We shared a train journey from Varkala with a Michael Palin look alike (he was about to embark on a 32hour train journey from the South to Delhi! Crazy!) and we saw hundreds of Indian women carrying bags of Sandalwood to take to the festival. We seem to be the only people that walk over the bridges at train stations, everyone else justs walked over the tracks - even when there are trains coming.

At Trivandrum station we finally managed to find the carriage and seats that we had booked - it's easy when you know how! The trains are so long with so many different classes that they have to wait at the station for 10 minutes for everyone to get on - we sat in 3rd class AC which had sleeper seats, it was surprisingly comfortable, almost bug free and we enjoyed a variety of biscuits and chai (We think the locals thought we were mad)!

We used the bible (Lonely Planet) to find our hotel but it was so dingey that we spent most of our time out and about - and avoided using the dirty Indian style toilet!

We had out first proper Indian breakfast which is bigger than a Sunday roast and is very spicey, especially at the crack of dawn (Debs decided she would stick to good old bread toast from now on!) We visited the Ghandi Museum which was very interesting despite the prejudice against the English (we pretended to be French) We bought a few books on Hinduism, Yoga and Meditation. After lunch we visited the main attraction in Madurai - The Meenakshi Temple which is slap bang in the middle of the busy city - with a JCB at its doorstep. It was a beautiful, amazing piece of architechture which was really colourful with all the sculptures of the Hindu gods on the exterior and brightly coloured paintings inside.

To enter the temple we had to abandon our shoes and were persuaded to purchase a basket of fruit as an offering to the Gods (scam if your not Hindu!) It was really interesting to see how religion is so central to everyday life. Inside the temple there was even an Elephant who was trained to take coins from people with his trunk and then pat them on the head for good luck - we were not too sure how we felt about this, the heffalump looked a little sad despite all his pretty painted face! We're learning alot about Hinduism!