Tirupati - Puducherry

Day 4
Tirupati - Puducherry 

The day started early and we left from our hotel by 5:25am.

 Our first destination was Sri Lakshmi narayani temple in Vellore. They have a car parking inside gate 2. We had reached by 7:45am when only special darshan are allowed. General darshan are only allowed after 10am. We bought tickets for ₹100 per adult, kept our footwear in the shoe house and proceeded for the queue. The Narayani idol is made of 70kg gold and the ganpati idol with 1700kg silver. This place is also called Sripuram. We had peaceful darshan. It's a huge temple complex with green lish surroundings and loads of boards with quotes written in Hindi, English and Tamil. While we were exiting the campus around 9am, it has already started being crowded. 
We started towards Kamakshi temple in Kanchipuram at a distance of 85kms. We reached the temple by 10:45am. We parked our car in the parking, keep our electronics and footwear in the car before getting in the queue. It wasn't too crowded at that time and the temple closes at 12:30pm as per the information available on the internet. However the doors were being kept closed for much longer windows. After waiting patiently but the kids getting impatient, we finally got the darshan around 12 noon. We exited the temple complex and stopped at a coconut vendor to have coconut water. We were directed towards a wholesale shop by the name of Sri Pranav Prakash silks for silk shopping. We bought silk sarees and then went for lunch at Sree Gupta Bhavan. 
They served absolutely amazing food items. A separate unique set of incidents took place after this, which have been described in another blog. We also went to another temple (Rajakuberar temple) which wasn't on our itinerary. We had fantastic darshan there.
 We then proceeded towards Puducherry and checked in to our booked accommodation by 6:30pm. We freshened up and enquired about a good veg restaurant. The hotel receptionist recommended a place and another guest sitting around confirmed the recommendation. It was around a kilometre but we decided to walk through the narrow lanes. In around 15 mins, we reached Surguru restaurant. They served good food. While walking back, we enjoyed the festive streets selling christmas decoratives giving a very fresh and festive vibe to the region. 

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