Tirupati tour from kolkata

It’s a simple guide of Tirupati tour from Kolkata. We decided to go for Tirupati, Tirumala Darshan tour in October 2015. Accordingly, we reserved the train ticket from Kolkata to Tirupati (AC 3tier) and Tirupati to Kolkata (AC 2tier). With it, we made the hotel booking after a bit of study on hotels reviews. All done and set, and we were just waiting for the day to come and at last, the day came to start our journey. It was a busy day as I was completing my works as far as possible and my wife was about to return early from her school (she is a higher secondary teacher). But she reached a bit late, and we started from our home to Howrah station via an OLA booking and attained the position before time.

As we were visiting Tirupati after 20 years and my wife was visiting for the first time, we both were very excited to see Lord Tirumala and have an excellent tour of Tirupati. Few things we did before leave are given here as a must to-do list for every visit:

1. Pack your dress, take less and use less, it’s best when you go for long tours.
2. Pack your toiletries, this covered soap, hankies, and towel, saving kit, female stuff.
3. Pack your medicine, some emergency medicine, and some preventive drugs, anti-allergic, bronco dilator with natural antiseptic, ointment and liquid.
4. Pack some food which you can eat occasionally.
5. As some newspaper to be used when eating or other requirements. You can offload it whenever needed.
6. Take less baggage and go happily with a wheel-based bag, which offloads a lot of weight from your hand.
7. Take one umbrella and one plastic cover bag for mobiles; it helps in unexpected situations.
8. Pre-book Tirupati temple visit in their website here
9. You can also stay at Tirupati in their own residential arrangement to book it goes here
10. Accommodation is not provided to any single person.
11. Pilgrim can book accommodation with minimum 1 day to 90 days in advance.
12. Pilgrim can book only one room. Subsequent booking can be done only after 90 days.
13. Multiple selection of accommodation is now allowed.
14. ID proof given during booking must be carried (original copy) to get the accommodation and in Tirupati Debasthanam.
15. No cancellations are allowed, here you will get all details on accommodation.
16. Many down hill hotels are available, so even if you don’t get accommodation up hill, no problem is there.
17. If you are travelling from Kolkata to Tirupati, then few trains are available. So, check them 4 months before travelling. Complete the train booking before 4 months as the ticket booking starts at IRCTC website.
18. If you plan to travel from southern states, good number of buses are available, so you can avail them.
19. People travelling from other parts of the country like north India and west India can avail train of flight as their preferred mode to reach the place.
20. To take flight then the nearest airport is “Tirupati Airport” from here you can take a car direct to tirumala or come to Tirupati bus stand from there you will get direct bus to Tirumala.
21. Bus transport is excellent here and highly dependable.
22. Book hotel online and avail discounts, do check reviews.

We took Laptop packed with movies so we can watch during our long train journey and our mobile internet was quite happy to give us good enough surfing experience. Via hotspot we did many official works as well. Even an emergency fixing of a server problem at Reni Guinta station.
We took all these and few extra items as per our requirements, and you too can do that. Now the journey started, and we got few good friends on the train, few enthusiastic kids who were interested in watching movies and talking a lot. One Senior person also joined us in spending the journey by sharing his life’s story which we all enjoyed. As the train left Howrah in the evening and we were tired of the hectic day’s work, so both of us went to early sleep and enjoyed a good night’s sleep in the train. As the train moved through many stations, we could see many southern cities and people selling South Indian food. The fields cultivated with many types of harvests. New cities came with bright and colorful way. The significant change happened at Vizag when trained stopped for 30 min and again started it’s journey towards Tirumala, it’s a reverse trip and we all with kids enjoyed it.

Then the time came for our meal and once we completed it there was enough time to spend, so we shared the time with other families on board by watching few detective movies. My wife went to a small afternoon nap, but I continued to look at the movie and kept working on my laptop. In the meanwhile evening, tea time came with a big southern city; we enjoyed some big Tiffin at a station with hot Coffey. Once it completed I felt the need of reading some newspapers, so I started reading online as the internet connection was coming and going but somehow I managed to download and read few newspapers daily editions. While doing so the senior was speaking on a real life experience once he faced on a horrific matter to the kid, so I too joined the team and started listening. As we moved on and talked about different topics, my wife showed me something a person was having severe pain, and suddenly he just fell off the seat. We somehow managed to bring him back to sense and asked him to rest while we all stopped talking.

Gradually Tirupati station came and we unbounded the train and move towards our hotel. One peculiar thing that I noticed in south Indian cities is that Residency and few name maximum hotels even had entirely similar name. But we reached the hotel where we have prepaid our hotel stayed cost and went to sleep as it was past 12 in the night and its early morning. Next morning we were about to go for a small city tour in the morning and evening, and the day after that we planned our uphill journey to the Tirumala, where Lord Venkateswara temple is located.

The next day we took a light meal and went to Talakona Waterfalls. It’s situated at a distance of 60 Km from the Tirupati station. If you take the common local bus, there will be a bus and auto exchange before you can reach the place and it’s a one and half hours journey to the place. As we moved to the place first time and without any other person with us, we were feeling the heat of it, but ultimately when we reached the place, it was worth it. The place has a small waterfall; its water was very fresh, and hundreds were enjoying their holiday there. A beautiful place with one more temple and a small water body near the fall but as we were not prepared to take a bath in the. So, we could not take a dip in that pool or fall. No food was available there, so we returned a mid place from where buses were accessible to the central city with few hotels, there we finished our lunch.

As it ended with this pleasant journey, in the evening we toured few more temples in the town along with icon temple. I would say all the temple’s portrait an excellent quality of art and sculpture. With this, our day ended and the next, we were all prepared to go to Tirumala. For this a special bus leaves from bus stand, we took it. As the bus went towards the top of the mountain temperature started getting cooler and cooler. The uphill journey was another amazing experience to share and feel.

At the hill top, we lined up with our ticket for darshan, submitted all luggage to the luggage room including mobile phone and every other electronic device. You are not even allowed to wear pant and shirt, either you can wear pajama, Punjabi or dhoti, I took one pajama and Punjabi of Bengali style with me, and that worked.

The temple covers a vast area with market, ceremony and puja space, Prasad distribution center and many other places. Here you can keep your belonging, take Prasad, buy laddu; each person is pre-allocated with a fixed amount of laddu per ticket; laddus are famous here, and people were lining for the same. For darshan, thousands and thousands were lining up. To manage such a massive traffic they made a long line with many curvatures outside the temple so reduce pressure and allow all to have a darshan. There were two lines one for high payment and the other small payment, we went through the greater amount and had a breathtaking darshan of Lord Venkateswara. Then we donated in hundi and took prasad and left the temple by collecting our laddu.

The bus journey for the downhill ride started, and we again enjoyed it, but somewhere there was a pain of leaving such a nice and beautiful place, the tour was ending. Suddenly we planned to go to the golden temple of Lakshmi at Vellore, without understanding our return journey ticket is at 2 am early morning the next day. We thought it is at 2 p.m. the next day, so we took a shot to see the temple. The journey was long it took 2 and half hours from Tirupati to reach Vellore where I lost one of my mobile phones, and then the police did not help; they did not even lodge a complain of the same. In the meanwhile, we missed a lot of time in between and could not enter the Golden Temple, so we had to return from its gate. We came back to Tirupati at 1 AM in the morning and without realizing our train will leave after one hour we went to our hotel room and went to sleep.

The next day when we went to the station at 1 AM in the afternoon, the shock was waiting for us. As the time was just before Durga Puja no train was coming vacant and we were land locked, either e move by plane for that too we will need to go to some other city or take a bus to Visakhapatnam. I started surfing for a solution and finally decided from Red Bus app that I will take a 12 hours bus journey the same evening and take another train the next day afternoon to Bhubaneswar wait for one night and then come to Howrah on the next day morning train. It was easy to think but difficult to plan. For this, I would need a good internet connection and a running laptop to book a tatkal ticket from Bhubaneswar to Howrah as all trains were going full. But we took the risk and boarded the bus. The bus ran all throughout the evening, night and following morning Telugu movies and we were given the front seat. After bearing the missed AC 2Tier Train, I had to face this. After all the next morning came, and I started trying from my mobile to book that day’s intercity train to Bhubaneswar and the next day’s sat ab di Express from Bhubaneswar to Howrah. After many attempts with a 2G connection, which was frequently dropping in the bus journey I could at last book both and got confirmed tickets. At last, Lord sends some blessings to us that we could recover even after facing a loss of Rs 5000 and one day, we were still reaching back Kolkata before Durga puja. As it was our first Durga puja after the marriage, it held a great value for us and with the blessing of Venkateswara we could spend the puja time happily with our family.

——————————–Places To Visit In Tirupati—————————-

Tirumala Venkateswara Temple
S Mada Street, Tirumala, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517504, India
Darshan Time
02:30 AM – 11:00 PM
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Sri Govindaraja Swamy temple
Near Railway Station, Tirupati, Chittoor District, Andhra Pradesh 517501, India
Darshan Time
09:30 AM – 12:30 PM
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Sri Varahaswami temple
Chinna Bazar Street, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517501, India
Darshan Time
5:00 AM – 12:00 PM
4:00 PM – 9:00 PM
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Sri Kapileswara Swamy Temple
1st floor, Yamini Complex, Near Municipal Office,Ambedhkar Colony,Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517501, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
5:00 AM – 12:00 PM
4:00 PM – 9:00 PM
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Sri Veda Narayana Swamy Temple
Nagalapuram, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517101, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
5:00 AM – 12:00 PM
4:00 PM – 9:00 PM
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Sri Agastyaswamy Temple
Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517101, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
6:00 AM – 12:00 PM
2:00 PM – 7:30 PM
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Sri Venugopalaswamy Temple
Rajampet, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517101, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
6:00 AM – 11:00 PM
4:00 PM – 8:00 PM
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Sri Kalahasti Temple
Rajampet, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517644, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
6:00 AM – 8:00 PM
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Sri Padmavati Samovar Temple
Alivelu Mangapuram, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517101, India
Darshan Time
Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu
6:30 AM – 8:00 PM
Fri, Sat, Sun
8:00 AM – 8:00 PM
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Sri Venkateswara Museum
Sri Venkateswara Museum, GN Mada Street, Varadaraja Nagar, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517501, India
All days of the week except Tuesday
9:00 AM – 5:30 PM
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Sri Kalyana Venkateswara Swamy Temple
Sri Kalyana Venkateswara Swamy Temple, Tirumala Nagar, Postal Colony, Sarpavaram Junction, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, 517104, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
6:00 AM – 11:00 AM
5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
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Sri Kodandarama Swamy Temple
Sri Kodandarama Swamy Temple, Chinna Bazar Street, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517501, India
Darshan Time
All days of the week
5:00 AM – 12:00 PM
4:00 PM – 9:00 PM
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Akasaganga Teertham
Tirupati District,Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India
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sri prasanna venkateswaraswami temple
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Lord Shiva Temple
K T Road, Tirpuati, Andhra Pradesh, India
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sri chennakesavaswami temple
Tallapaka Village, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India
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Sesha Teertham
Kesavayana Gunta, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India
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Kalyani Dam
Kalyani Dam, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517501, India
Visiting Hours
All days of the week
9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
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Kailasanathakona Falls
Nagiri Hills, Near Puttur, Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh
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Talakona And Kailasanathakona Waterfalls
Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517501, India
Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517501, India
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Sri Venkateswara Zoological Park
Alipiri Bypass Road, Thatithopu, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517505, India
All days of the week except Tuesday
Summer: 8:30 AM – 5:30 PM
Winter: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
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Gurramkonda Fort
Gurramkonda, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517501, India
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Silathoranam
Near Chakra Theertham, 5 Kms From Tirumala, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517504, India
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Ttd Gardens
TTD Gardens, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517504, India
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Chandragiri Fort
Chandragiri, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh 517101, India
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