Madurai #1 – hate it but kinda love it too…

Monday 17^th August - After the damp gloom of Munnar we took a bus up, over & down the eastern side of the Western Ghats. The first section, through more tea plantations, took us in & out of cloud & through narrow passes that often meant backing up & sliding past buses coming the other way, all a little nervy; the driver has credit card sized mirrors & the conductor guides him with his whistle, with a 100m drop concealed by the fog.

Madurai was an all day ride away & we enjoyed the journey despite the earsplitting Tamil movie & the aforementioned risk of certain death.

The city itself is large dirty & noisy, on a scale of Katoomba (0) to Agra (10) it rates about an eight. We hated it straight away.

However… we ended up having the best time & possibly the most intensely "Indian" experience of the whole trip at the enormous Sri Meenakshi temple. More of that later.

Life is subtly different here in the state of Tamil Nadu, the saris & longhis are less colourful, the tea is less spicy but the food is wonderful & the temples are a riot of colour. And most of the hotel people are terminally grumpy.

Also you can see strange & wonderful things like

• A calf eating the movie posters off a corrugated tin wall
  
• A cow butting C out of the way as she walked along a pavement (very funny)
  
• A woman on a moped with crash helmet visor but no crash helmet
  
• Emasculated tuk-tuks. At some stage a local ordinance was passed to ban tuk-tuks from having the powerful horns you hear everywhere else in India. The joke is that they have to use coiled brass hooters with a rubber ball at the end & squeeze them by hand, just like on a Model T Ford or somesuch. Hysterical, a bus will come past blowing a pair of air (fog?) horns that could grace a small supertanker & the tuk-tuk will come back with what C described as "an irritated squeaky toy". They must be so pissed off.
  
• Lots of food stalls & cafes called "Tiffin Station - Morning & Evening"
  
• (In a nod to British military history) Restaurants called messes e.g. "Kumar Mess – Veg & non-Veg"
  
• Rotary club meeting in our hotel – Madurai East branch 6pm
  
• The filthiest bathroom mats ever, in every hotel we looked at. Don't even want to step on them in shoes…
  
• The spattiest spats on a jewelry shop guard. He was all smart combat uniform & huge moustache & had shiny white plastic spats over his polished boots.
  
• Rats playing on floor behind ticketing officer at newish Madurai station, live & let live….