Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai

Travel Day 911 – Tanjavur to Madurai, Tamil Nadu, INDIA

It was an Active Travel Day again, but this time we had to continue our journey by bus instead of the train…

Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, India

This wasn’t the biggest of all deals, but it was definitely always more comfortable to travel in the train than by bus. In the train one could at least stand up and walk around, or use a bathroom. Also there were always food or chai vendors on the train and the train was not driving on dusty roads or being stuck in traffic. So the train had a lot going for it, but unfortunately it was all booked out…

So we had to take a local bus to the outside bus terminal and then a long distance bus towards Madurai. While sitting in the front of the bus, which seemed to be racing its way through the dense traffic of the country road, I had to think of another argument for the train. It was a lot easier to relax on the train as head on collisions with trucks or other busses seemed not as likely as they did in our honking and racing overland bus…

Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai

Despite all threats of almost accidents we still made it to Madurai in one piece. But it took us another bus ride into town and a long sweaty walk in the heat of the day to find a decent and somewhat affordable accommodation. For some reason cheap hotel rooms were in the south of India not quite as easy to come by as they had been in the north it seemed…

Anyway, once settled in we at least made it out for a little walk down to the big Meenakshi Amman Temple. Coming from Thanjavur we didn’t really expect too much of this place and in fact it did look a lot kitschier than the nice Chola temple we had seen yesterday. For some reason all the colorations of the carved ornamentations just seemed to make the temple look somewhat cheesy and cheap. Also the fact that even inside the temple there were lots for tourist shops did not really help to feel the authenticity of this place…

Interior of Meenakshi Temple in Madurai

But once we had found the big open tank and we sat down to watch the sun set, things started to slowly look better. On the one hand the temple didn’t look quite as kitschy at night and on the other most of the tourists seemed to have disappeared at some point. Also when we started walking around again we discovered all the many indoor corridors and they were all beautifully done…

As it turned out this was much more and inside than an outside temple and more and more beauty could be found the deeper one went into the maze of stone carved corridors. For us this temple visit clearly became the highlight of the day and we stayed as long as we possibly could to enjoy the atmosphere…

Find all Madurai photos here.