This place is among the holiest places for a Hindu devotee. People say that unless God does not ask, you cannot go and visit the shrine. Here is my experience...
The famous shrine of Vaishnodevi witnesses the arrival of close to 60000 pilgrims per day during peak seasons. During non real seasons, the number is 25000. The one thing that even a novice would notice is the level of organization here. Almost everything here is planned properly. And though because of the number of pilgrims who pay a visit to the shine is close to 60,000 a day, the team of people handling the crowd does a fantastic job. Another noticeable thing would be the army presence. Due to the rouge state of Pakistan as a neighbor, the army needs to be over cautious. Our driver mentioned that thanks to the presence of the military they feel safe, relatively of course.
For visiting the shrine, the devotees are supposed to trek up a 11KM path which is a gentle slope up to the shrine. During our trek up for the shrine, we had to dodge heavy traffic (yes you read it correct, traffic on a path where only pedestrians are allowed). There was too much horse power on the trek path. No I am not talking about SUVs, or Jeeps. I am talking about dodging horses carrying those with some form of physical challenges or simply those who are too lazy. Of course where ever you find loads of horses, you also find loads of horse shit. Dodging piles of those was also a bit of a pain. Trust me you don’t wanna know more about this.
But the almost 8 hour trek didn’t appear monotonous at all. We joked around, stopped a lot to grad a snack talked a lot about a lot of things. Something that I had not done with my family for ages, and yes, made fun of others who were riding on a horse and couldn’t really handle it. It was good to know your family after such a long time.
Once at the top, we looked around for our accommodation, and thanks to some friend of my dad’s we were quickly able to get something. We had a bath and after an hour, went for the Darshan. For visiting the shrine, we are supposed to take off our footwear and stand in a queue for paying our respect to the shrine. It was frigid cold. My feet went numb, and soon after they were so cold that they were hurting me as if a huge rock has fallen on my feet.
After about ten minutes in the queue, our turn came and we simply paid our respect to the shrine to which we owed a visit for close to 15 years. At last, it was done. Thankfully everything went smoothly. Our stay was comfortable, all along the time, we had decent food, we had a timely visit and everyone was happy. And my mother promised to be back soon.
The next day we had to start for the return journey. Again, the same thing of stopping at numerous places, grabbing a bite, but what we noticed was that another peak about 50KM away was snow cover. No wonder the freakin chill last night. The sight was just awesome. But unfortunately the expanse of the whole thing could not be captured on a camera. What we captured could never reflect the true picture of what we saw.
