Hot Temple

[posted 11/11/09]

From Tanjore (Thanjavur) we made our way to Pondicherry, with a Swiss woman and driver trailing us because her driver didn't know the route. Along the way we stopped in on three more temples and by the end of the day all the temples we'd seen over the various days were starting to blur into one and other.

The first stop, Airateswara Temple (also /Airavatesvara/Airavateshwarar Temple), was also nicely un-busy. As we wandered within the temple a skinny little Brahmin priest gestured for us to follow him to the inner sanctum, where he said a long blessing, gave each of us a tilak and was quite happy to receive our donation. Then as we came across him a few minutes later in a different part of the temple he urged me to take a photo as he posed in a shrine to Shiva (I think it was Shiva), and once again was happy to receive a donation. He seemed like a nice guy so we were cool with handing over some cash.

The second temple of the day was the Brihadishwara Temple Gangaikondacholapuram (they're a mouthful aren't they?! almost as bad as Welsh!), which had a fantastic column-lined corridor I desperately wanted to take a photo of, but pleading with a couple of people for just one shot got me no-where and the 'no photo' sign beat me yet again. Damn you pesky sign!

By the time we got to the third temple we'd been travelling for half the day and H was over it all. But our driver said this spot, the Chidambaram Nataraja Temple, was an excellent Shiva temple and after coming all that way I didn't want to miss any photo-op, so I wandered around by myself. H chose wisely because this was without doubt the hottest temple I had to walk around. See, with all the temples you have to take your shoes off, leaving them at a shoe cloakroom of sorts. Mildly annoying, but when in Rome etc. However this was a particularly hot day and the sun was really beating down, making the stone pathways incredibly hot. So hot I actively sought the smallest of shadows to walk in and specifically avoided any of the dark or black stones that were in full sunlight – I just couldn't take the pain. No doubt my squawking white-mans dance made a couple of the locals chuckle!