Trip to Vaishno Devi

Just after my trip to Bangalore, I left to go the famous Vaishno Devi temple . Sanjay from Singapore (on hearing about my plans to go the temple) also decided to join and was able to make arrangements within a couple of days. This is one of the biggest changes in India Travel arrangements can be made very quickly and reasonably reliably.

To go the temple, we had to fly to Delhi where we were met by our friend Sudhir. We spent the day there till around 4pm when we left by train to Jammu (on the banks of the Tawi river). This was my first trip to the beautiful state of Jammu & Kashmir. From Jammu you take a tourist taxi to Katra which is the base camp town for the 14.5 km hike to the temple.

I took my new Garmin GPS 60CSx on this trip and here is a link to the kmz file that shows the trek. Load it into Google Earth and you can see my entire trek!!

I had a great darshan of Mata Vaishno Devi.. and everything about the trip was great...well everything except that I couldnt sleep on the train and hence hadnt slept for 3 days in a row with a 30+ KM trek thrown in!

All the same it was great to be about in a part of India that I had never been in!!