December 20

The day started with a visit to Gopoal, Jaikumar's cousin. He lives in a small
village and manages a large farm. We were not sure how to get to his house but that
turned out to be easy as there was a young man on a scooter who waited for us at a
crossroads and had us follow him - a live GPS (it seems that neither GPSs or Google
Maps work in India). Gopal took us for a tour of parts of his farms - rice paddies,
a nice summer house of his uncle's where we ate pomellas and drank cocnut water from
trees which grow around the property. Everything is very lush and beautiful and
Gopal was very nice and hospitable.

We stopped for lunch at a hotel which Gopal recommended (a nice buffet) and we
continued to the Airavatershwara Temple in Darasuram. We took a guide there but he
was not very good and did not amuse us much. This temple is inactive and is run by
the Indian Archeological Survey - they take amazing care of these sites which are
extremeley clean and well maintained.

Next we went to the Brihadishwara Temple in the village which has the short name of
Gangaikondacholapuram (literally - the town of the Chola king who took the Ganges).
This is an active temple, and there were quite a few Indian tourists there. The
structure is very impressive and it was fun walking around it and visiting the
different dogs. We had ashes smeared on our foreheads and a red dot applied to our
foreheads. The visit ended with a race along the nice lawn between Yuval and Na'ama
which Na'ama won and another race between Na'ama & Avi which Avi won.

The road to Trichi (or Tiruchirapalli) is most bizarre. Large parts of it are
supposed to be a 4 lane highway but the project seems to have been abandoned
mid-stream. So you drive for 5 km on a nice wide road - as usual there are many
lanes of traffic going in the same direction - bikes, tuk-tuks, cars, lorries, cows,
goats, people (the last 3 might be going in any direction or just standing in the
middle of the road), when suddenly everything ends and you jump over a very bumpy
unpaved stretch of 100m or so, after which all the traffic in the opposite direction
is suddenly added to the mix (with their share of cows etc.). So you crawl for 5
km, where the lanes separate again and so it continues. This is somehow even more
nerve wracking than the regular nervousness associated with driving in India, but
our driver Ramu is very skillful, so we skip a beat only every other minute.

The hotel is much more expensive than the previous one but hardly any better (the
water is slightly warmer but far from hot). We ate supper in the Hotel restaurant
and Prahladh went to his parents' house.