Sometimes it feels like there aren’t many praises to sing about budget accomodation in India. Dirty walls, stained sheets, incessant traffic from the streets, non-functioning electric sockets for recharging camera batteries, even the occasional “accidental booking” of a roach or two all make sleeping a bit less restful than it should be.

Twenty-four hour checkout is, however, a beautiful thing. Most budget joints have it, so if you check in past midnight, you don’t have to be out nine hours later.

Nevertheless, my Financial and Menu Adviser and I wanted to get the heck outta Dodge as quickly and with as little delay as we could. Once we’d found the tourist office, found out the train time for our departure and found some breakfast, we headed to the Brihadishwara Temple and Fort.
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So the sun was setting behind some wetlands in the middle of wintery Tamil Nadu. It was 28 degrees Celsius out as darkness dropped like a thick blanket over my eyes, warm and uncomfortable. The hazy gold with orange tinge that had faded into a gooey red mess on the horizon.

It reminded me of a crappy B-grade horror flick, the ones with the right production values but still too graphic for “USA Up All Night,” back in the days when cable was young and dumb. Getting to Thanjavur wasn’t as bad an “Up All Night” screamer, but then, in some ways it was worse.
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The journey from Mamallapuram to Thanjavur was, in no uncertain terms, a disaster. Bald-faced, evil-eyed, Lex Luthor-sized disaster. Glad-I’ve-done-it-once-and-never-again disaster.
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