After our last emotional day at the site of the new Babies Cottage, and meeting the working kids at Dindigul, we settled on a lighter agenda for today – some shopping in the temple markets around Madurai.

Tailoring here is incredibly cheap and we picked up fabric for saris and salwar kameeze (the local pants and overshirt worn by many women locally, and predominant in the north of India).  Our next stop was the ancient temple market colonnades where tailors were lined up with their old singer sewing machines.  It cost $3 to have a salwar kameez tailored to your measurements and ready for pick up in just one hour.

We browsed the temple goods and before lunch also made a stop at the gold shops.  The contrast between the poverty we had seen all week, and the incredible bundles of rupees handed over by the richer classes as they purchased thousands of dollars worth of gold jewelry was stark.

After lunch we retrieved our new clothes, and then hit the imitation jewelry shops to buy cheap necklaces for all the children at Girls Village.  Although our adventure officially ended that night, Carolyn and Andrea were not leaving for at least another day and wanted to make one more visit back to Girls Village to say goodbye.

That night we traveled up to the Taj Garden Retreat for dinner.  A magnificent colonial mansion on a hill above Madurai it has now been converted into a 5 star boutique hotel.  The restaurant is perched on a terrace on a cliff with stunning views of Madurai and the towers of the Sri Meenakshi temple lit up at night.

It was a beautiful setting to talk about all of our adventures over the last week and the journey we had undertaken.  We talked until 11pm when the restaurant closed and moved up to the hotel Bar and snooker table until finally calling it a night at 1am and heading back to our hotel.

The next day we went our separate ways but already talking about our return to this amazing country and people.