Ccorridor of Ramanatha Swamy Temple is largest corridor of any temple in the world
Near Madhav Kund (the dirty one)
I don't have any idea that what story/message depicted in the pic. Clicked it because I liked it :-)
Ashirvadam from Gajraj
At the very tip of Indian paninsula
Gang of Four
Jeep Journey
Ruins of 1964's cyclone at Dhanushkodi
Beutiful Dhanushkodi Beach
After Bus and Jeep, now its Autorikshaw's turn
Ramjhrokha Temple
The Last temple of the tour. Unable to recollect its name after so much pressure on mind.As always, one more instant program. To utilize my Christmas vacations, I decided to visit the Rameswaram and Madurai in Tamil Nadu. Biggest blocker in instant programs is train tickets :-) Flights were damn expensive in this holiday season so decided to do all journey in by Bus. Thanks for redbus.in, I was able to book all the tickets online.
My plan to go Rameswaram was via Chennai, so I called my friends in Chennai if they can join and voila; Amit, Sandeep and Harish were ready to join me. I started for Chennai from Hyderabad on 24th Dec night 11PM By Kesineni travel’s Volvo AC bus. Bus was decent but they tortured me with two Telgu movies :-| The loud speaker was just above my head. No chance to escape from this big noise pollution. Could not sleep entire night :-( Somehow I passed the night by counting remaining hours and minutes of the journey. Thankfully bus was fast and exact on time to reach Chennai. First time I felt such a great relief after reaching to my destination. I was so tired that after reaching Sandeep’s house I canceled the entire program for day visit of Chennai and immediately went to bed. 2 hours of sleep gave me some freshness. Want to sleep more but we need to go to Koymbedu, Asia’s largest bus stand to catch our bus for Rameswaram. Journey started very well when bus wala started playing some very good Tamil Dance numbers. I can’t understand a single word in Tamil but music was good. And the beautiful ladies dancing on those numbers were really gorgeous. Illiana, Shriya, Asin and Jyotika. Who watch heroes in South Indian movies when such beauties are there :-). But buswala doesn’t want to see smile on our faces. He started some junk Tamil movie by lauding the speaker on its highest possible volume. Needless to say, it makes our Christmas Eve horrible.
Morning when I woke up, I saw almost everybody was bent towards window. Out of curiosity I also looked outside and wow, what a fantastic scenery. Our bus was running on Indira Gandhi Bridge, one of the engineering wonder of India. I was thrilled with such a beautiful start of my morning :-) Bus reached to Rameswaram around 7 AM. Amit was having some contact there in Rameswaram, through which we got an okay types lodge just 10 steps away from the main temple. We were lucky that at least we got something there in such a crowded season. Without wasting any time, we all freshed up and got ready to take bath in the sea and the 22 kunds (wells) of Ramanatha Swamy Temple.
Sea is there near to Agnitreetham temple and one really hesitates to enter in the sea at first go. Not because it looks dangerous, in fact the sea there was totally silent. But it was so DAMN DIRTY that you really think twice before entering in to it. Somehow we collected courage to enter in this dilute MUD after taking name of lord Ram. But no, this is not the end of test, in fact it is the starting. After entering in the sea, you realize that something is tied in your legs. Don’t worry, it is not a snake, these are clothes of other people which they leave here. Yuk!! After chanting some mantras in fast forward fashion we completed our bath in the sea. Now this is the time to wash out our sins with the water of 22 wells of Ramanatha Swamy Temple.
We hired a Pandit for this purpose in Rs.200/-. He gets the water in bucket from each Kund and asked us to drink some water and pour rest of the water on our body. It was a real fun. We enjoyed this whole bathing thing a lot. Most of these wells are adjacent to each other but taste of water is different for each kund. At our time of visiting, 5 out of 22 kundsl were closed for repairing. All kunds are actually well except Madhav Kundu. The other kunds/wells looks pretty ok to drink their water but Madhav kund is really horrible. It is like a dirty pond having lots of lotus (don’t forget lotus grows in mud) and fishes in it. It’s really hard to drink its water after watching the pond from your own eyes but we did the dare. I hope its water cleaned my body from inside :-). After covering all Kunds, I was really feeling light weighted and why not? All of my sins washed out after all ;-)
Now it’s the time for Darshan. First things you notice in the temple is its large corridor with lots of pillars. There are total 1212 pillars and corridor of Ramanatha Swamy Temple is largest corridor of any temple in the world. After a long queue (even with the special darshan’s ticket), we finally got a chance to worship the Shivling from a good distance. You need to pay a lot to do puja by your hand itself. Here are the some pictures of temple.
After Darshan episode, we had lunch in one Gujrati Samaj restaurant near the temple. It was all dozy dozy after lunch but we somehow kept us ready to visit rest of the Rameswaram. Amit’s contacts worked again here and that generous guy hired a JEEP for us. In the first go we were not feeling comfortable to fit ourselves in a jeep but when we actually moved to Dhanushkodi, we understood that jeep is the best option for commutation for such a place. A proper road is there up to Dhanushkodi beach but after that it is total mud, sand, stones i.e. everything except roads. Finally we reached to the edge of Tamilnadu from where Sri Lanka is just 18 KM far by sea route. It is believed that Lord Ram’s monkey army started building bridge from here for their mission in Lanka. A small edge of Adams bridge can be seen in the sea (you really need a good binocular for that). The beautiful Bay of Bengal one side and Indian Ocean at other end (little far). If you have time, it’s a very good place to sit and relax.
We started back to cover rest of the things in our bumpy ride. Dhanushkodi is a fishing hamlet. Most part of this village was completely destroyed in the cyclone of 1964. Do you know that before 1964’s cyclone Indian railway has the connectivity to this very tip of Indian peninsula? Ruins of the church, temples and old railways station can still be seen here. After having few gulp of coconut water on beautiful Dhanushkodi beach we moved forward towards Kothandaramaswamy Temple, the only man made structure which was able to survive in 1964’s cyclone. This is the place where Vibhishna, the brother of demon king Ravan, surrender himself to lord Ram. Temple is having image of lord Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Hanuman and Vibhishan. Again a peaceful place to sit and relax but since we were running short of time, we came back to our lodge. The total taxi (Jeep) charges for this whole visit was Rs. 800/-.
Now only two important temples were remaining to cover, so we checked out from the lodge and decided to visit remaining places on route to bus stand. After settling down the lodge bill we hired an auto to visit remaining temples. The first temple is the Ramjharokha temple which is perched at the highest point on the island of Rameswaram, Gandamadana Parvatham. The shrine preserves the imprint of Lord Rama's feet placed on a Chakra (wheel). A beautiful view of city, sea and greenery can be seen from the temple. Good places to try your hands on camera in different angles and different poses :-)
The last temple was... Oops! I forgot the name :-( The main attraction in this temple was floating stones. The temple is dedicated to lord Hanuman and it contains few stones good size stones that float on water. As per the priests in the temple, those are the stones which were actually used by lord Ram’s monkey army to build the bridge to Lanka. Don’t know how truth it was but I felt surprised by seeing a stone floating in the water.
“Its 6:30 man, just grab some snacks fast and rush to bus stand to catch the bus of Madurai”, somebody shouted and in reaction we all moved to our final destination in the Rameswaram, the bus stand. Bus was ready to go, so a quick after a snacks session, we all placed out butts on the uncomfortable seats of bus.
Madurai trip was one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. Don’t have enough time to cover it in the same blog so I will cover the story in next blog. Stay tuned :-)
My plan to go Rameswaram was via Chennai, so I called my friends in Chennai if they can join and voila; Amit, Sandeep and Harish were ready to join me. I started for Chennai from Hyderabad on 24th Dec night 11PM By Kesineni travel’s Volvo AC bus. Bus was decent but they tortured me with two Telgu movies :-| The loud speaker was just above my head. No chance to escape from this big noise pollution. Could not sleep entire night :-( Somehow I passed the night by counting remaining hours and minutes of the journey. Thankfully bus was fast and exact on time to reach Chennai. First time I felt such a great relief after reaching to my destination. I was so tired that after reaching Sandeep’s house I canceled the entire program for day visit of Chennai and immediately went to bed. 2 hours of sleep gave me some freshness. Want to sleep more but we need to go to Koymbedu, Asia’s largest bus stand to catch our bus for Rameswaram. Journey started very well when bus wala started playing some very good Tamil Dance numbers. I can’t understand a single word in Tamil but music was good. And the beautiful ladies dancing on those numbers were really gorgeous. Illiana, Shriya, Asin and Jyotika. Who watch heroes in South Indian movies when such beauties are there :-). But buswala doesn’t want to see smile on our faces. He started some junk Tamil movie by lauding the speaker on its highest possible volume. Needless to say, it makes our Christmas Eve horrible.
Morning when I woke up, I saw almost everybody was bent towards window. Out of curiosity I also looked outside and wow, what a fantastic scenery. Our bus was running on Indira Gandhi Bridge, one of the engineering wonder of India. I was thrilled with such a beautiful start of my morning :-) Bus reached to Rameswaram around 7 AM. Amit was having some contact there in Rameswaram, through which we got an okay types lodge just 10 steps away from the main temple. We were lucky that at least we got something there in such a crowded season. Without wasting any time, we all freshed up and got ready to take bath in the sea and the 22 kunds (wells) of Ramanatha Swamy Temple.
Sea is there near to Agnitreetham temple and one really hesitates to enter in the sea at first go. Not because it looks dangerous, in fact the sea there was totally silent. But it was so DAMN DIRTY that you really think twice before entering in to it. Somehow we collected courage to enter in this dilute MUD after taking name of lord Ram. But no, this is not the end of test, in fact it is the starting. After entering in the sea, you realize that something is tied in your legs. Don’t worry, it is not a snake, these are clothes of other people which they leave here. Yuk!! After chanting some mantras in fast forward fashion we completed our bath in the sea. Now this is the time to wash out our sins with the water of 22 wells of Ramanatha Swamy Temple.
We hired a Pandit for this purpose in Rs.200/-. He gets the water in bucket from each Kund and asked us to drink some water and pour rest of the water on our body. It was a real fun. We enjoyed this whole bathing thing a lot. Most of these wells are adjacent to each other but taste of water is different for each kund. At our time of visiting, 5 out of 22 kundsl were closed for repairing. All kunds are actually well except Madhav Kundu. The other kunds/wells looks pretty ok to drink their water but Madhav kund is really horrible. It is like a dirty pond having lots of lotus (don’t forget lotus grows in mud) and fishes in it. It’s really hard to drink its water after watching the pond from your own eyes but we did the dare. I hope its water cleaned my body from inside :-). After covering all Kunds, I was really feeling light weighted and why not? All of my sins washed out after all ;-)
Now it’s the time for Darshan. First things you notice in the temple is its large corridor with lots of pillars. There are total 1212 pillars and corridor of Ramanatha Swamy Temple is largest corridor of any temple in the world. After a long queue (even with the special darshan’s ticket), we finally got a chance to worship the Shivling from a good distance. You need to pay a lot to do puja by your hand itself. Here are the some pictures of temple.
After Darshan episode, we had lunch in one Gujrati Samaj restaurant near the temple. It was all dozy dozy after lunch but we somehow kept us ready to visit rest of the Rameswaram. Amit’s contacts worked again here and that generous guy hired a JEEP for us. In the first go we were not feeling comfortable to fit ourselves in a jeep but when we actually moved to Dhanushkodi, we understood that jeep is the best option for commutation for such a place. A proper road is there up to Dhanushkodi beach but after that it is total mud, sand, stones i.e. everything except roads. Finally we reached to the edge of Tamilnadu from where Sri Lanka is just 18 KM far by sea route. It is believed that Lord Ram’s monkey army started building bridge from here for their mission in Lanka. A small edge of Adams bridge can be seen in the sea (you really need a good binocular for that). The beautiful Bay of Bengal one side and Indian Ocean at other end (little far). If you have time, it’s a very good place to sit and relax.
We started back to cover rest of the things in our bumpy ride. Dhanushkodi is a fishing hamlet. Most part of this village was completely destroyed in the cyclone of 1964. Do you know that before 1964’s cyclone Indian railway has the connectivity to this very tip of Indian peninsula? Ruins of the church, temples and old railways station can still be seen here. After having few gulp of coconut water on beautiful Dhanushkodi beach we moved forward towards Kothandaramaswamy Temple, the only man made structure which was able to survive in 1964’s cyclone. This is the place where Vibhishna, the brother of demon king Ravan, surrender himself to lord Ram. Temple is having image of lord Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Hanuman and Vibhishan. Again a peaceful place to sit and relax but since we were running short of time, we came back to our lodge. The total taxi (Jeep) charges for this whole visit was Rs. 800/-.
Now only two important temples were remaining to cover, so we checked out from the lodge and decided to visit remaining places on route to bus stand. After settling down the lodge bill we hired an auto to visit remaining temples. The first temple is the Ramjharokha temple which is perched at the highest point on the island of Rameswaram, Gandamadana Parvatham. The shrine preserves the imprint of Lord Rama's feet placed on a Chakra (wheel). A beautiful view of city, sea and greenery can be seen from the temple. Good places to try your hands on camera in different angles and different poses :-)
The last temple was... Oops! I forgot the name :-( The main attraction in this temple was floating stones. The temple is dedicated to lord Hanuman and it contains few stones good size stones that float on water. As per the priests in the temple, those are the stones which were actually used by lord Ram’s monkey army to build the bridge to Lanka. Don’t know how truth it was but I felt surprised by seeing a stone floating in the water.
“Its 6:30 man, just grab some snacks fast and rush to bus stand to catch the bus of Madurai”, somebody shouted and in reaction we all moved to our final destination in the Rameswaram, the bus stand. Bus was ready to go, so a quick after a snacks session, we all placed out butts on the uncomfortable seats of bus.
Madurai trip was one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. Don’t have enough time to cover it in the same blog so I will cover the story in next blog. Stay tuned :-)
