Dwaraka

While in High school, the beauty of Dwaraka that was described in Bhagavatham by the great Telugu poet Pothana was repeatedly sung by my Telugu teacher and I really enjoyed it. In addition, we were able to add one Jyothirlingam visit and one of Adi Shankara's Sharada peetham which we wanted to cover in this trip.

Nageshwara Jyotirlingam, one of the 12 holy shrines of Lord Shiva, is located near Dwaraka. We covered that. And then, the famous Somanath Temple. I will detail it in a different post.

Dwarka is one of the four Shankara peethams and this one is also called Dwaraka Peetham. We already visited Sringeri in our yatra 2. We went to Chardham on our first yatra, but since it was a package tour, they did not take us to the Shankara Math there. We will be covering Puri Peetham at the end of this yatra.

Sri Krishna and his community migrated to Dwaraka from Mathura area where He was born and raised.

When we got off the train in Dwaraka, there was a Railway Police employee by name I think, Raghuvir, was standing outside the station. One of our helper passengers suggested that we talk to him. He assured us that the Auto rickshaw people are very honest and have a fixed fee to take us to the hotel that is to our liking. We hired one for 20 rupees (this would never happen in Andhra Pradesh, where all of them appear to be so greedy). The first one we checked was Shivam. We made sure, there was hot water for bathing and western style toilet attached to the room. Both were there. The rate was only 375 rupees per night.Also, there was a free shuttle van to take us to the Temple premises. We didn't want to check any more hotels. We liked the name shivam, even though modest, the amenities were there and for Nirmala's sake, coffee was available from 6 a.m. with room service. WOW!!! What a luxury, finally!!
The receptionist gave us a flyer about other tours and explained to us how the tours worked. Our knowledge of spoken Hindi was ok. Chandni travels was recommended for the next day's bus tour. We freshened up in the room and were at the Temple for the 7:30 p.m. Aarathi. The inside shrine was packed with people - but no shouting, pushing, cursing. We had a very peaceful darsan.
As suggested by our Auto driver, we went to a family owned place called Ammami's place to eat. The meals were simple with lot of personal attention and the cost was nominal. It was pure vegetarian (suddha saakhahari) with hot rotis. It felt like we were at home with our family. We purchased our tickets for the other tours - one was 60 rupees each. The second one was 140 rupees.
The night was very peaceful, hottest water for bath and a good night's sleep.
We were ready in the morning for our bus tours.
Perhaps I should write about those tours in my next post.