Travel Diary || Kerala Trip || Day 3 || Madhurai || Meenakshi Sundareshwar Temple || A Rainy Evening ⛈️🌧️

^{Edited with Canva}

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Greetings, Friends. Hope you all are doing fantastic! I am good by the grace of God. Happy Sunday! The weather in India is very, very hot these days; luckily this morning we had some rain showers to give us some relief from the heat. So today I am here with Day 3 of my Kerala travel diary with my next destination. If you missed my last post in this series, you can find it here . It’s been quite a while since I posted this, but anyway better late than never! So let’s begin with the post.

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^{The Beautiful Munnar Tea Gardens}

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As we woke up the next morning in Munnar, we soon got ready to leave because our plan was to head towards Madhurai, Tamil Nadu which was 160 km away from Munnar. We spoke to the jeep driver and asked him to take us to all the places that were on the way to the nearest bus station, so that we could cover them before leaving for Madurai. The road trip was amazing, we saw many fascinating places, on the way we also visited a church in Thekkady that we had not planned to visit, but while on our way we found it to be so beautiful that we had to wait and get some clicks.

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^{St. Thomas Church, Thekkady}

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The driver was suppose to drop us at Theni Bus Stand so that we could catch the bus to Madhurai in time. We planned to visit Madhurai only for a short period of time as we wanted to see the Meenakshi Temple. There were some rules we had to follow before visiting the temple. We could only enter the temple if we are wearing a traditional outfit. So we caught the bus to reach Madhurai railway station, kept our luggage at the cloak room and changed into our traditional clothes.

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^{Some beautiful stops on the way}

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The boys had to wear mund - a traditional garment worn around the waiste. And the girls had to wear something that covered their hands and legs. Hence, we had carried an extra pair of clothes so that we could visit the temple. We reached the railway station at around 5:30 p.m. The temple was just 10 minutes away from the station, so our plan was to book an auto and reach the temple as quick as possible because it would close by 8:30 p.m. There was just a small catch. The journey which was suppose to be 10 minutes turned into a 30 minutes journey because it started raining!

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^{Our Ride for the day!}

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It was already 7 p.m. and all our friends had still not gathered at the railway station. We all took 3 different auto rickshaws to reach the station as we were 6 of us. So all of us reached at different times. We then quickly changed to our traditional attires and got ready to go to the temple. Just then we found that none of the auto rickshaws or cabs were available due to the rain! There was water clogging all over the place, so no transport was ready to take us there. And another issue was that we had a train at 11:50 p.m. so we couldn’t even extend our stay and visit the temple the next day.

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^{The beautiful views from top}

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But with determination we said, no we have come so far we are anyhow going to visit the temple. We cannot go back without seeing The Meenakshi Temple. So all of us wore our raincoats, pulled our pants up, held each other’s hands and started walking in the knee deep water. As we had no other option but to walk to the temple! It took us almost 30 minutes to reach our destination. On the way we even tried to stop an auto but no one was agreeing. So we kept walking until we reached the temple 🛕.

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^{Good times!}

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We had to leave all our belongings outside at the counter, including our phones and shoes. We had to go inside empty handed. But we carried some cash so that we could offer it inside. Although it had stopped raining by the time we had reached, but everything was still wet and obviously it was already dark outside. So we didn’t get an excellent view of the temple in day light, but we surely admired its beauty in the night time. We truly enjoyed our time there and took a lot of photos and had the Prasadam that they offered after the Aarti. We still managed to click a few pictures in whatever lighting we got.

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^{Meenakshi Temple}

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So here I come to the end of Day 3 of my Kerala Travel Diary. I hope you all like it. Don’t forget to share your thoughts and feedback. Take care everyone. I will be back with another post of my travel diary. Until then Bye 👋 and enjoy your day.

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^{Finally Reached the temple after waking in the rain water 😇}

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Thank You Everyone for reading my post

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