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Published: August 7th 2007
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When we got to Madurai on March 11th it was late, and we went straight to our chosen hotel by rickshaw. Our hotel—Sree Devi—was located breathtakingly close to the Meenakshi Temple complex, and according to our guidebook it was “spotless” and “great value.” Two bellhops led us into the tiny rickety elevator, insisting that all four of us crowd in with our bags despite the fact that we were nearly on top of each other, and could much more easily have taken two trips. Our room was small, windowless, filthy—to the point of dirty handprints and hairs all over the sheets—and absolutely reeked like a pile of trash that has been stewing in the sun for days. We’d had some less-than-perfect rooms before, but this one was certainly the worst. But by then it was late, we’d already hauled our bags upstairs, and we didn’t have the energy to find another hotel. The hotel staff agreed to move us into a room with windows the next day, when one opened, and we resigned to spend a night trying not to breathe through our noses.
The view from the rooftop terrace almost canceled out the condition of our room.
The temple was so close I could have thrown a rock and hit it (not that I would throw a rock at a temple), and multicolored cement houses sprawled in all directions, their rooftops decorated with plants and drying laundry. The temple complex is huge a walled-in enclosure with multiple enormous towers, all of them completely covered in colorful and detailed carvings. Even at night, when the details were hidden by the darkness, the view from the rooftop was breathtaking. We spent time on to roof every night we stayed in Madurai, chatting with other travelers and watching the sun set.
The next morning we moved out of our disgusting, stinking room and into the room next door, which was ten times better and about twice as expensive. It had cleaner linens, a slightly cleaner bathroom, and a small porch looking out over the busy street below. Although the room was better and the view was incredible, the hotel staff struck us as somehow shifty. We received phone calls from the reception starting at 7 a.m.—sometimes four calls within five minutes—asking if we wanted breakfast (which was exorbitantly expensive, so the answer was always no) or laundry service. Many
times hotel staff would come to our door, for similar trivial reasons, and try the handle instead of knocking. There were always at least three employees asleep in the hallways or stairwells, meaning that the elevator was often unusable because there was no one awake to run it. We made the mistake of ordering food to be delivered to our room at one point, and although we asked for two simple dishes we were brought (and charged way too much for) four different things, none of them what we’d asked for. But the view was too good to pass up, so we stayed at Sree Devi for the four nights we stayed in Madurai.
We spent most of our time inside the temple complex, wandering the nearby streets searching for cheap local food, or relaxing on the hotel rooftop. We found a couple of great thali places, serving heaps of fresh rice and curries on banana leaves. We hadn’t quite mastered the eating-with-our-hand thing yet, so we got quite a few friendly laughs from our neighbors as we ate. One night for dinner we stopped in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with absolutely nothing written in English on the menu. We
managed to explain that we wanted something with fish, and we were rewarded with an excellent spicy fish curry. As always, we found the best food in the smallest, least tourist-oriented places.
Inside the temple is a maze of shrines, vendors, musicians, worshippers, and a few painted elephants accepting donations of coins or bananas with their trunks. A huge central bathing tank holds a golden lotus flower, and the steps leading down to the water are crowded with Hindus resting and chatting. The walls and ceilings inside the temple are brightly painted and carefully carved, and candles burning in the countless shrines cast a flickering orange glow on the faces of the Hindus that walk clockwise around each. No shoes are allowed into the temple, so we left ours in our hotel room each time we visited, picking our way barefoot along the road, sidestepping puddles and piles of cow manure. The roads were full of people offering to make clothes for us: “I make you skirt just like that one! Very cheap!”
There was a crowded little indoor market near one of the temple gates, held inside of a carved building that could very well have been
a museum in itself. Vendors hung their wares from hooks driven into the carved faces of gods, and cobwebs and dirt coated the ornately carved stone ceiling. I suppose in comparison to the splendor of the temple next door, the ruins of the marketplace carvings were considered to be insignificant. But it was strange and slightly depressing to see consumerism literally overwhelm and drown what was once probably a temple.
It seemed like there wasn’t a lot to do in Madurai aside from visit the temple and find food, but even just sitting on our porch watching the daily comings and goings of the people was enough to fill a few idle hours. In the early mornings the women of each house would sweep their front steps clean of dirt and draw mandalas (chalk symmetrical drawings) in front of their front doors. Fat cows would wander from one trash pile to the next looking for lunch. One evening, a man lit a trash pile on fire below us in the road, and we watched about 30 cockroaches fleeing from the flames in all directions, some of them literally in flames themselves. We left Madurai on March 15th, catching the
train to Chennai, the nearest major train station to our next destination: the stone-carving seaside town of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu.
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Anna
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The painted elephants are my favorite.