The Virgin Goddess residing on the mountain - Part 2 (darshan and the aftermath)

Now, to give you an idea of how good our overall timing was, consider that statistically (based on stats from the temple's website) September is the third best month to visit the temple. You don't have as many visitors then. Normally after you get your token, you can expect to spend upto 3-4 hours waiting for your group to be called and then maybe another couple of hours in the queue. We walked upto the guard even as group #197 was being shown through and showed our #198 ticket, he just let us in without comment. Now, the security in this place is really tight. Our bags were x-rayed twice and physically examined (item by item) twice during the climb, and then once more at the top of the hill. Further, for the actual darshan, you aren't allowed to take in any "artificial" items. This means no wallets, belts, watches, cooling glasses or combs. Bags, cameras, mobiles and slippers are out of question anyway. Even after stripping down to just your shirt/pant and some cash to offer the goddess, you're frisked twice in this line! They are taking absolutely no chances here.

The darshan happened very quickly. The goddess herself is deep in a cave. And she is represented as "pindis" representing the female Hindu Trinity. We got out in 15 mins. After that we visited the temple of Bairon Nath, which is a further climb of 2 kms away but we did this part on horses. And in another case of good timing, we reached there at a great part of the day, just before sunset. We got to shoot plenty of pictures (and if only I could have cleared out there area of tourists I could have shot better pictures!)

We started the climb down at 7pm. Now, we thought it wouldn't be a cake walk but atleast it wouldn't be too hard. But walking down is easier from an effort point of view, but the impact is high if you don't watch yourself. Soon we were all showing the effects of having climbed up and down a mountain. We even thought of just giving in and taking the horses but we kept going. Finally we made it to the base at midnight and climbed into bed in our hotel an hour after that.

Our feet were sore and our legs were tired as hell. We took a few painkillers, massaged our feet as much as possible with an ointment and passed out. A good night's sleep would have cured us, except the third guy, the very same one who couldn't sleep in the bus earlier, woke up really early on Sunday and decided to wake us up too. He shook us awake by telling us that it was 10am instead of 8am that it was. I could have killed him them and after the bout of sickness I suffered in the aftermath of the trip from the reduced sleep, I think I could have killed him again. But at that point I tried to be as polite as possible and explained that there was no way we could do any sightseeing seeing as we could barely walk. So we stayed in the hotel room till noon and went to Jammu. In Jammu once we got our tickets back to C'garh, we just tried to kill time. One place we visited was the "worst temple in the world". The other was the park "Bagh-e-Bahu". Each place we went to we were "oh"ing and "ouch"ing in pain. Somehow we made it till 9pm, got into our buses and passed out till we reached Chandigarh!