Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu's temples are not monuments, they are working buildings with queues in them. The Great Living Chola Temples, inscribed in 1987 and extended in 2004, are three: Brihadisvara at Thanjavur, Brihadisvara at Gangaikondacholapuram, and Airavatesvara at Darasuram. The shore monuments at Mahabalipuram, inscribed in 1984, are the other kind entirely, Pallava work cut straight out of the boulders. The usual circuit is Chennai, Mahabalipuram, Puducherry, Thanjavur, Madurai and then up to Ooty or Kodaikanal. That is one stop too many. Drop a hill station or drop Madurai, but do not try to take the delta temples in a single day wedged between two long drives. Chettinad is the part almost nobody builds a day around. It is on UNESCO's tentative list: hundreds of merchant mansions in villages near Karaikudi, built on Burma teak and imported tile, a good many of them half empty. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway, added to the World Heritage list in 2005, climbs from Mettupalayam to Ooty and takes most of a morning, which is the point of it. The rain arrives in the wrong half of the year here. The north-east monsoon runs October to December, and Chennai floods in it.