Yercaud

Yercaud is the place we visited this weekend. A hill station so cool that it was hard for me to believe that you can ACTUALLY feel cold in Tamilnadu! We started off from Electronic city, Bangalore. From Ecity, Tamilnadu is right around the corner. Cross Atibele of Karnataka and you enter Hosur where Tamilnadu starts. We stopped for fuel; fyi – petrol per liter is 67/- in Tamilnadu as compared to 71/- in Bangalore. It’s so good to start a road trip from TamilnaduJ. We couldn’t resist the road side Tamilnadu special Parota breakfast. We actually thought of just quick coffee break..but the pictures below surely display how tempting the authentic food was.

I have always wanted to click pictures of parota making. If you look at them cooking you would not want to eat it, reason being they use so much of oil in the making of the parota. But again they do it so skillfully; the multi-layered bread is one relish to enjoy in Tamilnadu. As I was clicking pictures of the food, the lady making parotas was bold enough, yet shy to say in Tamil – click my photo too. Always welcome my lady! Breakfast was heavy with steaming hot Idlis, parotas, coconut chutneys and sago.

From here we went to Salem and then to Yercaud. Tamilnadu like Maharashtra has mountains all around it. My father in-law said the name was originally Sayilam meaning surrounded by mountains which became Salem in time! Yercaud gets its name from the lake located at its center - in Tamil "Yeri" means "lake" and "Kaadu" means "forest". The roads in Tamilnadu are amazingly good compared to those in Karnataka. We never hit any bad roads throughout our trip from Ecity – Salem-Yercaud-Coimbatore. It proves that the recently sacked Karnataka Chief Minister Yeddurappa did nothing for the state and ate up all the money!

The Yercaud hill area is called the Shevaroy Hills. The drive up to the hill had 20 hair-pin bends. My brother in-law did a superb job driving up the mountain. The mountains are full of coffee plantations and pepper plantations creeping on the tall dense forest trees. There is still another 2 months time for the pepper corns to grow, so I just saw empty strands in the plants. Saw lots of Jackfruit trees. A mighty plant to hold that huge fruit up on the tree! Hundreds of monkeys on the way to the hill. Little monkey babies, big monkeys grooming other monkeys…funny ride. Yet we were careful to have our windows up. Entering the hill station there is huge lake in the center of the town. Lots of boating to do; we didn’t. We instead went to Pagoda point; amazing view point of the greenery and mountains. The weather was very cool.



Monkey families



Yercaud Lake

From here we went to drive to a famous temple of Meru Chakra, yet under construction. I have still not understood the spiritual concept of the Meru Chakra; for now I understand it is worshipping the form of Shakti (energy ). I took snapshots of the description to read later. This temple apparently has the largest chakra in the world. Again photography was prohibited, but this temple has one of the best intricate wooden statues; I was so tempted to break the rules and take a shot! But I didn’t! Too much guilty conscience! L I still regret for not getting snaps of those statues!

But I got to click some beautiful dahlias on my way!

Then we continued our drive to the top-most point on the Servaroyan hill where the Servaroyan Temple is situated. The temple is a narrow and dark cave having the God Servarayan and the Goddess Kaveri inside, which are believed as the deities of the Shevaroy Hills and Cauvery River. The drive is just gorgeous with clouds coming down the green dense mountains. And it is really cold from the breeze and clouds! Every year they have an annual fair worshipping the God Servarayan; hence you see fair rides J

Gorgeous place to trek too. This place had other tourist spots too. But we choose very few to see as per our time constraints. It was a great drive experience on our new car Ritz! And she did really well!