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Madurai: in awe at the Meenakshi Amman temple

At 6:30am we woke to "last stop, last stop" and collected our things. The sleep bus was pretty good for sleeping. Bumpy, but no honking as there is a door between you and the driver and getting to lie flat saves the bum.


We went across the street to a tea guy and sat on the steps having chai and deep-fried bread. From there we headed to the Meenakshi Amman temple. I was happy to see that there is an effort to reduce plastic bags, especially having seen the amount of plastic on the beaches in Sri Lanka and Oman.


We weren't the only ones, even at that early hour. The temple opens at 5am. You can enter at any of the towers and need to leave your shoes, large bags, and cameras at the shoe spot next to the entrance. The woman at the entrance did a thorough search and found my camera that first round, so we had to go back to the left luggage place. On the second time around she didn't like the plug adapter as it looked electronic. After showing her how it worked she let me through. Supposedly, foreigners need to pay to enter, but no one was there, so I gave some money in one of the donation places as a bit of a contribution. I find the foreigner entry fees a bit off as some foreigners will contribute if they are of the religion and buy offerings, but guess that most don't.

The temple is huge and quite impressive with countless towers, a large pond, colorful ceilings, and tons of carvings. It dates back to at least the 7th century and the current structure is from the 17th century.








After this we headed back to the bus station to see if we could get a bus to Kerala. There were only night buses, but did discover a train leaving later that day thanks to the IRCTC connect app. We got lunch and then headed to the train station to get tickets as buying them online wasn't working.

It was one of those tedious experiences you have when you don't know the system or speak a common language. We got in line. A couple of guys point to an office and said "foreigner" so we headed there to find an apathetic woman who checked a couple things for us and then tells us to get back in the same line. As we were buying 2 journeys, I'd put the train info for the 2nd journey on the back, but this wasn't accepted, so filled out another paper. The pink papers are for last minute tickets that cost double the price and white for regular. There was no space on the train, so he asked us to wait 15 minutes for cancellations so we didn't have to pay double. Eventually we got all the tickets in time before C booked a flight to Goa in despair.

With a few hours to spare, we headed to the Gandhi museum only to realize that it closes from 1-2pm for lunch. We waited the hour and then got a detailed report on the events leading up to Gandhi's efforts to free India as well as his life. Highly recommended and it's free.

Got to the train station early and found the upper class waiting room so we could charge our phones. The train was about 15 minutes late, but we found our seats and settled in for the 5 hour journey towards Kanyakumari.


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