Where’s Megan?

From Kerala I headed east and crossed the mountain range known as the Western Ghats. Riding a bus through mountains is always a mixed blessing – you trade frequent panics of careening off the edge for the incredible views.

On the other side of the Ghats is Tamil Nadu, a big state in the southeast of India. The monsoon rains can’t climb the Ghats, so I said goodbye to the rain and headed for warmer weather. However, I avoided both by first visiting the “hill station” of Kodaikanal. This city, high up in the clouds, is a popular vacation destination for Indians escaping the summer heat. It was actually cold in the mornings, which was nice. There’s not a lot to do in the town, but its location provides great views into and across the wide valleys (when clouds aren’t blocking them, anyway)

Tamil Nadu is known for its Hindu temples, and a major one I visited was in Madurai, a city centered around a huge temple complex.

Temple detail:

The place was certainly grand and beautiful, but half of the fun of visiting temples is just watching all the activity inside, with priests walking around, people praying or lighting candles in front of the many different shrines set up inside. And, apparently, photographing foreigners. It’s a phenomenon I don’t quite understand, but wherever there are Indian tourists, I become some kind of brief celebrity. With virtually no introduction, a group either wants to me to join their group for a picture, or have me take one of them. Then we all shake hands and go our separate ways. Maybe there’s a national scavenger hunt with “pasty white girl” on the list, I don’t know. It’s all rather bizarre, but kind of fun.

Here’s a photo collage to prove my celebrity status:

I briefly visited Pondicherry, a former French colony where the language is still commonly spoken. My first morning there I was greeted with a “bon soir”. Great, the one convenience India offers me is now gone. At least it was incorrect French, which I’m better at (“bon soir” is “good evening”).

Thankfully my next destination had plenty to offer. Mamallapuram is known for its stonecarvers and a variety of temples and monuments. Here’s one of the stonecarver shops:

It’s also popular with backpackers, and touts and salesmen were everywhere, worse than any place I’ve been in India or even Morocco. The carvings were lovely, but not lovely enough to justify lugging the heavy things around in my bag. Despite having to say “no” every 10 feet, the town was quite nice.

Beach scene with fishing boats. Yes, those are cows. Beach cows.

Some carvings from a group known as the Five Rathas:

There’s also the Shore Temple, which looks awesome on the skyline but the sand, salt and wind erosion has made it much less impressive close-up.

Monkeys are a common sight around temples, and they always seem to be concocting some evil plan. I don’t trust them one bit.

Near Mamallapuram there’s a place called the Crocodile Bank where they breed and display various species of crocodiles, snakes, and turtles. It was quite interesting, and a bit terrifying to see an enclosure of 500 crocodiles, especially as they slowly lumber towards you (and the low wall) for feeding time.

And that was it for Tamil Nadu. I’m heading up to Calcutta next, and then off to Bangkok, Thailand. I decided that, although I’d love to see some areas in the north of India, if I stick around too long I’ll miss the good snorkeling season in Thailand, and that would definitely be tragic. So, like always seems to happen, I’ll have to save it for another trip!

Tags: India, Madurai, Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.