Rameswaram

9 hours sat on a bus sounds like a long time. It is. Gone are the days when long bus journeys with school on trips to europe seemed to fly by. Nowadays being older everything seems to happen much faster. Apart from the shit you want to happen faster. Anyway it wasn't so bad, there were plenty of pit stops  including one roadcafe that took advantage of the most generous usage of the word 'toilet' i've seen so far on this trip. Enter with flip flops at your peril.

Rameswaram was even busier than kanyakumari but busy for a specific local hindu festival; one of the things we really wanted to see. Over the course of two days we saw parades of elephants and chariots, we ventured inside the temple which was impressive, especially the corridors and supporting pillar stonework. Throngs of people were queueing like ive never seen before in the hot and wet (but very clean) halls. All to either get soaked in holy water or to get close to and/or touch a shrine or lingam. At that point i qas very happy to be an atheist. I can enjoy religious festivals objectively on not be that desperate to get squashed into next week by 500 people pushing behind me. If it was the oblivion ride at alton towers then thats a different scenario.

Niki sez... as part of our induction to temple life we were whisked from here to there by another guide Kannon. He seemed quiet eager for us to complete a complicated ritual which would see us stripping down to our smalls and dousing ourselves in 22 varieties if spiritual water. We polietly declined and so instead he put some chalk on our heads, stole someone elses flower offering, which he then made ben symbolically offer back to me, then smeared what i think was ghee on my head for good measure. Feeling thoroughly cleansed we hit the beach. Adams bridge to be precise, a robinson crusoe esque sand bar which at 6km long almost joins india to sri lanka. It was breathtaking and we had it all to ourselves for an afternoon. A mirror opposite of the 'holy' beach in town, which saw droves of families, dogs and probably cows frolicing about in some quite questionable water, the women still in full on sari get up half drowning but having a wail of a time. Each to their own i guess.