Melkote

My in-laws had come over to bangalore and they were very keen on going to the only sri vaishnava temple in south india, which is in Melkote. As my sense of routes within bangalore itself is bad, and I didn’t know any person who had been to Melkote before, I did lot of searching on the net to get a proper route map. Luckily, I got enough details from the internet.

Melkote is almost 150km from our house near airport in bangalore. We need to take the Bangalore-Mysore highway untill Mandya. After Mandya, take a right turn and drive through the two lane town road for almost 40km. There are basically two temples here, one is Cheluvanarayanaswamy temple in the town and other is the Yoganarasimha temple, which it on the top of the hill.

We started early sunday morning at around 7pm. We included me, my wife, her mother and grandmother ! That was quite some responsibility on me. Luckily there was no rain and the weather was really great. As always, we had a good drive on the highway untill Mandya. We also made a stop at kamath lokaruchi for breakfast. But, once we got off the highway and entered the town, it was quite a narrow road and it took us a while to cover that distance of 40km. Finally, we reached Cheluvanarayanaswamy temple at around 10:30. I was really pleased to see that there was not much crowd even on weekend and there was a serene outlook to the place. After the darshan of all the gods in the temple, it was almost 1pm and we were really hungry. As its a small town, we couldn’t find any restaurants around. We packed some puliogare from the roadside stall near the temple and headed for Yoganarasimha temple.

Yoganarasimha temple was quite nearby, but we had to park the car almost near the bottom of the hill and walk all the way to the top. I guess, it was more than 100 steep steps to climb and I was not sure if my in-laws could walk all the way. But to my surprise, they were really determined and managed to walk to the hill top ! The temple was a bit crowded, as there was not much space to move around and we had a quick darshan. After the darshan, while we were looking around to sit for sometime, we just realized how much height we had covered. We could see a wonderful view of the whole town and there was cool breeze all around.

While coming down from the hill, there was a Kalyani (small pond) on the way. We stopped there for the much needed rest and had our puliogare lunch. Though the Kalyani was quite big, it was not so clean and we had to search around quite a bit to find a neat seating place. We stayed there for almost a couple of hours, and started back to Bangalore around 4pm. Though the return drive was a bit tiring due to traffic, it was a really enjoyable trip and we had a good time.