Madurai - "The City of Divine Nectar"

Last weekend, I went on a staff trip to Madurai (check out: Madurai on Wikipedia). It was a trip down to the "real" India - and I didn't realize just how much of a strange, misty, mountain kingdom Kodaikanal was, until journeying down to "the plains," as anything down from the hill is known.

Our bus left Kodai at 6:30AM, and we began the dizzying trip down the side of the mountain. I've never gotten sick myself, but most people recommend not having anything to eat before beginning the ride, and taking some motion sickness tablets if you're prone to that sort of thing. The change in altitude is huge; Kodai is at 2,133m (7000 feet), and Madurai is essentially at sea level. Plastic bottles shrivel in on themselves, the greater pressure of the plains beating down on the thin mountain air inside them. It makes your body feel odd - for a lack of a better word - to suddenly descend 2 kilometers and experience about a 15 degree (celsius) difference rise in temperature. Suddenly the cool, clinging mist of the mountaintop becomes a sticky, stifling humidity. It feels like a warm, pleasant blanket at first, but then as the midday heat rises and the chill of Kodai is chased from your bones, it just feels HOT.

That's what brings out the smells of India, though. I mean that in the best possible way - yes, you get the occasional whiff of pure sewage, but it's mostly this rich cocktail of spices, incense, cooking, animals, perfumes, dust and smoke and sweat and exhaust all settled over the streets like a fourth dimension to the world... It's an entirely new way to take in a city which doesn't exist in North America, because nothing really smells. I suppose that animals can smell the difference, but with my wimpy human nose I need a certain richness of scent before I notice it, before it becomes an important and beautiful characteristic of the place I'm in. Here, everything is full of scents. The temples have their own particular blend, a mixture of the powders and ghee spread onto holy sculptures, the garlands of fruit thrown around their necks, the endless strings of jasmine flowers that the women wear in their hair, millions of sticks of incense, sputtering tallow candles, and of course the crowds of people wandering everywhere.

The temples. Madurai - in case you're too apathetic to click the Wikipedia link - is a city of 1.3 million, whose chief attractions are the enormous, amazing Hindu temples, most notably the Meenakshi Sundareswara temple. It was our first stop on the Madurai trip, and I'd never seen anything even remotely like it in my life. Tather than describe it I'm just going to deluge you with photos:

The temples are covered with intricate and colorfully painted sculptures of gods and goddesses - click for a larger version:

There are zillions of things for sale in the temple, some of them devotional in nature, some of them just tourist junk.

For two rupees, you can be blessed by the elephant! It's a very well-trained elephant - you hold out the two rupee coin, the elephant nimbly grabs it with the flexible tip of its trunk, and then taps you on the head with its trunk as a blessing. Needless to say, I received my blessing, despite the biologist in me feeling a bit outraged that it was so far from its natural habitat and family group... They're very intelligent creatures with lifelong, closely-knit family groups. I hope this individual wasn't taken from its family. Where do sacred elephants COME from? Is there a special place where sacred elephants are bred and raised, or do they just snatch them out of the jungle??
Though there were many people at the temple to worship, there were also a lot that just seemed to be there to hang out - they brought picnic lunches in their tiffin boxes and sprawled down against the wall or between a couple of pillars, like this family.
There was a model so that you could see the scope of the entire temple - as you can see, there are actually many different towers, with the courtyard and fountain in the center.

I'm running short on time - I have to go to bed soon, I have an extremely busy day tomorrow - so I'm just going to throw down the rest of the photos and hold off on the long reflections, descriptions, etc (do I hear sighs of relief? Shame on you! Or rather, shame on me...)


We went to a fabric market, an amazingly colorful and bustling market in a huge building opposite the temple. High ceilings lofted above narrow passages between stalls absolutely packed with cloth, as you can see above. After bargaining for lengths of raw silk or jewel-toned shot silk, you can have it made into salwar kameez or anything your heart desires, just 2 meters away, where a row of tailors and their sewing machines wait to fulfill all of your clothing needs:

I bought two ready-made salwar kameez and had them altered to fit me right there, in about half an hour. In fact, see the green cloth in the picture above? That's mine! The other one is gold shot silk. They're both beautiful, and I'm going to try as hard as I can to get away with wearing them in North America.

The heat and walking was exhausting; we took auto-rickshaws sometimes, which was fun, but mostly walked. There aren't any auto-rickshaws in Kodai due to a REALLY REALLY LAME cartel by the taxis; I'm not sure exactly how they got so powerful, but the taxi drivers prevent any auto-rickshaws from operating in Kodai, and keep a rather expensive monopoly on transport. So it was absolutely delightful to beep-beep through the crowded streets in a tiny three-wheeled instrument of mayhem, dodging cows and buses alike, nipping down narrow alleys with giant potholes, the driver reaching up to squeeze the horn as we nosed past pedestrians and vendors. It's a friendly sort of chaos.

And here I am:


Adios! I'm off to camp with grade 11 for the weekend - swimming, archery, rock-climbing, a terrific zipline, excellent hiking... and probably a lot of teenage drama, truth-or-dare, and campfire singing. Apparently they sing Bollywood tunes instead of Kumbayah.