Kumbakonam

The quick plan worked out well to Kumbakonam as My closest friend and I chalked an overview of places to see in the temple town. Among the hundreds of temples and places we marked up good 10-15 places to cover in 2 days. This is going to be an on toe travel. Train number – 16232 Mailaduturai Exp. The train reaches Bangalore Cant at 7:15pm and we settled with our railway coffee and the notepad to do the final chalk down. No time to relax while we are there. Once done, we settled in our respective bunks to get the most required sleep. We reached the flowery little station of Kumbakonam at 5:45am.

Here we are and the weather is still at a good 22-23 degrees. We quickly made our way out and took a rickshaw to our destination, the YHAI Hostel of Kumbakonam. As mentioned in the website, the hostel is centrally located just opposite to the prime temple and lake. It is said that from any corner of the town, one can view a kumbham (the pot kept right on top of a gopuram) of a temple. Hence the name of the town is Kumbakonam. Once we dumped our bags and freshened up, we caught hold of our camera bags and started for our tour.

We had the list handy already and to start with, we clicked the early morning reflection of the tank of Kumbeswarar Temple. One done, we went out to look around the prime temple of Kumbakonam, The Kumbeswarar Temple, with the prime deity as Adhikumbeswarar swamy. It is a form of Lord Shiva and the temple is beautiful and colorful.

Once done, we moved to the nearby Someswarar Temple, once again similarly beautiful work of colorful deities sculptured on the rocks and adorn the history of the temple. We took to have breakfast at a small air-conditioned outlet opposite the Someswarar Temple. The food was amazing and hospitality needs to be mentioned. As it was getting hotter with time, we hopped into an auto-rickshaw and bargained to Rs.500 for going around the Kumbakonam town and showing us the listed temples and historic monuments.

We went around and saw Nageswarar Temple of the Lord Shiva. The main deity is a Shiva Lingam and this temple is located centrally located in the town. The Kasi Vishwanathar Temple that we visited next is the temple of the 9 river deities of Ganga, Yamuna, Narmada, Saraswati, Kaveri, Godavari, Tungabhatra, Krishna and Sarayu.

We then visited the Veeravathirar Temple about 2kms from the Kumbakonam Bus stop and adjacent to the Mahamagam tank. The Ramaswamy Temple is one of the most beautiful temples. It has 219 painting of Ramayana adorned on the walls and the prime deity here is Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Anjaneyaa. This temple again is within 2 kms from the town center.

Finally we visited the Sarangapani Temple, one of the 3 major shrines of Lord Vishnu back inside the Kumbakonam town.
It was late evening by the time we finished our day temple tour. We gathered advice from our friendly auto driver about a good place to eat and he took us to the authentic Pandhiyan Hotel amidst the busy market area of the town. It is an old place with long tables and benches like the government schools, very high ceilings and old fans. The place was painted and very clean with one wall completely adorned with photographs in black n white and colors, may be of the members who hav been associated with the place. We ate amazing South Tamil Nadu dinner both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. The food tasted great but more than the food the hospitality was as if we have been invited to dine in Tamil Nadu, this place feels invited.
Post dinner, we called off an early day as an exciting day starts ahead with the sunrise.