Madurai, in Tamil Nadu is best known for the Meenakshi Temple.  It was of course impressive, over the top and/or too much depending on your opinion of rather busy artwork and architecture.  

Kanniyakumari is on the southern tip of India, and provided some genuine tourist attractions, some cheesy and contrived ones and a few that were somewhere between.  It was quite a pleasant and friendly area to visit though.  

It seems that I took many more photos than usual, and ended up taking many photos of people also, a rarity for me.  As I have often written, I generally don't like to take photos of people, finding it intrusive and offensive in many cases.  While the photos are often interesting, to me it seems to reduce an interaction, an experience and a person into an object.  If I were to try to take photography more seriously I suppose I'd accept this.  Anyway, for this part of the trip I ended up meeting up with Tara, an American I met in Hong Kong.  She was constantly snapping away at people, places and everything.  I got motivated by this I guess, and found it easy to take photos undetected with the benefit of an extreme telephoto lens, a viewfinder aimed 90 degrees away from where I was taking the photo, and a blonde woman nearby taking photos.  My look is not as exotic here as the European American, so attention was seldom turned to me.  I ignored that underlying objectifying feeling for awhile.  Easier to do as locals took turns objectifying Tara.  Everyone seemed to want a photo with a white woman.  There are a few photos in this set that Tara took - prefixed with Tara in the filename.

Anyway, on with the show!  I am including a couple of short sound samples here, the first from the temple in Madurai and the second from the cathedral in Kanniyakumari.  Maybe listen along with the appropriate photos?  Format is mp3.  I usually use Ogg Vorbis, but it seems nobody has heard of it...  Click below to check out the sounds.

Sound recording from inside the temple, Madurai

Sound Recording from inside Our Lady of Ransom, Kanniyakumari.

Ok, enough incoherent text.....


As always, the photos are of a reduced resolution for faster downloading.  If you are interested in full resolution files, please email me and specify filename and date....

Exit Takes you back to the page that brought you here - probably my travel page?

Intro Page Takes you back to this oh so clever and informative page.

July-05-2006 -- 05:47 PM Date the photo was taken.

DSC00099 Filename of the photo.  Use this if requesting full resolution files from me.

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