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Published: March 12th 2007
A welcome day’s rest. At last I cam please myself and actually try to see a bit of this remarkable country.
Sachiko had agreed to show myself and Scot some of the sights of Madurai to help speed up the orientation process. This morning started with the spectacular Meenakshi Temple.
Meenakshi is a prominent Goddess in Hindu mythology, her important is emphasised by the fact that it is unusual for temples to be built to honour goddesses. Meenakshi means Fish Eyes (Meen - Fish, Aakshi - eyes), the goddesses eyes never close allowing her to always be watchful over her devotees. Meenakshi was the sister of Lord Vishnu and the wife of Lord Shiva, 2 of the most important Hindu Gods.
The temple is a huge place, a central Tank surrounded by numerous corridors, halls and smaller temples. The most impressive room being the Hall of a 1,000 pillars, apparently a gross exaggeration as there are only 997! Each pillar is carved from a single piece of rock and must have required hundreds of man hours to complete. The hall also serves as a gallery for many carvings, paintings and artefacts depicting the life of Meenakshi and also
Lord Shiva.
The perimeter of the temple is marked by a huge wall and in the centre of each wall are 4 huge and incredibly ornate towers. Amazing feats of engineering and craftsmanship!
The temples itself receives between 15 and 30 thousand visitors per day, some are tourists but the majority are Hindus there to worship or on pilgrimages. The place is fantastically busy and vibrant, with small stores in some halls, priests going about their duties and pilgrims sat around deep in meditation or conversation.
The temple provided me with an unusual opportunity - to be blessed by an Elephant! Foolishly, I did not wait to watch anyone else being blessed before having a go myself and certainly was not expecting to find my head being engulfed by its trunk - as can be witnessed by the look of surprise on my face!
On leaving the temple we made for the tailors market across the road. Here I introduced to Kannan, a 38 year old who had had his stall there for over 20 years. He is known as the Aravind guest house tailor and always looks after guests well. An entertaining character who loved
to talk - 30 minutes about random subjects from tourism, cricket, the Jewish faith! I will be paying Kannan a visit later in the week to sort out my wardrobe for Mouli’s wedding.
After a hot, dusty, crowded but thoroughly enjoyable 3 hours in and around the temple we decided to grab an Auto-rickshaw up to the Taj Garden Resort hotel which is situated on a hill overlooking Madurai.
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Jean Boyd
non-member comment
Stunning
What a place! This whole experience will change your life! Elephant sweet - put him in your hand luggage and bring him home