Road to Madurai

This was another long travel day on the road to Madurai — the second largest city in Tamil Nadu and a major temple city. What cathedrals were to pre-modern Europe, these temples still are to Hindus. Tomorrow will be the major festival day of the year for followers of Shiva, so we expect crowds.

The trip was broken up by several stops. The first was at a roadside cashew nut stand. We saw the fresh-picked cashew nuts being roasted over an open fire. Then the shells were cracked with a rock. It’s time-consuming labor, which is why nuts are so expensive. We paid 100 Rupees (about $1.50 US) for a very small bag.

After driving a bit farther we got off the highway to visit a village shrine. Along the way, on the single-track dirt road, we encountered a man on a motorbike. The bike was so heavily loaded that it was probably as wide as a car, so he and the bus could not pass on the narrow road. Standoff!

We all jumped off the bus to take his photo, and he seemed pleased about that. Then our tour leader invited him aboard the bus for a brief interview. His bike was so loaded that it wouldn’t stand by itself on the kickstand. Our bus driver’s assistant had to go out and hold the bike up for him while he came on the bus to chat.

We learned that this man performs a valuable service. He collects waste plastic and takes it to recycling centers. He also sells plastic items, such as buckets and wash tubs, in the villages. Sometimes the farmers are so poor that they have to buy a plastic pail on the installment plan, and this guy offers credit.

There was a pen full of goats near the place where we got off the bus. The goatherd was happy to chat. He raises the goats for meat, but because he is Hindu, he is a vegetarian. Nevertheless, he is happy to sell his goats to neighboring Muslims. I’m not sure that’s entirely in the Hindu spirit, but it meets the letter of the law.

We walked a short distance through the desert brush until we came to the entrance to a shrine or temple. The four villages near here that share this holy site are too poor to build an actual shrine, so this is an open air temple (removing shoes is mandatory, nevertheless).

A unique feature of this temple is that at each harvest festival the offerings are carried to the altar on a terra cotta animal — usually a clay horse, but sometimes a bull or an elephant. When the ceremony is over, the clay animals are placed along the road leading to the shrine. It is unclear to us if there is more than one offering per year, but in any case, this temple must have been in operation for some time. There were probably a thousand clay animals lining the road, many broken, but some not.

At lunch time we stopped in the village of Kadiapatti. During the British colonial period this had been a center for commerce and banking, and a number of local families became very wealthy. They built large, fancy villas in classical style, and partly due to multiple wives, raised huge families to fill the houses up. Now this place is considered too out of the way and isolated, so family members have moved to the big cities, leaving the houses, in most cases, to decay.

A few of these ornate villas, however, has been turned into a hotels or event centers. We had a tour of one, and then ate lunch there. The man giving the tour wanted to give us way too much detailed information, so he had to be hurried along. The lunch was all food of the region (served on a banana leaf, of course) and was very good.

There are a lot of granite outcroppings in this are, and granite has been quarried here for centuries. Today, granite is exported around the world for kitchen counter tops. There were also some interesting granite formations we passed, There is one that looks like a giant elephant laying down on its stomach, looking toward the city of Madurai. It is said to be the guardian of the city.

Our hotel here is built on the side of another formation, called the cow. It’s an old manor house for a British textile trader, built in the 1890s (but the part in which we’re staying was added much more recently). The room is huge, but rather bare. The view of the city from up here is fantastic

Wildlife here consists primarily of peacocks. They’re everywhere, and they aren’t the least afraid of people. We were sitting by the pool, reading after our swim, and about five of them came up around us, at least one walked just a couple inches from my elbow as I sat in the deck chair.

At 6 p.m. we met our group and the tour leader had arranged “auto-rickshaws” (tuk-tuks) for all of us, two to a car, so that we could experience the city after dark. They took us on about a 20-25 minute trip to the city center. We walked around the market area, which was largely unremarkable.

We saw a woman selling human hair, which is not something one sees everyday. Women sometimes buy these braids to use as hair extensions, or it is considered to be a noble sacrifice if burned in the temple.

Our tour leader treated us each to a cup of badam milk — cow’s milk that has been boiled and spices added. Then the tuk-tuks drove us to a place very near our hotel where street food was being prepared in a very entertaining manner. We watched the preparation of an egg dish, that was essentially an omelet filled with lots of spicy stuff, topped with curry, and served on a banana leaf. There was bread
and chicken on the side. It was quite good, and the whole meal cost less than a dollar each.

The tuk-tuks delivered us back to the hotel by about 8 p.m