel in town - where I think we paid about Rs 400 ($AUS 10) each, including beer. Liz & Marty found a place that did Pizza and were overjoyed to eat that. They didn’t like South Indian food much, I think. Marty
Indira Gandhi national park
the dam, I forget the name, not far from Monkey Falls raved how good it was, as good as pizza you’d get back in Melbourne. Personally I thought it was a bit like Pizza Hut pizza and I wouldn’t normally eat it back in Melbourne, but it was a nice change. We spent the next day wandering around the part of Trichy near the temple, where most of the markets are, and they bought some souvenirs. We didn’t feel like going back to the temple to see the parts we’d missed the first time, since it had been shut, but we did see Lourdes Church, a large European-looking church modelled on a basilica at Lourdes, France. It had a peaceful garden and was quite an impressive building. As well as the normal grottos, statues and stained glass windows, inside, it had lots of small grottos outside showing the stations of the cross and various other scenes from the gospels or Catholic tradition. The thing that struck me is how even here in the most Dravidian part of India, the characters all had that slightly effeminate look, and certainly were all whiter than an albino Scandinavian with anaemia, as they are in Euroope. So God is still a white man, even in
Indira Gandhi national park
playground in park near hydroelectric dam (see previous photos). The funny thing is kids seemed to enjoy the slide better this way! Tamil Nadu. Of course the historical Jesus (being Palestinian) would have had darker skin than the historical Buddha (being Aryan).
So the next day I saw Liz and Marty off, on their way home to get some proper food. I hope they liked it, it was probably not the best place to go to get a good understanding of India, or even of Tamil culture (which of course extends well beyond India), but since I knew I would be seeing much of the rest of India, I enjoyed it and it was good to take things a bit easy for a while. That afternoon I headed down to Madurai again, on a local bus, cram-packed with locals. I had been unable to get a train ticket, so I was forced to pay I think it was Rs 60 ($AUS 1.50) for a bus ticket. The bus station is the only place in central Trichy where everything is only in Tamil. In many places of course people only
speak Tamil, but the signs are usually in English, or in both languages, but not at the train station. The bus was crowded and the guy next to me didn’t speak English.
I had to sit my backpack at the front of the bus near the driver as there was no roof-rack or luggage compartment. I was back-tracking, but needed to get a suit made, and Madurai seemed like the place to do it. Plus I wanted to see the things I’d missed out on there. That will be in the next blog.
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Madurai hotels
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Madurai hotels
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