Tamil Nadu - Temples, temples and temples again...

After my trip through Rajasthan, I thought I was templed out and decided that I would probably not spend any more time visiting temples during this trip... It was before I went to Tamil Nadu and visited three of the most amazing Hindu places in India.

It was difficult to leave Pondicherry because of the horrific weather conditions, but I finally managed to get a bit of sun to get to the bus stand and jump on a bus to Trichy. After about 10 hours of a trip including the bus breaking down (definitely not easy to travel in India!) and changing buses on the side of the highway with cars driving on the wrong side of the road (they do it on normal roads, so why not on the highway!), I got to the town. Trichy has the second biggest temple site in the world after Angkor in Cambodia and I have to say it is rather amazing with a 136 acres site mixing temple gates and usual Indian city bazaar, passing seven massive gates carved with hundreds of colorful god statues and finally getting to the main temple. I did not take pictures of it as the layout and the site of the site made it extremely difficult to get a good idea of how it looked like...

After less than 24 hours in Trichy, I headed to Tanjore, to see another huge temple: the Breehadishwara temple, which is a Unesco world heritage site and included a 63 meters high tower. Again, the carvings were among the most impressive I have seen and the ochre color of the stone made it amazing.

The next day, I finally traveled to Madurai, which also has a Unesco world heritage site: the Meenakshi temple. This one is probably the most amazing building I have seen in India after the Taj Mahal: a marvelous colorful temple with 50-meter high gates, all covered with thousands of statues representing the Hindu gods. This is also one of the only sites that the Indian seem to be taking care of as they repaint the temple every twelve years. Last time they did it was in 2009, which means that everything looked brand new. I hired a guide for a 2-hour tour of the site and I learnt a lot regarding Hindu religion and the various gods, as well as the way people worship them.

This done, I decided to try to go under clearer skies and headed to Kerala to get a bit of backwaters and natural parks. But I will talk about this later on.

Take care,

Matt

Now, the pictures:

The gate to the Brihadishwara Temple in Tanjore 

Brihadishwara Temple in Tanjore 

The main tower of the temple 

These types of carvings are covering the whole temple 

The gate to the Sri Minakshi Temple in Madurai 

There are literally thousands of statues carved and painted on the temple 

The ceilings are also amazing 

A famous type of Hindu painting, with an optical illusion 

View on most of the massive temple complex in Madurai 

I did not know where to look as there was something interesting everywhere 

I knew I was the Anaconda, but this guy is my hero: 6 elephants to hold his penis!!  

The tatues are also very detailed: see the veins on this musician's hand