bangalore to tirupati

This weekend being long weekend we planned to go to tirupati. As usual we could not book any of the things since this was a last minute plan .We knew that there will be crowd at tirupati but remembering the experience of previous visits it was always like that. And we had 3 days so we decided to go ahead.

We started from bangalore at 5 am on friday morning by my maruti alto.The route for tirupati is Bangalore – kolar – chittoor – tirupati. We got on inner ring road, headed straight to airport road flyover , indira nagar and at the dead end took right for old madras road. After that it is almost straight . You just have to follow the signboards. One route is through chittoor town and another one takes diversion to left for a alternate route. And the alternate route was the worst patch of road as compared to rest of the road in the trip and we have to pay Rs 5 toll ! . The highway being in existence since long has lot of things for travellars unlike new bangalore chennai highway where we did not find any decent place to eat or rest. Only deterance was sudden speed breakers without any warning or coloring. And dummy speed breakers – there was zebra coloring but no speed breakers. But apart from this things and drive was fine. We stopped at woodys for breakfast which is after kolar. The roads in Andhra seemed to be better than in karnataka. Reached tirupati at 12 in noon.

We had lunch at andhra tourism hotel in srinivasa complex first floor. It was andhra style thali. Iterations of rice and dal, rice and sambhar , rice and rasam, rice and curd and then sweet dish. And the waiters did not allowed to mix and match the order. We managed to get rooms in hotel sindhu at the outskirts of tirupati which turned out the be a good value for money.

Next day after darshan we did some shopping near the temple. Down in tirupati we went to place called Shilparamam which was near the hotel. This is crafts village kind of place but there was nothing of that sort. The things being sold was nothing special and all of them you could find in your neighbourhood gift store. The entry is only 2 rs per person. car parking is 3 rs. It was a beautiful place but could have been more fun, looked like nrityagram in bangalore. There was a singing recital going on in the ampitheater with less than ten people as audience.

We wanted to stay in tirupati in night but could not get any place as all the hotels were booked for marriage. So we decided to go back to bangalore in night. We started at 8:30 pm.Decided to take dinner at woodys but it was closed in night which looked odd for a hotel on highway. Reached bangalore at 2 o clock in saturday night with enough time to rest on sunday.