On the Road to Chettinad

Chettinad is a long bus ride from Madurai but worth the trip to see some of the remnants of a brilliant era in the town's history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was home to a group of wealthy international merchants who built large mansions throughout the township on profits from their trading operations in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

Today these homes have fallen on hard times but they still retain hints of their former grandeur and seem especially intriguing given their EXTREMELY remote location. Evidently prices in the middle of nowhere on land not considered at all productive is precisely why these mansions are located where they are – these merchants didn't amass their fortunes by being lavish but parsimonious instead!

And they still managed to eat very, very well: our lunch at a local small hotel showed the Chettinad cuisine, famous throughout India, very much worthy of its outstanding reputation.

The bus trip gave us ample opportunity to observe life in rural Tamil Nadu.

We stopped on our way to Chettinad in a small village to visit a batik cooperative giving shelter and training to orphan girls …

… and later at a pre-Hindu temple, the walkway to which is lined with terracotta figures of horses, elephants and cows given by local farmers in thanksgiving for good harvests, a practice dating back thousands of years.

Returning to Madurai we took in a visit to another rural coop, this one making beautiful handcrafted ceramic tiles. Two of our group even got to try making free form tiles themselves, and both turned out quite credible efforts.

It's all these little extras along the way that make Overseas Adventure Travel tours so very special, however long the bus ride might take to bring us to them.