Madurai has a wonderful temple, full of life and visited by 20,000 or so Hindus everyday. It also has amazing food, an air conditioned hotel and satellite television. So far we have watched In Her Shoes with Cameron Diaz, The Jungle Book with Mowgli, Ransom with Mel Gibson, a lot of Indian music channels (which included one short adaptation of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, dubbed over with some Bollywood pop music), and our personal favourite Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Baseketball. Culture.

We have had a rough few days:
Mysore, 19th March
A decomposing, headless pigeon fell from a tree onto Jenny
Minutes later she was groped
Then we ran over and killed a rare monkey on the way to the old hill station of Ooty in Tamil Nadu
(This was a local bus, not for tourists, but we still feel a sense of guilt for it. However, we are not responsible for the building of the road through the national park.)

Ooty, 20th to 22nd March
It rained a lot and there was minor flooding. (It's much worse in other parts round here - the river here in Madurai is as high as the bridge, and is almost spilling over onto the roads, and resovoirs are close to full.) Granted this was unavoidable, but we were miserable nonetheless.
We were on the end of some abuse from someone who wanted to 'hit a foreigner'.
We couldn't get a seat on the famous mountain train and so we had to get a bus down the mountain. They drive wrecklessly. They overtake on hair pin bends over 200ft cliffs, and oil tankers overtake cyclists on blind bends.

Madurai, 24th March
We took the local bus to Kumily, in order to get to Periyar national park. The absurdity continued on the road. As we drove through a tiny section of road with a few houses on either side, we tried to overtake a cyclist and ploughed into an old man trying to dive out of the way of the bus. We thought he was dead, but he appeared to get off lightly with a completely dislocated and broken ankle. He probably has more injuries but there was no way we could tell because of the fuss around him. Thankfully, an ambulance turned up within 15 minutes. For whatever reason, our driver accelerated when he saw the old man on the road, presumably trying to whizz round past him instead of waiting for him to get out of the way. He seemed to think it was the old man's fault, and made his point heard loud and clear as villagers tried to take care of the old man, but seeing as we were doing around 40or50mph in a residential zone and driving on the wrong side of the road at the time, I can't agree with that.

We'll head up north, see some of Rajasthan and other famous places before moving onto Japan as soon as we can. We're no longer going to China and Tibet for obvious reasons. I doubt we'll go to Nepal either. What a shame.