Quick tour of Lepakshi and Nandi Hills

Trip members: Karthik, Murugan, Sanjeev, and SG
Trip date: 12th and 13th Sep 2015
Trip Plan: Chennai - Lepakshi - Nandi Hills - Chennai
Trip Route : Chennai - Arcot - Chittor - Kolar - AH 43 - Lepakshi - Nandi Hills - Hosur - Chennai

About Destination

Lepakshi in Andhra Pradesh is located at a distance of 390 km from Chennai and around 125 km from Bengaluru. Lepakshi is famous for its beautiful sculptures and a temple relating to the epic of Ramayana.  We planned to visit Nandi hills as well which is midway between Bengaluru and Lepakshi on the Asian Highway AH43. We planned this as a quick weekend trip - 2 days and 1 night with a night stay in Lepakshi.

Started on 12th Sept morning around 5:45 from Tambaram and planned to reach Lepakshi by 1:30. We were on time to start as per plan and had a pitstop for breakfast at Hotel Sakthi Ganapathy near Kancheepuram. The route of Ranipet - Chittor - Palamaner was full of truck traffic and terrible to drive! It took close to 2 hours to clear this 77 km of stretch. Then, we hit the NH4 towards Kolar and relished the drive. We took SH96 to connect to AH43.

Asian Highway 43 (AH43) is a route of the Asian Highway Network, running 3,024 kilometers (1,879 mi) from Asian Highway 1 in Agra, India to Matara in Sri Lanka. The road was just great like a runway and any vehicle would just fly. At any point in time, there is a visibility of around 5-7 km of the highway. Drive through this highway is more than memorable.

We reached Lepakshi around 1:30 PM and checked-in at the A.P. Tourism hotel - Haritha. We paid Rs.900 for an A/C Double bedroom. The rooms were spacious, very clean, and well furnished. The hotel is located just in front of the historically popular monolithic Nandi sculpture. After having a simple and decent lunch for Rs.80 at the A.P. Tourism hotel, we visited the Nandi and then the temple.

The monolithic "Nandi" sculpture is said to be the biggest monolithic Nandi in India. It is 4.5m high and 8.23m long. This is on the main road of Lepakshi and about 200 meters from the Lepakshi Veerabhadra temple.

Lepakshi temple is significant with three shrines dedicated to Shiva, Vishnu, and Lord Veerabhadra. The temple is known for paintings of the Vijayanagar Kings depicting the Ramayana moments of Jatayu and the history around it. The paintings are so fresh and have modern designs - saree and bed cover designs.

One can understand the history of Lord Rama and Hanumantha consecrated Lingas in the temple and Aghastiar mamuni has performed his meditation here. One can feel the greatness once you visit the temple. The specialties of the temple are shrines of Lord Vishnu and Shiva just opposite to each other, a pillar that almost hangs without any support, monolithic sculptures of Linga with the snake, the unfinished Kalyana Mandapa, Sita Patham, and serene views from behind the temple prakarams. The temple is maintained very well and clean.

Another amazing thing about the temple is, the stones are stacked over each other and not really built. The temple had sloppy shades for rain and sun just through stones - amazing engineering !!

Sita Padham

View from behind the temple

Pillar with almost no support

We also visited Hindupur and witnessed an amazing sunset on the way. There is nothing special in Hindupur but, just a cool breeze evening drive. We returned back to the hotel to have a good dinner at a very surprisingly cheap rate for the quality of foods - Pulka, Dal, Sabji, Jeera rice, and curd.

Day-2:

Day-2 started with hot idlis at the A.P tourism restaurant and decided to visit Nandi hills - a quick plan on the way back to Chennai. Nandi hills were 92 km drive from Lepakshi. The hill drive with sharp and steep hairpin bends is 3.5 km. Many people do cycling and hiking in this stretch. Nandi hills is a place where one can easily spend 1 full day, There are several places to stop by and enjoy the grand view. Bangaloreans just fled here for a weekend. Rs.100 is collected as charges for a car. and there is space to park the car around the hill.

The grand view is a very cool and time killer. There are restaurants there and activities too. After spending a couple of hours, we decided to return back to Chennai only through highways and definitely no SH - this led us to Bangalore - Hosur route and, though we ended up driving extra 60 km, we had a good time driving.