Madurai & Rameswaram at Length — Four Nights

Met and taken into the old city, which is laid out as a series of concentric squares around the temple with the street names still describing their distance from it. Meenakshi Amman in the afternoon — the gopurams, the golden lotus tank, the Thousand Pillar Hall — and then the evening ceremony that closes it, when Sundareswarar is carried to the goddess's chamber behind drums and pipes. It is worth staying to the end rather than leaving when the procession passes.

The Mattuthavani flower market before six, which is where every garland in the city comes from and is sold by weight in a scale of colour and noise that most visitors never see. Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal afterwards — the surviving quarter of a 1636 palace, with a courtyard of twenty-metre columns and restored stucco. The afternoon takes the Gandhi Memorial Museum, housed in a Nayak palace and holding the dhoti he was wearing when he was assassinated, and the Thiruparankundram rock temple south of the city if there is light left.

South-east across dry country and over the Pamban channel onto the island. Ramanathaswamy in the afternoon: the third corridor runs about twelve hundred metres, the granite piers each carved differently and the ceilings painted, and it is the longest such corridor in any Indian temple. The twenty-two theerthams can be done today or tomorrow — an attendant draws each well and pours it over you, it takes the better part of an hour, and you will need a change of clothes.

Dhanushkodi early, out along the nineteen kilometres of spit to the point where the road stops between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Mannar. The 1964 cyclone destroyed the town and it was left as it fell; the church shell and railway fragments are still in the sand, and Kothandaramaswamy temple further back is the single structure that survived. The afternoon is Gandhamadhana Parvatham for the overview, the Abdul Kalam memorial, and whatever the day suggests — the island is small enough to follow rather than schedule.

The temple once more at first light if you want it, when the corridors are close to empty and the low sun runs the length of them. Then back over the bridge and west to Madurai, around four hours, for the airport or the main-line station. Ramanathapuram's palace makes a sensible break on the way if the departure is late enough to allow one.