Tiruchirappalli (Trichy), Tamil Nadu, India

Tiruchirappalli, or Trichy as it’s often referred to, is a city of about a million people located in the centre of Tamil Nadu state in the far south of India, just above Sri Lanka.  We arrived here early Tuesday morning on an AirAsia flight from Kuala Lumpur, and once out of the airport, loaded our backpacks into an auto-rickshaw for the 20 minute ride into the town centre.  Trichy is an overwhelmingly Hindu city but there are one or two Christian churches around, Christianity having made an appearance here in the late 1400s.  Many of the auto-rickshaws bore names emblazoned across their cabs; just ahead of us was Ave Maria overtaking Christ and our own vehicle was Oh Lord Jesus.  At first I thought these were public professions of the drivers’ religious faith but they could just as likely have been cameo commentaries on the state of the traffic, that was chaos.  With the latter in mind we had no desire to travel with Mr Amen.

Trichy is more than a far-south transport hub – it contains some religious sites of national significance, most notably the fantastic Hindu temple of Sri Ranganathaswamy, possibly the largest temple complex in the whole of India.  To escape the midday heat we were up before dawn and on the temple roof before the first rays of the day’s sun lit up the profusion of brightly coloured sculptures covering the temple’s seven gopuram, the largest of which soars 250 feet above the complex.  All visitors had to leave their shoes at the entrance and it was quite pleasurable strolling on the smooth, swept, slightly warm granite cobblestones still retaining some heat from the previous day.  We passed by brightly clothed pilgrims, brahmins and cows, and an elephant that lightly tapped the forehead of any visitor kind enough to give it a coin donation that it took with its trunk and “handed” to the man seated nearby.

We proceeded to the nearby Rock Fort Temple built into a massive 83 metre high rock outcrop, the top of which provides a panoramic view over Trichy and surrounding countryside.  We also spent a few minutes looking inside the gaudily decorated Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church on Madras Trunk Road before strolling around the green, cooling grounds of the adjacent Jesuit St Joseph’s College where groups of neatly uniformed students chatted animatedly as they moved between classes.   

We dined twice at the Banana Leaf across the road from our hotel.  To get there we had to pass a vacant lot recently cleared and awaiting a new construction, but in the meantime it serves as a public open-air men’s urinal.  We found it best to hold our breath and look the other way as we passed this section, while still being very careful not to fall down the large open manhole on the path.  I stared into it at one passing, making fleeting eye contact with a plump sewer rat below.  This reminded me of the grizzle of an internet scribe who claimed that on seeing a rat in her budget Indian hotel room and reporting the fact to reception, it was suggested to her that she return to her room and “learn to love mickey mouse”.  We had no such problems at our hotel and the roadside impediments were trivial obstacles on the way to culinary pleasure at The Leaf where we dined on spicy Lamb Biranyi, Chicken Hyderabad, various vegetable curries and chutneys, naan and chappati breads, and lime juice.  A nice start to a long journey through India.

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