Madurai, Madurai, Madurai

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Due to a bit of bad planning we ended up spending 2 more nights in Madurai. It's the second largest city in Tamil Nadu so not a bad place to get stuck waiting for a flight. We survived the trip back down the hill from Kodaikanal. It only took 3 hours down (4 hours up) and the bus wasn't full so not to bad an experience. Only about a kilometre of the trip had vertical drops so no sphincter strain at the end.

We decided to walk around the outside in the cool of the morning. We repaid a promise to the store owner who had helped us, by lending me a dhoti to enter the temple, in returning to his shop to have a browse. They have set up a viewing platform on the roof of the shop to overlook the temple and act as a draw card for prospective clients. It was a nice place to chill with a breeze. I risked the bamboo ladder to get to the very top.

Unfortunately, for him, we didn't see anything we liked that we could have carried but did see some tempting statues and carvings.

We then went out to the Ghandi museum which has a great pictorial history of India and its road to independence. The show piece for the museum is the blood stained clothing he was wearing when he was shot. Not quite as impressive as Ho Chi Minhs embalmed body in Hanoi but does make these historical figures more relevant when you encounter their physical being or artefacts.

With an afternoon free we found a post office to send some post cards, a barber to get a shave and haircut and a few hours browsing in a branch of Chennai Silks.

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