Thanjavur to Madurai

Monday, October 26th was another travel day. We got on the road at 8:30. Sudha pointed out to us all the children in their school uniforms, heading off to school on foot or by various forms of transportation. We stopped at one point to look at a cashew tree. Shortly afterwards, we came to a town and stopped at a hotel, where Sudha had temporarily booked some rooms for us to use the toilets. The tour company had warned us that while our hotels would have bathrooms up to American standards, we might have to make toilet stops out in the country in places where there might be no American-style toilets. Mary Joy is not fond of "Turkish" or squat toilets. They are apparently not designed for women wearing slacks. So far, however, Sudha has always managed to get us toilet stops where there are American-style toilets.

We saw a band of macaque monkeys and stopped.

We visited a village (called Ilangudi) where there was a four-way feud, now in court, between various caste groups as to access to the central temple. We wandered through the lowest-caste area, talking to people, then walked through the woods to an outdoor place for worshipping Ayyanar, one of what Sudha had called the "fierce gods." As we approached the clearing at the foot of a centuries-old tamarind tree, we had to take our shoes off. The path was lined by hundreds of terra cotta horses, each about four or five feet high, in various states of (dis)repair. Sudha said that the 380 families who worshipped there would periodically add a new horse, but this had stopped with the court case. The oldest horses there were 280 years old

We stopped for a wonderful lunch, served not on plates but on banana leaves, at a former British club called the Bangala.

Then we went on to the temple city of Madurai. Our hotel was one of the nicest yet: a mansion built by an American textile magnate on a hill outside the town. Peacocks wander the grounds.

After a two-hour rest period, we joined Sudha and Stalin in climbing into a group of tuk-tuks and heading for the old town. The ride was very interesting, especially when we discovered, later, that our tuk-tuk didn't have headlights. We got out at a sixteenth-century market building, where cloth-sellers and tailors were soliciting business from the passersby. Mary Joy bought a pair of small, zippered bags, then got herself measured for an Indian-style shirt and pants, which would be ready the next day.

Then we climbed back into the tuk-tuks and rode to a sort of milk bar, where the proprietor was famous not so much for his milk masala drink (though it has a very nice almond taste and is only barely sweet (unlike most Indian drinks, which are loaded with sugar), as for the spectacular show he puts on in pouring it from one pitcher to another, without spilling a drop.

Next, we drove to a small neighborhood restaurant, where the cooks put on another sort of show, of making bread and chopping together the ingredients (bread, egg, onion, tomato and curry) of a dish while it is frying. We ate some of it (very good) with some bread.

Then back to our hotel.