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| South India Travel Guide |
Before Traveling to South India
South India
Things to know Before Traveling to South India | Despite its recent rush to modernity and pockets of over-development, South India remains one of the most relaxed parts of Asia to explore. It is also among the easiest. In all but the remotest districts, accommodation is plentiful, clean and inexpensive by Western standards. Delicious street food is available from nearly every roadside vendor.
While journey times can be long, the region’s extensive rail network moves vast numbers of people at all times of the day and night, and if a train isn’t heading where you want to go, a bus almost certainly will be. Furthermore, South Indians are the most garrulous and inquisitive of travellers, and train rides are always enlivened by conversations that invariably begin with the refrain of “Coming from?” or “What is your native place?” It is a credit to the region’s legendary capacity for assimilating new ideas that the modern and traditional thrive side by side.
Walking through central Bengaluru, you could brush shoulders with an iPhone-toting software developer one moment and a trident-wielding ascetic the next, while rickety bicycles mingle with luxury cars. There are, of course, the usual Subcontinental travel hassles: interminable queues, packed buses and constant encroachments on your personal space.
Yet just when your nerves feel stretched to breaking point, South India always offers something that makes the effort worthwhile: a glimpse of an elephant from a train window; a sumptuous vegetarian meal delicately arranged on a fresh banana leaf; or a hint of fragrant cardamom in your tea after a night dancing on a Goan beach.
Introduction to South India
Though its borders are uncertain, there’s no doubt that South India, the tapering half of the country’s mighty peninsula, differs radically from the landlocked North. In the South, the coconut groves seem a deeper green and the rice paddies positively luminescent, the faces are a darker brown and the vermilion marks smeared over them arrestingly red.
The landscape varies from tropical beaches that hug towering Ghats in the west, to the arid Deccan plateau that descends into fertile plains in the east. Under a sun whose rays feel concentrated by a giant magnifying glass, the ubiquitous colours of South India of silk saris, shimmering classical dance costumes, lurid movie posters and frangipani flowers radiate with a life of their own.
Where to Go to South India?
Your first impression of South India is likely to be Mumbai, the arrival point for most international flights. While the city gets a pretty bad press, and most people pass straight through, those who stay find themselves witness to the reality of modern-day India, from the deprivations of the city’s slum-dwellings to the glitz and glamour of Bollywood movies.
The surrounding state of Maharashtra, though not culturally or linguistically part of the South, has plenty of attractions including the extraordinary caves of Ellora and Ajanta and the thriving city of Pune, once a Raj-era retreat, and now a buzzing metropolis with a hip eating scene.
The other major gateway to the region is Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu, in the deep South, which is a slightly less stressful place to start your trip. Although it’s another major metropolis bursting at the seams, hidden under its surface are artful gems such as regular public performances of classical music and dance. With regular flights and ferries to Port Blair, Chennai is also the major springboard for the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago ringed by coral reefs and crystal-clear seas, over 1000 km east of the mainland in the Bay of Bengal.
The majority of visitors’ first stop after Chennai is Mamallapuram, an ancient port littered with weatherworn sculpture sites, including the technicolor Shore temple. To get right off the beaten track you only have to head inland to Kanchipuram, whose innumerable Hindu shrines span the golden age of the illustrious Chola kingdom. Back on the coast, the former French colony of Puducherry retains a distinctly Gallic feel, particularly in its restaurants.
Most travellers press on south to Madurai, the region’s most atmospherically charged city, where the mighty Meenakshi-Sundareshwar temple presides over a quintessentially Tamil swirl of life. The two other most compelling destinations in Tamil Nadu are the island of Rameshwaram, whose main temple features a photogenic series of pillared corridors, and Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India, where the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea flow together.
The dark shadows visible on the horizon from here mark the start of the Western Ghats, lush mountains which stretch for more than 1000 km in a virtually unbroken chain all the way to Mumbai, forming a sheer barrier between Tamil Nadu and neighbouring Kerala. The hill stations of Udhagamandalam (or Ooty, as it’s still better known) and Kodaikanal, established by India’s former colonial rulers as retreats from the summer heat of the plains, attract hordes of Indian visitors in the run-up to the rains, but see plenty of foreign tourist traffic during the winter, too.
Heading north, a string of smaller former dynastic capitals punctuate the journey across the eastern edge of the Deccan plateau to Hyderabad, capital of the newly created state of Telangana and, for the time being, still acting capital of Andhra Pradesh, whose principal landmarks are the Charminar and Golconda fort.
Andhra’s other attractions, by contrast, lie much further off the beaten track. Comparatively few Western visitors ever reach them, with the exception of Puttaparthi, the ashram of India’s most famous living saint, Sai Baba, and Tirupati, whose temple complex on nearby Tirumala Hill receives more pilgrims than anywhere else on earth and is an essential stop for all Hindu pilgrims, especially followers of Vishnu.
West of Tamil Nadu, neighbouring Kerala’s appeal lies less in its religious monuments, almost all of which remain off-limits to non-Hindus, than its infectiously easy-going, tropical ambience. Covering a long thin coastal strip backed by a steep wall of hills, this is the wettest and most densely populated state in the South. It is also the most distinctive, with a culture that sets it squarely apart.
Its ritualized theatre (kathakali), faintly Southeast Asian architecture and ubiquitous communist graffiti (Kerala was the first place in the world to gain a democratically elected communist government) are perhaps the most visual expressions of this difference. But spend a couple of days exploring the spicy backstreets of old Kochi (Cochin), the jungles of the Cardamom Hills around the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary or the hidden aquatic world of the coastal backwaters, and you’ll see why many travellers end up staying here a lot longer than they originally intended.
If you’re not pushed for time and find yourself crossing northern Kerala during the winter, set aside a few days to search for theyyam, a spectacular masked dance form unique to the villages around Kannur.
A short ride across the mountains takes you to Mysore in Karnataka, whose opulent maharaja’s palace, colourful markets and comfortable southern California-like climate have made it among South India’s most popular tourist destinations. Bengaluru, India’s answer to Silicon Valley, is a hectic modern capital, and most travellers press on to the state’s extraordinary historic sights including the mausolea, mosques and Persian-style palaces of Vijayapura (Bijapur), often dubbed the “Agra of the South”, and the Angkor-like faded splendour of Hampi, once the magnificent capital of South India’s last Hindu empire.
Only one day’s journey to the west, the palm-fringed, white-sand beaches of Goa, formerly a Portuguese colony, offer a change of scenery from the rocky terrain of the Deccan. Succumbing to the hedonistic pleasures of warm seawater, constant sunshine and cheap drinks, many travellers find it hard to tear themselves away from the coast, but Old Goa’s Portuguese churches and splendid mansions should not be missed.
India’s Spiritual Heart is South India - Travel Man Bytes
If the sacred peaks of the Himalayas are Hinduism’s head, and the Ganges its main artery, then the temple complexes of the South are its spiritual heart and soul. Soaring high above every urban skyline, their colossal towers are emblematic of the awe with which the deities enshrined inside them have been held for centuries. Some, like the sea-washed temple at Tiruchendur in Tamil Nadu, are thought to be as old as human speech itself; others, such as the Sabarimala forest shrine in Kerala, are less ancient, but attract greater numbers of pilgrims than even Mecca. For foreign visitors, however, the mostextraordinary of all have to be the colossal Chola shrines of Tamil Nadu.
Joining the crowds that stream through Chidambaram’s Sabhanayakam Nataraja temple or Shri Ramalingeswara in Rameshwaram will take you to the very source of the world’s last surviving classical culture, some of whose hymns, prayers and rites predate the Egyptian pyramids.
When to Go to South India?
The relentless tropical sun aside, the source of South India’s lush scenery lies in its high rainfall. Unlike the north of the country, which sees only a single deluge in the summer, most of peninsular India receives two annual monsoons one sucked in from the Arabian Sea in the southwest, and the other on stormy northwesterly winds off the Bay of Bengal.
The heaviest rains are reserved for the Western Ghats chain of mountains, where the first summer monsoon breaks in June and lasts through to October. In a nutshell, you should, when planning a trip to South India, largely avoid the rainy seasons.
The novelty of torrential downpours and the general mayhem of landslides and flooding wears off very quickly. Broadly speaking, rule out the period between April and September, when in turn firstly two months of stifling heat and then the southwest monsoon grip the whole peninsula.
From late October until April, the weather is perfect in Karnataka and Goa, but less reliable in Kerala, where, by November, the “retreating”, or northwest monsoon means constant grey skies and showers. Being on the eastern side of the mountains, Tamil Nadu gets even heavier rains at this time, as does coastal Andhra Pradesh.
To enjoy the far south and the Andaman Islands at their best, come between January and March, before the heat starts to build up again. For more detail, read the next post.
Travel Man Fly Bytes about South India
- South India is referred to in some of India’s oldest inscriptions as Dravidadesa, “Land of the Dravidians”, referring to the ethnically and linguistically distinct people of the South.
- The South’s Western Ghats mountain range is one of the most biodiverse places on earth with over 500 bird species and 139 mammals.
- Three of the the five largest cities in India are found in the South Mumbai (12.4m), Bengaluru (8.4m) and Hyderabad (6.7m).
- Goans consume 40 million coconuts per year and the fruit finds its way into virtually every dish.
- Languages spoken in the South include Tamil (Tamil Nadu), Telugu (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Kannada (Karnataka) and Malayalam (Kerala).
- India’s greatest sporting hero, the cricketing master Sachin Tendulkar was born and raised in Mumbai.
- The film studios of Mumbai (Bollywood) and Chennai (Kollywood) make more movies than any other country with up to 2000 releases annually.
Conclusion
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