Warangal Trip

After considerable scheduling, 4 families (ours, PSN’s, RK’s and Sekar’s) left for Warangal on Monday (24th) morning. RK brought Ramesh’s Toyota Innova and Sekar brought his friend’s Chevy Travera. We started after 7.00am and stopped after Boingiri for breakfast. We reached Warangal by 10.45am. We initially thought of staying at a hotel, but later requested Vijaybabu and he accommodated us at his father-in-law’s house. This is Warangal Murthyraju gari house on Hunter Road. It is very spacious and accommodated 4 families very well.

After a short break, we directly headed for Ramappa temple, about 65km from Warangal. Most of the road is okay, except for the last 10km from Mulugu to Palampet. Ramappa temple’s construction is breathtaking. Right from the colors of the stones used to the sculptor’s talent, everything is first rate. The granite statues that can produce sound are amazing. Most of the temple is in ruins because of continuous invasions and proliferations, yet it is worth watching.

The priest at the temple has put Vibhooti bottus (religious white color powder strips on our foreheads, as you can see in the album below) on all of us that made us look like very different people. After spending an hour or so at the temple, we went to Ramappa lake. We stayed there for a very short time, mainly because it is almost lunch time and there is no decent food in the neighborhood. We drove all the way back to Warangal and had lunch at Asoka’s Continental restaurant. The service there is very good and the food is tasty enough.
It is about 4.00pm by the time we completed our lunch. Then we went to the thousand pillars temple. This is a huge construction but most part of it is closed because the archeology department is trying to renovate/resurrect the temple using the leftover artifacts. The main temple is still operational and is very good to watch. We roamed around there till dusk and headed back to our stay. Spent a couple of hours playing card games while children took a break. Then we went to Suprabha restaurant for dinner. The food is okay, but the service is not up to the mark. Most of us had a light dinner. We are visited in the evening by Vasu and Prasad’s family. They are Latha’s childhood friends. It was about 11.00pm by the time we winded up the day. Surya fell sick after dinner, but recovered by next morning.

I got up early next morning and took shower by 5.15am. Then me and Sekar went out for a short walk and a cup of coffee. Once Latha and kids are ready, our family drove by to see Latha’s childhood home. We also visited Vasu and Prasad. By 8.30am, all of us headed for breakfast at Asoka. Vasu accompanied us to Warangal fort. The fort is currently down to a very few visiting places, but there are no good explanations on the historical significance of each place. Nevertheless, the stone carvings are a good feast for the eyes. It took us about a couple of hours to visit all the places. At the final leg (atop the hill near the lake) we took a few minutes of rest. We headed back to Asoka again for lunch after vacating our stay. We started back at 2.30pm and reached Yadagiri Gutta by about 4.00pm. We took darshan of Lord Laxmi Nrusimhaswamy, which took about 45 minutes. The crowd here is huge today. On the way back to the highway, we stopped at Surendrapuri, which features five faced Lord Hanuman. There is a huge statue of Hanuman and Siva (on either side) outside the temple. It is dark by the time we started from there. We took another tea break before Boingiri. We reached home by about 8.30pm.

After dinner, I transfered the photos from my SD card to the desktop and found that we shot about 220+ pictures. Unfortunately, someone changed the settings of my camera during first day’s lunch and the photos are shot at a lowest resolution possible. The next morning, I took some time to prune the set to 75 pictures and uploaded them to my albums here.

WarangalTrip07

I took out many photos, especially the ones that don’t feature people. They are candidates for a future blog entry I guess.Overall, the trip was fine. Because we went with kids, the food logistics made us compromise at a few sight seeings. We also didn’t visit Bhadrakali temple, which is another good visiting place. May be next time.