Mahabalipuram trip

                  Happy New year 2013...!!!! I went to Mahabalipuram last week with my family and I want to share my experience with my readers... Mahabalipuram is also known as Mamallapuram. It has a great history.It acted as a foriegn trade centre and  as a port in Pallavas(a southindian dyanasty)  period. It has various monuments built between 7th and 9th centuries. Now its one of the popular tourist attractions near Chennai.

                        We had booked a resort for our stay in makemytrip.com. We reached the beach resort (SilverSands) in the evening. It provided us a decent room and vegetarian food tonight. We sat on the shores and enjoyed the early dinner. The next morning we started exploring the place around us.....

   The restaurant where we had breakfast is this..

                 
                  This resort was pretty close to sea. Then we went to beach to play.Though we didn't see the sunrise, but still beach looked beautiful in the morning.It was very clean and scenery was awesome...Apart from beach there are also other activities in the resort.

                     
                    After enjoying in beach and having breakfast, We went on to see other major tourist attractions like arjuna's penace, pancha rathas, shore temple etc.,We first went to Arjuna's penace which was made with single stone rock.It is a beautiful sculpture.It looks like this...

                    There were many mandapas around this Arjuna's penace. They are Krishna Mantapa, Trimurthy Mandapa, Varaha Mandapa etc., We saw a big rock which stood on the hillslope for several thousands of years without rolling down, this is called 'Krishna's butter ball'.

                   Then we started to panchrathas and shore temple. On our way we had some snacks on the road. I observed an intresting thing on roads. There were shops making sculptures based on the order of their customers. Government of TamilNadu is encouraging the sculpture by running a college of arts and sculpture.

                   Panchrathas means five chariots. The imagination behind this sculpture was that pandavas used these chariots in war against kauravas. It was very sunny when we reached this place..There were five similar mantapas. The mantapa was made of one piece stone. One them looked like...

                   Last but not the least we saw was famous Shore temple.It was built by pallavan king, Narasimhavarman-II who lived in 700 A.D.There are two shrines inside the temple (kshatriyasimheswara and rajasimheshwara).

                      After this we went for shopping. Then we went to resort to check out. We had lunch in ECR daabha on our way..I enjoyed a lot and learnt many things. I am proud of my country which has a very rich and civilized history.