http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot Not just a Chennai Blog Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:05:54 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Kere Thonnur once called Thondanur is a village near Melkote. This place has 4 temples associated with Vaishnavite saint Ramanuja. We wanted to visit it during our earlier Melkote Visit but lack of time put paid to those hopes. Luckily we got another opportunity to goto Melkote in June and ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=373 Melkote or Melukote  (or ThiruNarayanapuram for Tamils), is one of the most important Vaishnava temple in Karnataka. Inspite of living (on and off) in Bangalore since 97' I have never been to Melkote before and the long weekend over Christmas gave me the opportunity to do so. The route was ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=360 Day 2 of Yelagiri trip began lazily with a thick fog.  After discussing a lot about a trekking trip to Swamimalai or driving to Jalagamparai waterfalls, we had decided to take it easy and spend half the day in Yelagiri itself. After a hearty breakfast, we started with the walk around ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=352 Yelagiri is a small hill station near Tirupattur / Vaniyambadi in Vellore District, about 150 Kms from Bangalore and 220 from Chennai. Not very well known, with very little to see or do,  it is nevertheless getting increasing crowd from Bangalore and Chennai due to it being just off the ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=342 Now that I have gotten a little more comfortable with the driving, I am slowly easing into making weekend trips near Bangalore. Having read about the Chikka Tirupathi  temple in a blog and having gone across a couple of times in bike rides, I thought it is a convenient place ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=338 At last I did my first ever drive to Chennai from Bangalore for Deepavali. It was on the superb Golden Quadrilateral via Hosur. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="800" caption="Chennai Bangalore GQ"][/caption] Left Bangalore on Friday morning at 6:15 AM. Took the Varthur, Sarjapur, Attibele route to Hosur and reached A2B,Chinnar at 7:30. ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=332 Google Earth has been upgraded to version 5 with the satellite images being more recent (May or even June 2009). Apart from the fact that our Chennai apartment which was under cloud cover earlier is now visible, lots of the new constructions in Chennai (and other cities) are now part of GE 5.0. ... http://www.sln.in/Chennaispot/?p=326