Tenkasi, Courtallam and Tirunelveli

Hi,

I am back after a long time.

After my last update lot of things happened.. I moved from Bangalore to Trivandrum.
Now I started visiting places around Trivandrum. I had been to Neyyar Dam, Kovalam, Varkala, Ponmudi and local site seeing. I will give details on those later.

Two weeks back I had been to Bangalore to bring nanamma and Thatha. I am having nice time with them. I come from school and play with them whole day. Some time I make them laugh and some times irritate them....

Last week I took namma and thatha to Padmanabha swamy temple and Attukkal Bhagavathy temple (Sabarimala of Women). This week on 10th March we went to Tenkasi, Courtallam and Tirunelveli.


We started from at 7:45AM (the plan was to start at 6:30AM :-) ). We took State highway to Thenmala. We reached Thenmala at 9:30AM. Thenmala is an ecotourism project. The route to Thenmala was hilly and green and breezy. So I slept all through. I got up just before reaching Thenmala and wanted to stop there. We stopped there next to the river for breakfast. We had home packed Upma before starting to our destination -Tenkasi.

Thenmala Dam:


The river:


We stopped for a minute on the way near a railbridge for photo.



We had no problem with the direction until we reached TN border. As soon as we crossed Kerala, the road signs changed to local language. And there were no sign borads giving directions to any of the tourist locations. We just headed on the main road, until we reached Tenkasi (we followed the Google maps printout).

The Tenkasi temple tower can be seen from outskirts of the town. We reached temple at 11:00AM.

The temple is big and good. The temple was dark and there were no electric lights inside the temple. Most of the places we had difficulty in seeing the deity in that dim light.

Temple Tower from out side:



The temple tower from inside:





Temple premises:










We were out of the temple by 12:00noon. We headed toward Courtallam which is 6Kms from Tenkasi. I was excited to go there as Dad told me that there are 5 water falls in Courtallam.

We reached Courtallam in 15 min. Our plan was to go to Siddheswara mutt first. But we had tough time finding the place. People there either dont know what is it or not ready to tell us where it is. The worst part is we cant read anything. In just a 2KM city it took us 30min. to find the place after roaming here and there asking for directions. There were some people who misguided us too. Thanks to an auto driver and another guy who helped us find the place.

The mutt is in a small area with different temples. They are performing homas and poojas there. We spent around 30 minutes there before leaving the place.

The mutt from outside:



The plan was to visit the waterfalls and leave the place at around 5PM. All the way I was asking dad for waterfalls. But, we were told that there is no water in any of the falls and its not the season to visit falls. However I wanted to go to falls. So, we went to main falls. Here is the look of falls :-) :



Just to make me happy dad took us to falls and spent some time. We wanted to have lunch there but looking at the monkeys, we decide to have it later on the way.

The time was around 1:45PM. So, we decided to visit Tirunelveli and go to Trivandrum from there. Tirunelveli is around 60KMs from Tenkasi and is on the way to Trivandrum (another route).

On the way we were looking for some big tree for shadow to have lunch. Finally we found a nice tamarind tree at 2:15PM. We took out the packed lunch dishes from car and were ready to start and it started raining.... We moved into car and had lunch inside the car one after the other. We were done by 2:45PM. It was still raining.

We reached Tirunelveli at 3:30PM. Again we had problem finding the temple. We were asking almost everyone for the way to temple.. but they either say they dont know or tell us to go to Tenkasi. We were surprised. We were thinking may be we are in a wrong city... This might not be a temple town etc.. Finally, one guy told us the details and he also told us that it would be opened at 6PM. But, we wanted to give a try and went to temple. Its such a big temple (14 acres) and we wonder how some people in city including a hotel guy on the road opposite to temple dont know where the temple is. As usual, there were no sign boards.. may be they were in Tamil.

As expected, the temple was not closed. It was open but may be there were no poojas being offered that time. Its such a beatiful temple, we just forgot about time and went all over the temple. You will need atleast a full day to cover the temple fully. The sculptures are excellent. There were some pillars carved out of single stone and make different sound when you hit at different place. There is also a beautiful thousand pillar mantap. Thatha and nanamma were saying we should have come to this place first.

Inside Temple:




But we wanted to reach home before its too late. So, we came out at 5:45PM. We bought some halwa (Tirunelveli is famous for halwa) and started back to Trivandrum. After getting out of the town, we saw a sign board saying Trivandrum is 161KMs. Surprised. Dad was expecting it to be some 80KMs....
Kanyakumari is 50KMs from there. So nanamma told to go there and visit that too. We anyway came prepared for a two day trip with all the clothes etc. But, dad has Kanyakumari trip plan for another weekend. So, he wanted to go home.

Until Nagercoil the drive was breeze on the 4-lane highway. After that it was worst. It was dark and there were no sign boards in English!!!!!
It was 10:10PM, by the time we reached home. and was 12 mid-night when we had dinner and went to bed...

No plans for tomorrow.... will come soon with my tomorrows schedule...