My Travel Experiences In My Way ...: May 2010

It was Saturday morning and I came after completing my night shift. While sleeping at 8am,I didn’t even imagine that I would be preparing for my spiritual visit. I woke up at 4pm and one of my friend and I started discussing about weekend plan. On every weekend, we used to hunt for some nearby places to visit on my Yamaha Fazer.. Suddenly thought of tirupati struck in my mind. We are in Chennai since over 18 months and we had never been to tirupati,the place where people come from places. We started to search for information on internet and some of our living tamil sources ;)

We got a fair idea about how should we plan. We did it and started in the morning exactly at 5am from Tidel Park. Tirupati is just 152km from Chennai and the main temple is on the hills called Tirumala located around 27 km from Tirupati. Uptil now I never heard about Tirumala. Upto the time we went to Alipiri toll gate which is the toll gate for Tirumala Hills,we thought that the main temple is in Tirupati and Tirumala is the place where wehad to collect the 300/- token required for Shighra-Darshan.

We followed the path as Chennai – Poonamalli – Tiruvallur – Thiruttani – Puttur – Tirupati. It was a bumpy ride for first 60-70 km but after that Road was good. It was going parallel to a railway track for few kms. It was a very good experience for me because I never did driving for more than 100 km on my new bike at a stretch. I was on 11^th sky you can say. We reached in Turupati after 2 and half hours. The first thing that we had to do after reaching in Tirupati was to collect a token for Darshanam. There are four types of ways available for Darshanam. SarvaDarshanam i.e. free of cost, SuDarshanam i.e. with 50/- token, ShighraDarshanam i.e. with 300/- token and last one is for VIPs.

The first place to get tokens was RTC bus stand where we came to know that the tokens for SuDarshanam were finished. We didn’t need to search for other places to search for tokens. People told that we can get 300/- tokens on hills. For SuDarshanam, they provide 7500 tokens. 2500 token are distributed as free of cost and remaining 5000 are sold at 50/-

We proceeded to our journey to Tirumala hills. As the place comes in AP,you can find people speaking Hindi so we could get some help. At the toll gate,security was very tight. Scanning of each and every baggage, car, bikes and people. The road was so smooth that I haven’t seen such a wonderful road in hill sections anywhere. I was feeling so good to ride in those curves.

We reached to Tirumala hills,parked bike somewhere and proceeded to get into the queue after a little enquiry. The place was so awesome and clean. 2 floor cottages for the people who come for Darshanam, required shops and well maintained roads. The queues were developed on the footpath along the roads and they were having proper roof and water arrangements in between. They were the longest queues that I have ever seen. For free darshanam,I heard,it takes around 20 hrs,for ShighraDarshanam, it takes around 3-4 hrs. As it was Sunday, it took much more time than expected. We were at the end of the queue at 9am. It was moving pretty fast and the surrounding conditions were so good that we didn’t feel tired even after standing in the queue for around 3 hrs. After 4 hrs,we got to the token counter where we deposited our mobiles and cameras and took our token and the queue continued into the temple surrounding for another 2 hrs. After the counter,we started feeling tired and we had only tea after reaching the hills.

We decided that we would take our lunch only after getting Darshanam. It was getting more and more crowdy as we were going closer into the main temple. Everyone was enchanting Govinda Govinda.... and we were getting that spiritual feel. Our souls were becoming calm even in that crowd and we were feeling very delighted. We heard that we get Darshanam only when God want us to take it otherwise we will not get it. Eventhough we got it for around 4-5 secs,we were feeling very lucky to get it. The temple was totally golden as if it is gold plated (I am not sure about the whole temple to be golden but atleast all the temple tops are pure golden). After coming out of temple,we couldn’t even remind how the statue was exactly.It is said that after going to Tirupati,something good will happen to you and because of only that, people come again and again over there.

TTD (Tirupati-Tirumala Devsthanam) claims that it is the richest temple in the world. After seeing the Hundi (a big golden jar),I had to believe it. Everyone was pouring the money into it as if they are pouring water. We came out of the temple and got into the queue for Prasadam, the laddus. The place is so crowdy that you will find queues for each and everything over there. But everything is very systematic and strict.Before entering main temple,you have get through 3 security scans.

Before entering the queue,we didn’t have any idea that we had to take out our shoes and keep them in some lockers.We had to keep them to the security counter from where we couldn’t get them back.They said that tey threw all the shoes into jungle. As it is a temple place, there was not a single shoe shop. We had to drive back from there into tirupati barefooted. It was looking so much funny to ride a lovely bike barefooted that people from overtaking buses used to laugh at us. As it was Sunday,we hardly found a shoe shop opened and bought one as quick as possible. It was 5pm and we planned to return before it gets too dark. We took a fast lunch at some hotel and started our return journey to Chennai. We reached at 9pm exactly on room. Everything went as per plan and we were back safely. We were so tired because of queue thing and bike riding that we slept in no time.

It was an awesome experience. I will recommend to go on bike if possible if you are in Chennai. Eventhought we had digicam,we couldn;t capture much images. Some of the images are attached below.

Websites for reference :

TTD online ticket booking : http://www.ttdsevaonline.com/
TTD official website : http://www.tirumala.org/