Tirumala - Sri Venkateshwara swamy temple

Day 3
Tirumala
The day was reserved for Tirupati Balaji darshan.
We started for Kapila teertham at 7:35am. It was at a short distance from our hotel. Car parking was around the road side. We visited the temple and took a dip in the holy water. The water from the fall was refreshing however the one accumulated was rather dirty. 
We exited by 8:50am and moved towards the Tirumala hill. A check post on the way does a thorough checking of all passengers and luggage that has to be passed through a scanner machine. 
A person checks the complete vehicle as well. This consumed around 45 mins. The onward journey on to the hill through the ghats was very scenic. The best part was there were separate roads for upward and downward journey. This allowed the vehicles to zap through smoothly.
 We had already booked "Special Entry Darshan" (SED) so entered through the ATC gate to park our car. 
There are 2 major temples in the same campus - Sri Varaha swamy temple and Sri Venkateswara Swamy temple. Now, it makes sense to remove your footwear in the car, leave all electronic items as well, carry other required items like ID proofs for all adults, some snacks, water, hard copy of the ticket and a piece of warm cloth as it is cooler on the hill.
We were not aware of the way etc so missed certain things. Nevertheless, we were in the queue for Sri Varaha swamy temple by 10:30am. The story goes Swamy varaha permitted Swamy Venkateswara to stay on the Tirumala hill and hence Varaha swamy gets the first darshan. The darshan queues are ill-managed and hence a lot of human jostling in all the Andhra temples. We came out after the darshan by 11:15am and proceeded to enter the SED queue for lord Venkateshwara darshan which took around an hour. However, exit again was over crowded and took considerable time to come out. We were able to edit from the car parking by around 3pm. 
There are a few other renowned places/temples around the area. They are all located close to each other. We started with Srivari padalu - the padukas of sri Venkateshwara, onto Tirumala chakrateertham followed by Sri Venugopala swamy temple. Next was Akashganga and papavinasanam.
 Papavinasanam closes at 6pm and we were just in time. It was already getting dark, we had our darshan and started our journey towards the hotel by 6:15pm. Soon we were on the downward route from the Sri Venkateshwara temple. There was a separate track for pedestrians as well on this route. We reached Adyar Ananda Bhavan in the Tirupati city to have dinner. Post that back to our hotel by 8:30pm. We prepared for the next day, loaded the bigger luggage pieces in the car and slept.

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