Vijay Barve

Sabarimala Pilgrim

Dear All,

Just returned from Sabarimalai Pilgrim last evening. Here is a brief report.

I started along with two friends Manu and Ajith on 5th December evening bu bus for Adoor. Ajith's in laws say in Addor, where we performed Pooja and put the Mala for the pilgrim. We have to make a kit called Erumudi for it. This contains pooja material like Coconut, Rice, Haldi, Kumkum, Ghee etc. packed in a cloth bag to be held on head. We haired a Car and we three plus Ajith's Parnets-in-laws joined us. Most of the people were black shirt, black Lungi and black Pancha.

We reached the Pamba village, through which the Pumba river flows. We have to walk barefoot form this location about 6 km till the temple through forest. Facilities like drinking water and hotels are available. We started with a dip in the shallow river at about 3:30 pm.

The climb is steep in the beginning. The path is cemented till midway. Hot sun was making us tired, so we had some lemon soda on the way. Medicinal Hot Water was served free of charge on the way. And the volunteers serving the water were really polite and helping. Till midway the path of people going upwards and descending runs parallel. All the people keep on chanting "Swami Sharanam Ayyappa Sharanam" and some other rhyming slogans like we use for Ganesh festival.

After mid way, the slope was gradual, but the path is not cemented. So for people like me, who are not used to walking barefoot, it was bit difficult. Withing a kilometer distance, queue started. There was more rush due to security checking with metal detectors at several places. It took almost 4 hours for us to reach the temple premise through the queue.

The temple premise is beautiful. Initially we need to break a coconut from the Erumudi and then climb 18 steps. These 18 steps are very sacred. There are devasthana personnel to help people to climb and control crowd there. After that we have to take a round in long elevated gallery around the main temple and get the darshan. This time I got a very nice and peaceful darshan of Lord Ayyappa. After that we visited a series of temples in the premises, and performed pooja with Haladi, Bhasma etc.

In one temple, you do the Parikrama with a coconut rolling on the ground with your right hand. This was very interesting. After doing the ghree abhishekam, we went to get Prasad. We exchanges the packet of rice from Erumudi for rice and pickle was served on that. We also got some sweet rice. Looking at the long queues for Aravana Prasad, we dropped the plan and decided to return.

On return we had light dinner of Kanji and Tapioca and reached back Pamba at 12:00 in the night. The pilgrim was enjoyable due to nice Darsha of Lord.

I will write about the trivendrum tour soon.

Labels: kerala, sabaraimala, travel

posted by Vijay Barve @ 10:18 AM