Wednesday 9th April

Chennai (Madras)!, Tamil Nadu

I've got a splitting headache and haven't eaten anything since Sunday (horrible train food). Well - I've had a nibble of some Real Toast(!) and a bit of au gratin, but that's about it. We got to Bhubaneswar in Orissa at 6am and had an argument with a man in a hotel about his 24hr check-out time. This was Monday. Bhubaneswar is a strange place. It is a great place for studying Orissan temple architecture. (Our room had satellite television, so we stayed in and watched BBC World, music videos and a swashbuckler about the Jacobite rebellion with Michael Caine¹). At about lunchtime we dragged ourselves away in search of a restaurant for C. to have some lunch. Hence the 'real toast'. The food was so good, we went back three times!

Anyway, after this we explored the part of town that's full of temples. And I mean FULL. hundreds of 'em! Like giant bee hives! The best was a Kali temple which featured the Goddess in her usual friendly posture, standing on a corpse wearing a necklace of skulls - in complete darkness.² The bats didn't like us going in.

Most of them are Shiva temples like in Varanasi. It was very hot and I was very ill so we returned quickly to Star Movies. There was a Yul Brynner film on about the Dacoit rebellion in India.³ Filmed entirely at Pinewood Studios in London, it featured a lot of white actors painted black and talking in silly voices.

Orissa seems to be the place for erotic sculpture and most of the temples featured scenes from the Kama Sutra in embarrassing detail. It's impossible to be sensible and critical about these, they're just vulgar. Much bigger sculptures are at the Sun Temple at Konark, which we visited on Tuesday.

This temple is built to Surya (also known - albeit less famously - as the God of food poisoning⁴) and used to have a 69m tower. It has different kinds of sculpture in different areas; animals for the children, erotica for the young adults and spirituality for the oldies. All these feature at different levels on the Audience Hall (the 32m remains, which led to the main temple.

It is built in the form of a chariot - facing East - with twelve huge wheels and seven horses. We had a guide who took us around, embarrassing us by describing what all the sculptures were so graphically showing!

I was throwing up at night and even a couple of hours on the beach didn't help much. We've just had twenty hours on the train, having decided to come straight to Madras. It's not at all like we remember it, but more of that later.

It's good to be back in Tamil Nadu again after our holiday. But in the end I have only one thought on my mind - I want to go home!