Trip in April, 2014: The summer holidays began for the kids. We planned to go to our native place...but our plan got postponed. So we were excited to go to some interesting place for a day trip. We surfed the internet and we picked one place "Lepakshi". It is a small village in Ananthpur district in Andhra Pradesh.
Lepakshi is around 120 km from Bangalore and we hit the road around 10 am in the morning after our breakfast.
It is advisable to start early to avoid the sun. On the way we had refreshing coconut water and we wanted to have lunch at Kamat. However as we were not feeling hungry we decided to continue. We reached Kodikonda checkpost and we saw a board showing us to take left to proceed to Lepakshi. The distance to Lepakshi was mentioned 15 km and the road looked like a village road. Hence we looked around for options for lunch and fortunately were able to identify Harita resort of AP Tourism. We had nice lunch (Andhra meals) there and continued our journey.
On the way we saw a junction which leads to Veerapuram where we can view Painted Storks which migrate from Siberia to Veerapuram during Dec - July every year.
We were excited to visit the place and birds but we decided to visit the place on return from Lepakshi. After travelling some kms we saw some big stones on a hill on the left hand side. We guessed that we are nearing to Lepakshi. The scenery was good.
Soon we reached the Nandi. This is said to be the largest monolithic Nandi statue in India. The Nandi is on the main road.
The temple is 200 m away from Nandi. See the entrance of the temple below.
The main deity here is Veerabhadra. The temple is said to be built by Virupakshanna, under the Vijayanagar kings.
Carvings on stone referring to Srikalahasti temple, which means Srikalahasti temple existed when Lepakshi temple was being constructed.
The artist seems to have carved out Lord Ganesha for worship before starting the work.
It is said due to misunderstanding king ordered for the temple' builder to be blinded. Here this Virupakshanna removed his eyes and threw on the wall. The blood marks can be seen even today.
Sita amma padam: Foot print of Sita can be found here. the foot print was indeed very big, just compare the shadow with the foot print to understand how big it is.
Then we came across the carving of a plate, which was used by artist. Indeed it looks like people of those times were well built and had good appetite.
Then we came across the open air kalyana mandapam which conveys the marriage of Lord shiva and Parvati in the form of carvings
The artist were waiting for their mother to prepare for lunch and meanwhile they carved out Shiva lingam and serpant from single stone.
In all we spent couple of hours at the Nandi and temple together and then started our journey back as we also wanted to see the painted stork.
Here are some photos of the painted stork.
After spending around 1 hr at Veerapuram we proceeded back to Bangalore. On the way bay we had dinner at Kamat and the food was great as always.
