Vanakkam Mamallapuram !

60km south of chennai is situated the ancient coastal town of mahabalipuram, earlier known as mamallapuram. the town is famous for its historical monuments... the Shore temple, Varaha caves, Arjuna's Penance and the Pancha Rathas and is one of the most popular tourist places near chennai.

few years back i had seen in a friends album photographs of the massive sculpture of Arjuna's Penance and had been fascinated by them. eversince i have been longing to visit the place.  however until last Sunday my plans always got dampened by something or the other that would come on the way.... so on Sunday, before day-break, when my friend Rakesh and me finally left for mahabalipuram, i was all excited ! we had wanted to hit the shores by sunrise. but somehow that did not happen. we were a little behind our schedule and reached there only half an hour after sunrise... the rest of the trip however went as planned. in fact it turned out to be much more delightful than i had imagined... 

With Lonely Planet as our guide we knew that all the historical monuments in mahabalipuram are spread over an area of 1.5 sq. km. so after the air-bus dropped us at a spot in mahabalipuram we decided to tour the place on foot... this allowed us to explore every nook and corner of the town and appreciate the sculptures that lay all over the place... this sculpture of the saint was the first one we came across.... i am not certain, but i think it was placed at one of the gates of Hotel Pallava Dynasty located on E. Raja Street..  

tourists usually go for the Shore temple first... however since we had already missed the sunrise so we deviated from the usual tourist route and walked 300 meters west of E. Raja St to find these beautiful extensive sculptures of Arjuana's Penance. In my mind mahabalipuram and this elaborate elephant sculpture had always been synonymous....it was this photograph that had fascinated me at the first place... so having reached my destination at the very beginning i felt pretty satiated......

Arjuna's Penance

we spent the next two hours walking up and down the slopes seeing and photographing the monoliths and rock-cut-outs, sometimes climbing flights of tall steps, marvelling about the height of the people olden days, marvelling at their motivation to keep at the work and create such beauties as the Ganesh Ratha, Krishna's butter-ball, Trimurti cave, Varaha cave, Rayar-Gopuram, Mahisasurmardini Mandapam, Krishna Mandapam.... we did this till we were tired and hungry... 

Ganesh Ratha

Varaha Cave

Rayar-Gopuram

Sculpture at Mahisasurmardini Mandapam

the caretakers at Krishna Mandapam

....and felt desperate for a sumptuous south-indian-breakfast.  the place where we finally seated ourselves was a smallish street-side shop... while i can't vouch for the food we had there.. i can certainly say that the food they served wasn't too bad....

next we walked down Beach Road to see the Shore temple. at the site of the temple, there are two shrines  namely the Kshatriya Simheswara and Rajasimhesvara which are collectively known as the Shore temple. from the plaque displayed at the entrance we gathered that this historical monument was built by the Pallava King  Narasimhavarman-II around 700 AD and it marks the culmination of the architectural efforts that began with the cave temples and the Pancha Rathas....

the shore temple...

built on the shore of the Bay of Bengal, the shrines of the temple are continuously being affected by the rough sea and salt laden winds. though the archaeological survey of India has lately undertaken efforts to check the effect...  a closer look at the structure reveals even to the naked eye that what stands at the site of the shore temple today is but a weather-beaten-remain-of-what-used-to-be-a-magnificent-structure-once....

by the time we came out of the shrine complex it was 11 am. with the sun shining overhead we did not feel upto it to walk to the Pancha Rathas yet.... so the next few hours we indulged ourselves in shops, beach, food and more shops.... we spent quite sometime at Elangovan's shop no 6. he was a pleasant man and showed us a lot of stone carvings which we hadn't seen before... i was particularly impressed by the pieces cut out of the onyx stones... they looked lovely and i surely had a hard time trying to resist my temptation to own one of them...

Elangovan, shop no 6.

the shore temple as seen from the beach..

one of the many curio shops at Othavadai St, Mamallapuram

our next stop was the Pancha Rathas. these stand at some distance from the Othavadai Road where we had stopped for food and window shopping. being exhausted from all the walking we finally took a auto-rickshaw to the site of the Pancha Rathas....Though the name suggests, from the plaque displayed at the site we gathered that these temples have nothing to do with the Panchapandavas of Mahabharata.... the Pancha Rathas are a group of five temples resembling wooden chariots cut out from a single huge rock sloping from north to south.... this project was initiated by the Pallava King Narasimvarman-I (AD 630-688)  and the five temples were executed as models of south Indian temples and not consecrated ....

by the time we left the premises of the Pancha Ratha it was around 6:00. it was time for us to take our ride back to Chennai... so we took an auto-rickshaw to the nearest bus-stand and while the sun set along the western horizons we took our ride back towards home........

[all the photographs displayed have been taken by my friend Rakesh and me...]