TEMPLES..TEMPLEs..TEMPLes..TEMPles..TEMples..TEmples..Temples..temples !!!!

It was 4:00 am on a wonderful lazy Sunday…that I was woken up from sleep and asked to get ready…. ready!! For what? Oh that was when I realized we had planned for a 3-day pilgrimage to some of the awesome temples of South India. Temples being one of my passions…there was no reason to be still in bed!! To my surprise everyone else were already ready and all dressed up…just for the count there were about 15 of them…14 to be exactly (6 kids and 8 adults…oh yes that includes me). The transport for the entire trip…apparently a ‘15- seater-van’ was already there. Soon we embarked the ‘15-seater-van’ and on our way down south…. we stopped for breakfast at some place…I dunno where as I was woken up all of a sudden, again to find I was the only one in the van while others had already made their way to satiate their hungry stomach which had nothing but a cup of coffee from the morning…one, two and yeah three rounds of hot idli and sambar was sufficient with the all famous south Indian filter coffee to do the finishing honours….at this point it is important mentioning that all the people are from Andhra pradesh….and I duuno wat but they have a passion about south Indian filter coffee !!

The journey continued and we reached Chidambaram…the first temple on the itinerary. People who haven’t seen it…. it’s just amazing..incidently we were in time for the mid-day ‘harati’ and it was just great !! From there we continued out journey to Vaideshwaran temple. We had lunch at some totally remote place…and had to wait in the temple as the main shrine was closed till 4:00 pm. Finally there’s no need mentioning the spectacle witnessed…the temple had a ‘Kozhlam’ which again was very amusing for the kids…Then we proceeded to all-famous Kumbakonam…on the way to the main city we visited 2 temples one of which was ‘Oppiliappan koil’ which is apparently one of the 108 sacred temples of the vaishnavaites and is infact knows as ‘chinna tirupati’…a brilliant temple… a must visit for temple lovers !! The night halt was at Kumbakonnam…and there was nothing much that day…everyone just wanted to get to their beds..and zzzzzzzz.

Early morning…the temples of Kumbakonam was on the charts…so we started visiting one after the other…we had to visit four main temples there…well thanks to my friend for the advice as to what temples we need to visit…. that is because every street in Kumbakonam has a minimum of 1 temple. And the best part was, we had breakfast in this perfect ‘iyer’ hotel where the menu is idli, dosa and halwa…that’s it!! It was amazing and this was the place that I tried Coffee for the first time in my life…and I can’t think of a better place to start with…it was good…not brilliant but not bad!! We continued to Thiruvayyar…where there annual thyagaraja music festival is held. This is the place where Shri thyagaraja lay down to rest, forever. The place was amazing with a cauvery tributary passing alongside the shrine. From there we made our way to Thanjavur to see the Brihadeeshwarar temple or ‘Periya Koil’. This truly was spectacular…the size of the ‘Gopuram’ was mammoth… roughly around 220 feet high…. absolutely brilliant. The entire temple was huge…should have easily covered about 5 acres. It was evening by then, so we visited ‘Saraswati Mahal’ which was a medieval museum-cum-library and was virtually a treasure trove of ancient palm leaf and paper manuscripts, and other interesting artifacts of the Marathas of tanjavur.

Next on the list was Trichy…. and we reached trichy sometime around 20:00 hrs. We had lunch and crashed. Next day, all of us were up early and ready…and excited. Ah the reason was we were on our way to the temple of Sri Ranganathaswami at Srirangam. All I can say is none of us had anything to talk…all of us were just mesmerized by the beauty of the temple and the idol inside. The silence was broken when we saw ‘Prasadham’ outside as we all realized we didn’t have breakfast that day and the plight of our poor stomachs could be heard only now…we gorged ‘Prasadham’ for breakfast and soon it was time to return home. We had also planned to Thiruvannmalai on the way back home so we had lunch at some arbitrary place and took a diversion to Thiruvannmalai. The Arunachaleswarar Temple and Ramana ashram were what we visited there…it was almost 21:00 hrs then…so we thought we could make it back home…no one were interested in dinner…everyone just wanted to get back to ‘home-sweet-home’. The return was adventurous…everyone were tired and were dozing off…whilst I was sitting with the driver yapping. It was pitch dark on the way we took and it started raining…apparently some auto-guy said that was a short-cut…so we thought we could save time but we went through…. whatever…as all I could see was the head-lights of the ’15-seater-van’ and nothing else was there to show us the light… Finally we came across a perpendicular road to the road we were traveling in and an old broken milestone, which said ‘Chennai’… the driver, and I almost screamed in joy but we knew we shouldn’t wake people up…. so we carried on and soon reached Chennai in less than 5 hours…yeah it was almost 3:00 the next morning…

It was 4:00 am on a not-so-lazy Wednesday morning…that I had to go back to sleep!!!