Tirupati/ Tirumala Trip -2

Our next day journey started around 10am. The view around from the first check post at the bottom of the hill was quite beautiful and as the journey started we observed that there is some wildlife sanctuary on other side of the road. We really enjoyed the whole trip up to the hill as the roads were quite well maintained and we were thrilled to see one Deer group grazing nearby.

I also loved watching windmills for the first time in my life and I also tried to capture them through my camera.
We were able to reach at the top of the hill in half an hour. Reaching there was easy but deciding where to go was difficult.
I would love to give you few tips based on my experience:

Firstly, you should know that you cannot worship god in shorts. So either carry a trouser with you or get a lungi for yourself.
Then be patient as queues are quite long at any point of time and they travel in shifts with long zig-zag trail. But don’t worry as there is lot of places where you can purchase frooti/ coffee to drink.
There would be personal checking of you at more than three points in the process of worship which was quite annoying for me. Can’t they just do it once and for all?
Queues are very congested which can horrify young children and also there is chances of getting lost in between.
You are not allowed to carry mobiles and cameras inside. So, you can deposit that outside the temple.
No needs to purchase prashad as you are given 2 ladoos for every Rs 300 ticket and 1 ladoo for Rs. 50. Though for that also you need to stand in a long queue. But I must say it’s worth standing in a queue for these famous ladoos.

What really shocked me most was the act of some member of Temple, who first asked us to take shortcut to visit as Guggu was crying like anything. Then later he asked for money. My Bhaiya tried to give him 50 bucks but he demanded 100 bucks, which obviously was refused by my brother. Still he kept on bugging us in the whole Temple premises.

Worshipping the god inside the temple was an exhilarating experience as the whole journey in queues took us around 2 hours to finally reach there in front of god. We fel blessed when we got Prashad and felt like in heaven after eating that and got some of the ladoos back for our family and friends.
But outr journey was not yet complete as we had to search like anything to find exactly where people are getting Tonsuring done. We finally got one man who said he know such place and took us around 500 m away from the place to the hair cutter and he also asked for some money as he was the mediator. We were o tired by then that we happily gave him 50 bucks and got done tonsuring of my niece. She remained very calm during entire process and I as her Aunt did all the rituals of the Mundan. Finally, after the whole hectic day we came back to our hotels and packed our bags to leave for Bangalore.

Overall, the whole experience was quite memorable as this was my first visit to any temple in South India. Looking forward to visit some more till I am in South India.