Your chauffeur meets you at Chennai (MAA) and transfers you to your hotel in Tamil Nadu's coastal capital.

Your first temple is the Kapaleeshwarar Temple in Mylapore, a classic Dravidian shrine to Shiva with a vividly painted gopuram tower, followed as time allows by Marina Beach and the colonial Fort St George.

A short coastal drive brings you to Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram), the 7th-century Pallava port and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

You explore the sea-facing Shore Temple, the monolithic Five Rathas carved from single boulders, and the vast rock relief of Arjuna's Penance, the finest open-air gallery of early Dravidian art in India.

You drive south down the Coromandel coast to Pondicherry, the former French colony where mustard-yellow villas and bougainvillea line the seafront promenade.

You walk the French Quarter and Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and visit the experimental township of Auroville with its golden Matrimandir, a contemplative counterpoint to the temple towns.

An inland drive takes you to Thanjavur (Tanjore), the Chola capital, past the rice fields of the Cauvery delta.

Here stands the UNESCO-listed Brihadisvara Temple, a 1,000-year-old granite masterpiece crowned by a 66-metre vimana tower and a monolithic Nandi bull, the high-water mark of Chola architecture and engineering.

You continue south to Madurai, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, built around its living temple.

The Meenakshi Amman Temple is the trip's centrepiece, a riot of thousand-figure gopurams and a hall of a thousand pillars, and in the evening you witness the nightly ceremony in which an image of Shiva is carried to Meenakshi's chamber.

You drive out to the sacred island of Rameswaram, crossing the sea on the iconic Pamban rail-and-road bridge with the Palk Strait on either side.

The Ramanathaswamy Temple, one of the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines and a Char Dham pilgrimage site, is famed for its immense pillared corridors, the longest of any temple in India, and its 22 holy wells.

A long coastal drive brings you to Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of the Indian mainland where the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean meet.

You visit the Kumari Amman Temple and settle in for the celebrated sunset over the ocean, and, at the right time of month, the rare sight of sunset and moonrise together.

A morning ferry carries you to the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, built on the offshore rock where Swami Vivekananda meditated in 1892, alongside the towering 133-foot statue of the Tamil poet-saint Thiruvalluvar.

The afternoon is free for the Gandhi Memorial and a sunrise or sunset by the confluence, or an early rest before the final leg.

You cross into Kerala for the short drive up to Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), with an optional stop at the Padmanabhaswamy Temple if time allows.

Your chauffeur delivers you to Trivandrum airport in good time for your onward flight.