Road Trip

The advantages of a road trip are that it allows you to travel at your pace exploring places enroute. Pooja Shri is a marketing professional, currently on a sabbatical pursuing her creative interests. When she is not busy making Tanjore paintings or murals, she indulges in cooking and traveling with her better half.  Here she shares her road trip experience from Chennai to Munnar.

Travel from: Chennai; Destination-Munnar, Kerala;

Mode of transport: Car; Route decided Chennai-Trichy-Madurai-Munnar

We had a long weekend of holidays coming up. So we (read hubby, in-laws & cousin’s) decided to travel to Munnar, via Madurai and Trichy so that we could visit few of the famous temples enroute. We hit the road early morning and managed to reach the much known Sri Rangam Temple near Trichy by evening.Situated amidst mountains and River Kaveri, Srirangam is one of the biggest temples I have ever seen.

The temple is dedicated to Lord Ranganatha, a reclining form of Lord Vishnu.Devotees were thronging the templein huge numbers and I consider myself lucky to have seen and prayed at themesmerizing idol of Lord Ranganatha. Legend says that the idol of Lord Ranganatha was gifted to Vibhishna, by Lord Rama himself for helping him to fight against his own brother Ravana. While gifting the statue Lord Rama told Vibhishna that the idol should not be ever kept on the ground till he reaches his final destination, else he won’t be able to move it at all.

On his way back to Lanka, Vibhishna fascinated by the River Kaveri, decided to take bath in it and completely forgetting Lord Rama’s advise, he kept the idol on the ground. Soon it started increasing in size and thereafter couldn’t be removed from that place forever. This was how Srirangam Temple was born!!

Beautifully crafted, the temple has about 360 shrines dedicated to various gurus and deities. The temple also has the tallest Gopuram (the top structure of the temple)in the world!!The Temple opens between 6am – 1pm and 2pm – 9pm in the evening. A visit to the Srirangam temple is definitely recommended.

Unfortunately we could not visit Ucchipilliar Temple, which is located few kms away from Srirangam. Ucchipilliar Temple is situated at the top of a rock and one needs to climb almost 400 steps to reach the top. The temple is also known as Tirisirapuram as there are three peaks on the rock and as per Hindu mythology each peak is occupied by Lord Shiva, Goddess Parvathi and Uchipilliar himself respectively. The temple opens at around 6am in the morning andcloses at 8pm. I was enthralled by the outer view of the temple and surely plan to make a trip back to visit Ucchipilliar Templeto seek Lord Vinayakar’s blessings 🙂

We decided to stop for the night at Madurai and there we headed to the world famous Meenakshi Temple. The temple is dedicated to Lord Shiva (Sundareshan) and his consort Parvati(Meenakshi). Yet another temple with stunning architecture; had it not been raining, it would have been delight to capture this monument in my little camera. By the way, none of the temples allow still or video cameras inside its premises.

The temple houses shrines of various other deities also. My favorite was “The Pilar”. The specialty about this particular idol is that it is carved out of single stone. It is known as Mukuruny Vinayakar. It was Ganesh haturthyon the day we visited, so we witnessed “paalabhishekam”(where the idol is bathed in milk) being done for Lord Vinayakar. On this very auspicious day Vinayakar is offered a single modak (sweet delicacy),which is so big that it is later distributed amongst all devotees!The temple hours are 5am to 12.30pm and 4pm – 9.30pm.

Madurai can be reached by rail, road & air. It takes about 8 hrs by train from Chennai to Madurai. There are regular buses that ply from Chennai taking about 9 to 10 hrs with an a/c bus fare ranging between 800INR to 900INR. There are multiple economical stay options in and around centre of the city that one can choose from.

After such a long day, we had a sumptuous vegetarian dinner & tucked ourselves in, dreaming about picturesque Munnar that we were heading for the next day.

Munnar travelogue follows….