Travelogue 2

In the order of Latest-first (going back in order, w.r.t the latest trip), this is the 2nd tour that I went before my Kerala Trip(for which I've written a separate post ,the first part of the Travelogue series). Lord of Guruvayoor gave us chance to have his darshan in this tour. This tour has a nice prologue to be talked about.

I had been to a marriage of my engineering classmate where I met my Mechanical Branch classmates after a gap of 7 years! Ride down the memory lane kick-started and continued during dinner too where I was sitting beside this Adarsh (if I get a chance, I shall blog about this wonderful guy sometime) who was one among top 10 scorers of our batch. I got to know that he along with a bunch of machas (guys) do climb up the stairs of the Chamundi hills every Saturday early morning! Though I excitedly committed to join the group for this weekly-trek without fail, so far I’ve been able to make it only once. During the climb they were refining a tour plan which they had started to conceive some couples of weeks back. Ok, there is another coincidence as well. I had applied for leave on 25^th and 28^th of July 2014 to make it a long weekend as 29^th was marked as public holiday in our company. I sometimes do that – applying leave in advance, so that I can plan something suitably later. This time though, I didn’t have to plan as well. All I did was packing the luggage a day before the trip.

Trip route summary: Kanyakumari – Suchindram (aka suseendram) – Trivandrum – Guruvayoor

No. Of Days: 3 Days 2 Nights

Mode of Travel: Train and Bus.

This was a unique trip in many ways. The machas had planned this trip with one main aim – to take the parents along. There were 7 machas in the group. Some had got both parents, some only one and some came sans parents. Some even got their cousins, siblings and friends (I got my friend Manoj pothkar apart from my mom). The team size kept on adding up on daily basis. This prompted the core committee to say “Done. No more seats” when finally the numbers touched the 20-mark.

Since the planning was done perfectly well before, there were not any hiccups in the trip. Rooms for stay were booked at Kanyakumari for night#1 and at Guruvayoor for night#2. Train tickets too were booked well in advance.

Trip was fairly simple. Day 1 Saturday we reached Nagercoil (train will not go to Kanyakumari as marketed by Railways. Nagercoil is the last stop) early morning by train from Bangalore. We then reached Kanyakumari by hiring 2 taxis. The day was spent at Kanyakumari. Since it was Amavaysa that day, we took bath in the ocean as it is considered very auspicious. We then took Darshan of Kanyakumari Devi at the temple near the beach and then came back to hotel. After having bath and lunch we left for Rock Memorial-Thiruvallavur statue islands. After coming back in evening, we went to Suchindram by hiring a mini bus. Spent good amount of time there. The temple is famous for the tall status of Lord Hanuman. This temple is very huge and has temples dedicated to many Gods and goddess. Out of them, the Brahma-Vishnu-Maheshwar god is very beautiful.  We had the Dinner at a hotel beside the temple and came back to Kanyakumari.

Day2 Sunday: Reached Trivandrum, capital city of Kerala by train from Nagercoil. Visited the Huge AnantaPadmanabhaSwamy Temple. As it was Sunday, there was a bit of crowd. Otherwise, we were told that there won’t be any rush or queues. Security is too tight. Male devotees should compulsorily wear Dhotis. No shirt/banians. Not even a towel should be there on top! Needless to say that mobiles and other electronic gadgets too will not be let to accompany with you inside. Female devotees should be in sarees. If wearing any other dress, they should wrap a dhoti kind of material just like how males wear the dhotis. No purse or baggage allowed. There will be lunch available for good amount of time. But you should wash the plates yourself afterwards. Don’t think you can just hold it under the tap water and put it back. There will be a quality supervisor sitting who collects the plate and checks it for cleanliness. If he finds it not clean, you need to go back and wash it again!

3 of my friends left for Bangalore from here by 4pm train. The rest of us travelled towards the abode of Supreme head of God – Lord Krishna. The Guruvayoor. The Jan Shatabdi express goes up to Thrissur. From here, we travelled by a local private bus to Guruvayoor which is 25KM from Thrissur. It was late night by the time we reached. We hardly slept for 2-3 hours. The next day being public holiday, we were warned by the Temple Guest house staff to expect serpentine queue. In worst case, we will have to spend the whole day in queue they said.

Day3 Monday: Not to take any chances, we resolved to make it to the queue by 4 am. Though we indeed reached there by that time, the queue had already grown by significant length but thankfully not as big as to consume the whole day. When we had almost come near the gate, doors were closed for an hour for the puja purpose (around 6-7am).  Once it opened the queue movement pace picked up and we had the darshan of lord by almost one hour.

The team split into 2 halves. One half travelled towards Bangalore by 10.30AM train (which they were able to catch by god’s grace, given the delay in Darshan). The other half, which included me, travelled towards Mysore by bus. We first travelled till Calicut from Guruvayoor. It was around 2pm when we reached Calicut, where we had the lunch at Saravan Bhavan near Bus stand(suspect it to be original saravana bhavan hotel. But nevertheless the food was good). Post lunch, we got direct bus (Kerala RTC) to Mysore from here.

Reached Mysore @9PM. I guess the blore group also reached their destination around same time. Everyone was happy with the planning and success of the trip. And as I say always, lord himself called all of us to his abode to give us blessings. Hari OM Tatsat.