i predict a riot

So - Madurai is famous for its fantastically painted temples. Little was said of it's 50/50 racial mix - Hindu/Muslim and what happens if one side suffers an assasination the day that I arrive in town.

I'd arrived early in the morning and watched the sun rise over a station concourse that was littered with people, all wrapped up in grey cloths and blankets.

 

The temples are, indeed, spectacular. There's a great deal of prostrating oneself and walking around pillars numerous times.   I have one particular memory of a algae-infested water tank in one.  I might be wrong.

The Temple Market is also tremendously famous, lined, as it is, by tailors and other cloth-sellers.


I'm still profoundly deaf and think little of it when I find myself walking at the centre of a rather determined crowd, flying black flags and banners.  I quickly catch on when a police van flies through the centre of the crown and dispenses a large number of baton-wielding policemen.  Everyone runs in the opposite direction, including myself. 

 

Madurai goes into a degree of shutdown.  You can find yourself sitting in a bar/cafe, happily eating an onion dosa when the shutters rattle down to fend off a marrauding crowd of 'the other side'.

I'm also profoundly constipated, by the way.

What to do but checkout and head to Kerala.  A bus seems like a good idea.  If your idea of a good bus journey is a broken seat in front of you, a leaking roof and an endless array of indians wanting to sit next to you and make friends as you make your way over the Keralan mountains with the skies darkening and the temperature dropping.  Kumily (the famous hill station) passes in the torrential night and I arrive to a boxroom in Ernakulam, battered.

Am I enjoying myself?  From reading all of this, I'm really not quite sure.

MahabaliMamalapuram

Two things - the way I say the word Mahabalipuram always makes U laugh.  And this is, I think, the episode I tell people about the most.  Because it was the most horrific.

After J was gone there was a powercut. The perfect opportunity for me to contemplate the next 5-6 weeks entirely alone. 

My first step, in the morning, was to plan and execute my trip to Mahabalipuram, via Madras.  The famous shore temples were supposed to be the 'must see' sight of Tamil Nadu.  My account of getting there is full of heat, frustration and bangle-sellers.  My rhetoric is all about being 'confusedly hassled'.  First impressions of the town appear to be good but am immediately conned into staying at a homestay under false pretences.  Mr Neelankandan will remain, however, close to my heart for reeasons that will become apparent.

The most stereotypical array of travellers proceeded to career into view.  There was the yogic American called Brad.  There were the gaggle of Australian girls who particularly caught Brad's eye - "The ocean is my guru".  And there was Jim.  More on Jim no doubt later.

There seems to be an increasing impatience with Indian tourists and a need to find peace and quiet.  It's clearly very hot indeed and my cough is getting worse and worse.  The food, it seems, is good - apart from a head attached to a grilled fish. 

The 'tipping point' day was filled with unease, pain and inability to settle.  I go for a walk to clear my head and am picked up by "Mr Glastonbury" and put on the back of his bike and taken to the doctors.  50 Rps of drugs are dispensed, taken home and thrown up again.  An Australian Hippy administers a face massage.  And it gets worse.

Before I know it I'm in hospital being injected, blood tested and dripped.  My reflections are not of being at all alarmed - just deliriously going with the flow.  I had my own room with a lock and constant visitors and attention - notably from the Australian Girls, Jim and Mr N.  There's been a bubonic plague outbreak.  Incoming visitors to the country are being fumigated, outgoing tourists are being blood tested and television sets are being exchanged for 1,000 dead rats apiece. 

And there's a little boy called Hari Krishna who's Uncle is in the next room after a motorbike accident who brings me Tamil comics to read.

And I'm going profoundly deaf.

It seems my stoicism is being read in backpacker circles as great bravery.  It is, of course, nothing of the sort.  But the whole experience is nothing short of miserable.  I get out after five days - after x-rays and ear gouging and a 3,000 Rp bill.  Jim and Mr N walk me slowly home, stopping along the way to chat to people and look at stone carvings - mainly chillums for Jim.

A community art project is being undertaken in Jim's room - a mandala begun by Brad and radically improved by Jim who spends hours working on it wearing nothing but a small pair of blue shorts.

And I prepare to leave.  Mr N firmly believes that I should, in the least, send him a walkman when I return home.  Mrs N just thinks money will do.  And so, with sore tonsils and ongoing grumpiness at the people who continually hinder my (deaf) path with diversions to money-changers and dope dealers, I leave for Madurai.

Picking up a newspaper somewhere along the way I discover that there is now a moratorium on killing rats and that the best way to deal with delays on the railways is to set the train on fire.

Memories.  Dreams of having to return to India and finding myself back there already.  Mr N, appearing at my bedroom door each evening, bare chested with his face painted, giving puja.  Jim's shorts.

Hampi or bust

 

Hampi remains, many years later, one of the best experiences of my life. 

We stayed one night in Hospet - not the most inspiring of towns - mainly a stopping-off point for Hampi - as demonstrated by a couple who were daytripping to Hampi every day.

My diary refers to it, over and over, as 'Indiana Jones-like'.  The enormous boulders, strewn across the landscape.  The thirteenth century temples, Elephant Stables, Queen's Bath and singing stones.  The 'main drag' of a few shops and stalls with an enormous temple and town 'water tank' at the far end.  And Gopis - our hangout of choice.  And the cheapest room I've stayed in in my life - RajSingh's (or something).  A small cafe and a few bare rooms.  20 rps a night.  Monkeys everywhere.  But at least the place had hot water which you threw over yourself with a bucket.

J amused himself somewhat with some British Girls  that we'd met.  One, he maintained, was the spitting image of Patsy Kensit.  Lots of 'caram' in the cafe and bikerides out into the desert.

We both had 'daytrips' into Hospet for trouser-making, ticket booking and money-changing.  Mine was dominated by a chap called Vittl who insisted on escorting me everywhere, pissing in the street, ordering double for lunch and insisting that I came to his house for dinner.  J displayed his usual supportive charms by saying that he'd have happily let me go alone whilst he feigned illness.

 

I'd imagine that Hampi is a bit more touristified these days.  Then it was the last stop saloon.  Fights in the street between hammered indians and stoned hippy travellers.  Waves of dog barking in the streets, heralding the approach or departure of a visitor.  Monkeys coming into your room to steal things.  An ever-increasing entourage of visitors, every morning, from Shankar the massage and chillum guy through to the bread/pie/cake guy.  And every day marked with breakfast at RS's, chillin' in the room, climbing up to the temple and dinner at Gopis.



We'd spend hours, sitting on the side of a mountain, talking nonsense, writing postcards and poems, smoking and drinking 'bang lassis'. 

My diary shows signs of irritation on both sides.  J's womanising, 'go it alone' attitude and miserliness might have, in fact, caused problems further down the line - but it didn't because we were only together for 18 days. 

But all in all - a remarkable week - fondly remembered.

And indeed - after a quick trip to Mysore and the now-famous Bangalore, he was gone.  I was on my own.

PostScript.  I've just discovered, in looking for pictures online, that Hampi Bazaar is gone - bulldozed in 2011 as part of a government order to 'protect' the historic site.  The pictures online are truly sad and shocking.  All gone.  Never to return.