Travel Day 912 – Madurai, Tamil Nadu, INDIA
Since we already saw the big temple yesterday, it seemed there wasn’t too much to do in Madurai and so we took it easy in the morning…
Thirumalai Nayak Palace in Madurai, India
Madurai was quite a hot destination anyway and we couldn’t really be bothered to walk around too much, but a few things still made it onto our agenda for the day. On the one hand we had to figure out the onwards travels into Kerala and ideally to the hill-station of Munnar. On the other hand there was supposed to be a ruined palace within the limits of the historic city and we intended to see it…
Since figuring out the onward travels required us to go to one of the bus stations outside of town, we decided to leave this for later and rather do some city exploration as long as we had the luxury of daylight. The ruined Thirumalai Nayak Palace became our first real destination and it took a long while to actually find it, but luckily it wasn’t as ruined as the book suggested…
St. Mary’s Cathedral in Madurai, India
Actually as much as I personally like using LP as a guide-book, in this case not only the map was drawn incorrectly and showing the palace as well as the big cathedral in a different location, but also the information about the palace itself turned out not to be quite true. The palace was in fact in very decent shape and it was nice to be walking around in the forest of oversized columns and open courtyards…
Once we had seen everything, we passed by the big St. Mary’s Cathedral and continued our walk once more towards the Meenakshi Amman Temple. But instead of going inside, we rather just walked around in the adjacent area and enjoyed seeing all the many shops and stores. Especially the fabric and spice shops seemed interesting to me and considering every single store was offend the kind of product, it seemed absolutely impossible that any one of them would actually make some profit at the end of the day…
Typical Spice Shop in Madurai, India
After we saw seemingly every single shop around, we finally jumped on a bus to drive to the station outside of town, figured out the bus times and came back just in time for dinner, packing and going to bed. We had to rise early in order to catch our bus to Munnar and so we ended this pretty uneventful day quite early…
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