Madurai & Rameswaram — Two Nights on the Temple Coast

Met at Madurai and into a city that has been continuously inhabited for well over two thousand years and is built in concentric squares around one temple. Meenakshi Amman is that temple — fourteen gopurams, the tallest close to fifty metres, every one of them covered in painted figures repainted on a twelve-year cycle. Inside are the Hall of a Thousand Pillars and the golden lotus tank. The afternoon takes Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal, a 1636 palace of which about a quarter survives, and the evening the temple's closing ceremony, when the god is carried to the goddess's chamber for the night.

South-east to the coast and then the crossing itself, which is the part people remember: the road bridge runs alongside the 1914 Pamban rail bridge over a two-kilometre channel of open sea. Rameswaram is one of the four Char Dham sites and Ramanathaswamy temple is the reason — its outer corridor runs about twelve hundred metres and is the longest in any Indian temple, the granite piers carved individually and the ceilings painted. Pilgrims bathe at Agni Theertham on the shore first, and at the twenty-two wells inside before darshan.

Dhanushkodi in the morning, at the far tip where the island narrows to a spit between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Mannar. The town there was destroyed by the cyclone of December 1964 and never rebuilt; the church and railway remains stand in the sand and the road runs out at the point where, on a clear day, the sandbanks toward Sri Lanka are visible. Then back across the bridge and west to Madurai, around four hours, for an afternoon or evening departure.