Sunday, July 20, 2014

Tirupati temple visit

Once, a Himalayan trekker, a marathon runner, a serious Yoga trainee and a lazy guy went for a trek of 3500 steps. Oh wait, that is not where the story begins...

It was a friend's wedding that finally took me to Tirupati for the first time in my life. After a very comfortable car journey (4 people in a big SUV and I wasn't even driving!), we landed up in Tirupati at a late evening. The air conditioned hotel room was the best place to be in town because even late in the evening the place was sweltering hot. The plan was to visit Tirumala temple (now I can tell Tirumala from Tirupati!) early next morning. 2 of my friends had plotted a plan to climb the stairs to Tirumala. For those of you who haven't been to Tirupati, there is a perfectly nice road that goes all the way to the top of the hill... and you can take your car all the way... and if you don't want to do that, there are plenty of buses too, so there is no logical reason to climb the stairs ;-) One of the members of our team pointed out that the climb is not very easy (3500 steps, elevation of around 800 meters, distance of around 11 km) and suggested that we just drive up the hill. I guess the heat must have fried my brain, so I agreed to experience the thrill of the hike.

How difficult can this climb be? After all, thousands of people climb these stairs every day, many of them much older/weaker than me. There were two things that I had not considered: Most people who take the stairs reserve a lot of time for the climb, but we had allocated just about 3 hours. Secondly and more importantly, most of the people who take the stairs come there with an unwavering devotion to Lord Venkateshwara, which makes them forget about physical discomforts and focus just on reaching the summit to see the Lord. People who think too rationally like me can't reach that level of devotion.

So how was the actual climb? We started at around 5:45AM from Alipiri on the first Sopanamarga (http://www.tirumala.org/travel_tptm_foot.htm) to the hill. It was a Saturday and I was told that the crowd was unusually high that day. Initially we had to make our way through dense group of people. I saw a large number of people who had probably arrived in the town that morning and had directly come to climb the hill with their luggage. Some people were placing a camphor on each step (yes, each step!) and lighting it before moving on. Some were applying kumkum and arashina (turmeric) on each stair! Some people were carrying their kids while climbing. There were a number of senior citizens too. The stairs are well-maintained and there is a shade too. We needed to walk along the road for some distance in between, but that stretch too had a good footpath. There were plenty of shops all along selling all types of eatables, like full breakfast, water, juices, freshly cut fruits, chaats (yes, chaats), milk kova and so on.



The first 1 hour was the most excruciating as it was extremely steep, where we climbed around 2000 steps. After that, the next 1000 steps are spread across a lot of distance, so they were easy to climb. The last 500 steps were again very steep. After plenty of short breaks, we reached the top at about 8:30AM, taking around 2 hours 45 minutes for the climb. Tirumala is roughly at the same elevation as Bangalore and weather was pleasant, so we were able to relax very quickly and the exhaustion of climb was quickly forgotten. Needless to say, I was the slowest in our group and I made a resolve to improve my fitness levels immediately, a resolve I maintained for almost a day.

The climb is probably not much difficult compared to treks in real mountains. However, what makes this climb difficult is that as soon as we climb up, we need to stand in hours and hours of queues for the darshan of the God. On this day, there was a long queue for anything and everything in Tirumala... just depositing our mobile phones and bags took 45 minutes of standing in a queue. After a while we were conditioned to stand in a queue wherever we saw one. We were fortunate to have booked the right ticket for darshan that day, thanks completely to one of the members of the group who is a seasoned pro of visiting Tirumala. We spent less than 3 hours getting in and out of the temple, which included approximately 10 seconds of seeing the God. My friend had warned us to keep our eyes peeled while in front of the God because there is a tendency to close our eyes while in front of the God and doing so here can mean you will completely miss out seeing the God :-) After the darshan, there was a queue to put our offerings in Srivari Hundi too! The queue for buying "extra" laddus was so long, we decided to skip it completely.

Having never visited Tirumala before, I must say I was happy to see how well the place was organized, considering the large number of devotees who pour into the temple every day. While roaming around on the streets I didn't feel the population as much as I had expected. There aren't too many eating options in Tirumala, partly due to the free food provided by the temple. I found this interesting way of making badam milk though:

Tea stalls with a copper "boiler" like this were common, but I learnt that many stalls had these boilers just for ornamental purpose:

Picture from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Tea_stall_tamil_nadu.jpg/800px-Tea_stall_tamil_nadu.jpg

There is a free city bus ride within Tirumala and they use these interesting buses:

Thankfully, we took a bus while returning from Tirumala to Tirupati. I totally hate climbing down the stairs, much more than I hate climbing up. We were back in the comforts of our AC room in Tirupati by 5PM.