(Madurai, during winterbreak)
To backtrack a little, I traveled for ten days in December, down in the Indian south. We spent a great amount of time on buses, which varied from beds as seats to rockhard tiny benches with deafening Bollywood music playing in the early hours of the morning, but managed to also see a lot of beautiful things. Madurai itself wasn't the nicest city, and we'd had what I would say was the worst bus journey of the lot, as there was a continuous draft, no way to get comfortable and the bus station was smogged out and ten kilometres away from the centre.
The temple, on the other hand, was rather impressive. A World Heritage Site, with a multitude of colourful tower-things (called gopurams) that are painted once every twelve years, it contained a mini museum of sorts and required my travel-companion (a Danish boy in shorts) to put on a lungi (a type of wrap-around cotton skirt worn by Indian men in the south).
(If I wasn't slightly scared of him not appreciating the photos I took of him in it, I'd post them. Alas, I suspect they'd be detrimental to his masculinity?)
The temple was already full of praying people when we got there at eight in the morning, and the place held a certain haunting quality that definitely stifled the garishness of the stalls selling gold plastics and religious paraphernalia. It was massive too, and we spent a while simply wandering around barefoot on the cold stone floors, before heading off to the Gandhi Museum and our next destination of Tanjore.
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