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Published: February 25th 2006
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Oddly, my room seems to be warmer and more humid than the outside, which is unfortunate given how warm and humid it is outside.
I breakfasted in the hotel's A/C restaurant, ordering butter toast. This was served to me as essentially a sandwich with a thin layer of butter in between, however the toast was so thick that I thought at first they were serving me a slice of sponge cake.
With my trip now into its final few weeks, I can't afford to lose any days due to not being able to get a train ticket from A to B, so I decided to buy my next few in one fell swoop. The Madurai reservations office was the most orderly I've seen yet - queuing in seats, plus heaps of blank reservations forms (normally you have to pester one of the counter clerks for one). I now have tickets to get half way up Kerala.
With that admin out of the way, I proceeded to the temple complex. And I have to say it was excellent - and will quite probably be in my top 5 experiences here. The square complex is surrounded by a wall, broken
at each of the cardinal points by a gate surmounted by a massive gopura (technical term for a tower above a, er, gateway). One of the unique aspects of the gopuras (of which there are more inside the complex) is that, since the 1950s when a referendum was taken on the subject, they have been regularly repainted in their original blues/reds/greens/yellows, giving them a startlingly fresh appearance. Though this would look very Disney-ish in your average Western country, it's completely in keeping with the more colourful way of life here. And since the gopuras are covered with literally thousands of sculptures, you can spend hours just looking at one gopura - a truly amazing sight to behold.
The whole complex is itself a mandala, or "magical diagram", whose properties are supposedly activated when pilgrims perform a circumambulation. Not sure if this is affected by tourists wandering every which way, but I'm assuming not.
Within the complex, there's no shortage of activity. Tourists, people wandering around aimlessly, pilgrims doing puja (ceremonial rites), priests tending their various shrines, marriages, beggars, a large market selling religious odds and ends, etc. I also encountered one of the temple elephants, wearing a fetching
gold necklace with bells on it, who was bestowing blessings on anyone who would cross its trunk with silver. I felt this would be an auspicious event so I stepped forward for a blessing. This consisted of first having a Rs 10 note hoovered out of my hand, then being tapped gently on the head by the elephant's trunk. I walked away a new man.
With different ceremonies taking place throughout the day, and a changing cast of thousands, it's very easy to spend hours just walking around the complex taking in new sights, and that's what I ended up doing. My socks might not have been too happy about it (another shoeless zone), but I came away feeling that the temple exhibited more rude health than most I've seen so far.
In the evening I decided to try out the hotel bar, called Apollo 96 and decked out in LED lights like some 1970s idea of a spaceship interior. There was a line on the drinks menu "Make a happy flight to Venus in Apollo 96" which I thought might be a covert Boney M reference, but the music was a mix of Bollywood hits and the
Backstreet Boys. So yet again no Ra-Ra-Rasputin action before bed.
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