28 Jan 2012

Some temple cities you've probably never heard of in Tamil Nadu

From Mysore I took a night train to Madurai - it actually passed through Bangalore, although that isn't the shortest route, but the trains have these little oddities.

Madurai was heaving full of foreign tour groups, so all the hotels were full and I ended up slightly upmarket. The more I stay in medium-aspiring-to-decent hotels the less I think they are worth paying for. This one suffered from serious overstaffing - I'm one of a very small minority in this country who don't prefer lifts, so I tripped over several uniformed men draped over the stairs in a slight snooze. The poor things had to jump to attention every time I went past. 

There's even worse to come in the restaurant, which managed to provide one of the worst breakfasts I've had here. There's a buffet, but with 2 waiters for every early morning person, you aren't allowed to use it. [1] Especially not if you're foreign and female :-( Instead, the waiter managed to bring me toast with the standard Indian masala touch (onion and garlic flavoured - it makes me cross when I could perfectly well have put my own slices in the toaster!) and coffee instead of chai. And the grape juice was oversugared (by now, I'm quite used to a fair bit of sugar in your typical Indian fruit juice, so trust me, there was a lot of sugar). Then again, I might have been less bothered otherwise, but I was in a particularly bad mood after being fumigated by some fuel in the morning. I'm not sure quite what was involved, but there was a very powerful smell of kerosene or paraffin or somesuch, I think possibly some kind of insect control programme? It left me knackered and bad tempered for days. 

However, the temple was everything you've heard and more, and I was fortunate to visit it with a professional photographer from Devon, which may be while you'll spot some slightly more arty shots than usual in my latest set of pics.

I headed on to Trichy, which was full of Indian weddings, so the hotels were even fuller, and I upmarketed some more. To a hotel with pool! (Yay). It then proceeded to rain ... (!!!!) I nearly asked for my money back. So far, I have stayed in 4 hotels with pools: Delhi and Mumbai where it was too cold to swim, Vadodara where it was too public (and there was no one else in the pool at all), and Trichy where it rained. I'm going to have to do better!

[1] I've seen this partial-self-service buffet layout in a few hotels, and even if the food is better than this one, it never fails to create havoc with the logistics.

12 Feb 2008

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