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The Vaishnodevi Experience 2023

My first trip to Vaishnodevi was unimpressive. Climbing was hard, and it only served to highlight how badly out of shape I was, while my in-laws managed to cope so much better. Further, I hadn’t quite realized that the cave experience wouldn’t be the same as I had imagined, since the original cave was only opened at certain times a year, and that we only entered a newly created tunnel, one far easier to access, and hence more manageable with the crowds that thronged the mountain shrine. The resulting experience at the shrine, for barely a fraction of a second, hardly compared to what I had expected / imagined / heard about. So, for me, Vaishnodevi was like any other temple, nothing to write home about, something that was reflected (though not explicitly mentioned) in the blog post I wrote then.
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Memories of 2012 - Nashik and around

August brought us more opportunity for travel, and we were off to Nashik, by the ST bus this time.





Nashik itself has temples galore, and then we went on to visit more temples at Trimbakeshwar...



and then the Saptashrungi temple at Vani. Here, more memorable than the temple was the journey up the hill, amidst the pouring rain and extremely low visibility!!



But this trip was not all about temples. We also managed to visit the Gargoti Mineral Museum...where we spent blissful hours amidst rocks of all kinds!


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Location: Nashik, Maharashtra, India

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