We planned to visit three temples - Attukal Bagavathy temple, Pazhavangadi Ganapathy Temple, and the world-famous Padmanabaswamy temple. We decided to complete the first 2 quickly so we spend enough time in the Padmanabaswamy temple.
Attukal Bagavathy temple is around 2 kms from the central station and we reached there by auto in 10 minutes. The temple is very serene and is known to be crowded on Tuesdays and Fridays. This temple holds a record of having 2.5 million ladies in the single biggest gathering in history. The Goddess is well decorated and the temple premises are quite clean. We completed darshan in 15 minutes and took an auto to Pazhavangady Ganapathy temple.
Pazhavangady Ganapathy temple is located close to the Padmanabaswamy temple. Pazhavangady Ganapathy temple is a small and very popular temple. The tradition is to break coconuts in this temple. It is heard that there are people who break hundreds and thousands of coconuts as per their wishes and prayers. It takes few minutes on a normal day to complete the darshan. Gents should go with bare top body - remove shirts, t-shirts, banians, and women are not allowed with bags.
Padmanabaswamy temple
We next visited the Padmanabaswamy temple. The temple has quite a number of restrictions to enter. No mobiles, no any sort of electronic or electric devices like even mobile chargers or cables. No eatables, no anything apart from money! Women are allowed in sarees or asked to wear dhotis on top of their dresses. Female kids have to wear pavadai or frocks. Gents - no top-dresses are even allowed to carry inside. Only dhotis! All can be safely deposited in the cloakroom at a very low cost. As we entered the main gopuram, we saw the free darshan crowd to be considerably high. We opted for Rs.180 darshan, for which a pair is allowed on one ticket. I bought two tickets and we entered the main sanctum in 15 minutes. The main sanctum was very crowded and quite dark. The crowd was not managed properly and the darshan was not quite pleasant; rather it was very tiring and challenging for the elders. Somehow, we managed to out of the main sanctum and had darshans of other Sanctums of Lord Krishna, Lord Rama, and Lord Ganapathy. We completed the whole place in 1:30 hours and were out. There are small souvenir shops outside and one can dwell on them.
Our trip took a direction towards Kulathupuzha after visiting Varkala beach.
We took the route of Varkala - Kallamballam - Kilimanoor - Kulathupuzha. Kulathupuzha is one of the important temples of Lord Ayyappan. This is located around 56 km from Varkala beach. This temple is where the Lord is incarnated in child form. This small and popular temple is on the banks of the river Kulathupuzha and across a narrow bridge. Gents have to remove upper garments to enter the main sanctum and no restrictions for ladies. It takes around 15 minutes to have a satisfactory darshan on a normal day. We reached the temple by 10:45 and had excellent darshan.
