  I went through Tranjavur (Tanjure) and Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) on my way to Madurai. There are nice temples in those places, and it broke up what would have been another grueling all day government bus ride. Also, I caught a cold, so three nights of downtime in Trichy was good for me. I have pictures of the temples in those cities, but there is no reason to post them because the 17th century temple complex in Madurai is the crown jewel of Tamil temples. All of them in Tamil Nadu are distinctive, riotously intricate, and sometimes grand in scale. I will let the pictures of Madurai mostly speak for themselves.
  First, there is no vantage point from where you can photograph the whole complex, so here is a picture of a model which is in the museum in the Thousand Pillared Hall.
  All of those towers are connected by halls, rooms, and sanctums collectively known as the Thousand Pillared Hall. 1000 must be an approximately right number for how many there are.
  Non-Hindus are not allowed in the sanctums, but you can see but not photograph inside. There are, however, many altars like this. This is about 10 feet high.
  Here are some shots of some of the towers. The best view is from the rooftop of a 5 story textiles/jewelry/carpet/handicraft store. They have a good gig going. They meet you in the street and encourage you to get the best view of the complex from their roof. There’s an elevator, but you get to be tended by a salesman all they way back down through the store. I TOLD them I wasn’t buying, but they insisted “No buy, just look”. So I looked at wonderful Kashmiri carpets and drank lots of tea on the sofa for about an hour. The better pictures are from ground level.
 
And here are close-ups and closer-ups of, as put well in Lonely Planet, “the spectacular pastiche of Dravidian architecture”.
 So there you have it, the reason I’m still in South India. Now it’s time for the home stretch. With less than a month to go in India this time, before hopefully returning in May, I’m catching a train for Bhopal (yes, that Bhopal) tonight. It’ll take two nights and a day to get there. From there I’ll bunny hop over to Sanchi where the legendary founder of the first grat Indian empire, King Ashoka, built Buddhist monuments in the 3rd century BC. He embraced Buddhism after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people establishing the Mauryan empire. I’m mixed about visiting the site of the Union Carbide chemical factory disaster which killed tens of thousands and permanently disabled hundreds of thousands in 1984. The victims got pittances from Union Carbide and nothing from Dow after it acquired Union Carbide. I went to the killing fields in Cambodia, Auschwitz in Poland, and Vietnam. I suppose I could stomach Bhopal. At least Ashoka saw the error of his ways.
  I’ll probably write from Sanchi. Be well, all of you.