Sholingur temples

Visited Sholingur temples, took the train upto Walaja (Bangalore - Chennai route), and then a cab, it took about half hour to reach the foot hills. The sign-boards have it spelt as Solingur and you don't get much info with this name on the web, but here is a link, which also has pics of the deities.

The Yoga Narasimha Swamy temple is situated on a hillock, at a height of 750 ft, there are 1305 steps. We took a little less than an hour to reach the top.

The entire steps are covered by a shade of corrugated sheets, so its just the ascent and the monkeys. We did not take any material for worship as the monkeys snatch it away, (you get a complimentary stick with purchase of the material to keep the monkeys at bay, but we decided not to). The first five hundred steps were real tiring, there was a buttermilk vendor at this point, we had buttermilk which was refreshing. With few stops at irregular intervals we reached the temple. We had to wait, as the temple was being cleaned, it was noon. We were mistaken for some VIPs and were given special treatment.

The temple has two deities - Sri Amritha Valli and Yoga Narasimha Swamy. The deities are beautiful, we offered prayers and got the theertam (holy water). One unique thing at these temples is that they splash theertam on your face, it is quite refreshing and novel, specially after the strenuous climb.

Sri Amritha Valli	Sri Yoga Narasimha Swamy

We got a generous length of flower garland as prasadam, interestingly the man gets a longer length of it than the woman. We had prasadam, which was kesaribath, puliogre and curd rice at 5/- a serving, it was a nice simple lunch. As we started back the flower garland was snatched from me by a monkey, it was very quick and gone in a flash. I have seen monkeys in different temples, but the monkeys here are different, they snatch flower garlands, thulasi garlands and water bottles. Other temples the monkeys are interested only in fruits and coconuts.

We walked down a bit fast in spite of being warned to descend slowly and that resulted in calf and shin pain. On the way down the monkey snatched flower from my friends hair too, which was a bit too much. One reason could be that being a weekday there were less devotees and the monkeys were after anything they could get.

After coming down, a 10 minute drive took us to the Anjaneya Swamy temple. This is situated on another hill at a height of 200 ft, one has to climb 500 steps. The pathway is not shaded and stretches of the path were hot, we had to run a few stretches as the stone steps were heated up, it was past noon. Fortunately, the hot stretches were not many and most of the steps were not hot due to the shade is provided by the trees on both sides. On the way a monkey came after me, I had nothing besides the water bottle so was surprised. I banged the water bottle on the steps to scare the monkey away, but it wouldn't budge. In the process the water bottle slipped from my hand and the monkey ran away with it, it was after the water bottle. The monkey opened the bottle took a swig and threw it, another monkey took the rolling bottle and wiped the bottle mouth and drank.

The climb to this temple was not so tiring, guess due to lesser number of steps and a bit of getting used to. The temple was cool and peaceful. The uniqueness of this temple is that Anjaneya Swamy is sitting in the lotus position, and this is the only temple where it is so.

Here too we had theertam and the splash of theertam. We got a thulasi garland and a length of flower garland as prasadam and we managed to get it down safely, do not know if we were able to ward of the monkeys or it was their afternoon nap time.

We again had to run through some sections, it was less as in some streches we could walk next to boundary wall where the steps has cooled a bit due to the shadow of the wall. This second ascent reduced the calf and shin pain a bit, but it came back later. It was a pleasantly exhausting trip.