And so it ends . .

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The drive frron Thanjavur to Chennai was a long run, about seven hours, only broken by a stop at the Swaminatha Temple in Swaminalai.

Swaminatha is another name for Murugan the son of Shiva and the temple featured many images of the Shiva family. There were several large paintings (I think they must either date from the Nayak period or else be more recent). One showed Ganesh actually riding on his mouse. I knew that the mouse is Ganesh's mount but all depictions I had seen previously (even the Nandi like mouse in Thanjavur) hasd been far to small to realistically carry the elephant-headed god, but here a blue mouse is shown carrying not only Ganesh (in powerful form with eight arms, but also a consort. Likewise, Murugan was depicted on his peacock with even more arms and a large numver of heads and two consorts. Murugan definitely rules in this temple - even Lord Shiva, his father, accepts him as his guru.

The upper halls of the temple have massive Nayak like stone pillars, some of which are plated in bronze. There are some beautiful carvings on them, but the details have been obscured.

It began to rain really haed as we drove along and at one point we saw a bus that had gone off the side of the road. Fortunately, it didn't look as if anyone had been hurt.

In Chennai, I went first to the Cathedral of St Thomas, called Santhome. This church is dedicated to St Thomas Didymus, the Apostle, also known as Doubting Thomas for requiring physical verification of Jesus' wounds before he would accept that he was "risen". Thomas is said to have travelled to India (some say in the company of Jesus himself who, according to such people had not "risen" at all but had never died.

Thomas himself is said to have dies not far from the cathedralk and his remains were interred where the cathedral now stands. It claims to be one of only three churches in the world to stand over the body of a disciple, the others being St Peter's in Rome and St James of Compostella in Spain.

There is actually very little historical evidence to validate the claim that St Thomas came to India and died in what is now Chennai. The church has a small museum but there were no artifacts older than the renaissance, although there was a reliquary containing a "bone of the saint" and the "tip of the spear that killed him".

The church, as it now stands, was erected in 1896 and is an attractive building within and without with many interesting details about various apostles and disciples posted on its walls.

The church is near the beach and many local Christians believe it was saved from the tsunami only by virtue of a pole planted by St Thomas in the church's grounds to protect it from the sea.

The nearby beach (which stretches for five miles along the city) is sandy and wide and shows no remaining sign of the catastrophe when many, unprotected by St Thomas's pole, did die here. I saw in the paper yesterday that two people were drowned after swimming at Miramar beach in Goa, which I visited a few weeks ago.

Talking about the papers, I only saw today that the Deccan Chronicle carries the British Andy Capp cartoon. This is just the sort of thing my proposed HA Museum in Ooty would cover, the way that humour crosses barriers.

I also went to the Government Museum which had some very interesting bronzes together with placards expalining the differences between the various types of Shiva and of Vishnu statues and analysing the meaning of the Nataraja. These details were attributed to the Manual on the Bronze Gallery by Dr R Kannan but I could not find a copy of this in the Museum bookshop, which mainly sold reprints of nineteenth century and earlier works - I glanced an interesting and amusing book by Costantino Beschi, an Italian priest who'd lived in India, called The Adventures of Gooroo (ie) Guru Noodle (ie idiot).

Also in the museum, rather randomly, was a copy of Magna Carta with a sign stating that this was the basis of all democratic government.

I also went to the Valluvar Kottam which was buit in 1976 as a memorial to a famous ancient Tamil poet. It consists of a large auditorium with a building in the shape of a temple chariot, decorated with scenes from the poems, in the grounds.

I shall miss India, and miss travelling. The best times I had, surprisingly enough, were the two months I was doing volunteer teaching work in Ao Luk and Udaipur. I didn't post all that much about those times because I was busy and I was enjoying myself and I could just chat to the other volunteers instead of having to try to reduce my experiences to blogs!

I did not have as much time to explore Chennai as I should have liked. I have to catch a plane back to Europe at 8am tomorrow morning! Unfortunately, I thought I was catching a plane at 8 in the evening, but when I checked again it was in the morning. So I have to act quickly.

First, I'll go to Barcelona for a few days to acclimatise back to the West and then I will come back to England and another version of reality . .

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