Around the World

Continued from http://allyouwannaknow.net/aroundtheworld/2009/06/28/trip-to-kovalam-%e2%80%93-part-1/

We had to leave for Kanyakumari at 9AM. So we were up and ready by 8:15AM. We went in for breakfast which was a buffet. We had breakfast and filled our water bottles. The indica and our pleasantly smiling driver was waiting for us. We hoped in and were on our way to Kanyakumari.
We were dozing away a little …we were woken up just before the Nayathangara bridge to pay a toll of Rs 3…..after this, in some time we entered NH47.

The driver showed us the Kerala-Tamilnadu border at Kaliyakka Villai
After sometime, when the township vanished and we were into the highway completely…the scenery was good. So we were busy trying to take some snaps.

The first stop was at Padmanabhapuram palace. It was in Tamilnadu but this part was owned by Kerala. The palace was supposed to have been built by the Travancore king at the time about 200 years ago as a guest house.
It was a typical kerala structure. We had to pay an entrance fees of Rs 10 and also Rs 25 for the camera. So I just put my camera off and inside and decided that my photography skills could be checked out later when we don’t need to pay for it.
I have to mention a funny thing here….if we had to take a still camera inside …we had to pay Rs 25….but if we took a video camera inside…we had to pay Rs 1500….it seemed a little ridiculous to me.

The palace was quite big (dint look like a palace as per looks….was more like a huge traditional house in Kerala).

Special lamp

It had 2 floors with 1 dining hall on each floor. Each of these could house 1000 people at a time.
There were rooms meant for different purposes. Each important room had some person waiting to tell us the details (in different languges).

There was a place where the king and his ministers would sit for discussions. It had clack coloured floor which is supposed to be made of natural items like kotankuchi, kadukka etc ( it is difficult to get the English names for these…so I leave it this way).
The room also had some shelves in the lower part which had holes towards the outside wall. It seems, they used to fill these with a kind of herb called vetti ver. This would also e sprinkled with water. These shelves would be opened out when the meetings would happen so that when air was blowing through the holes in the wooden walls, it would be cooled by this herb (which is actually a kind of grass root) and it would serve as natural air cooler.
They also had the wooden walls which were made in a such a way that the serrations would allow us to see outside, but it would be dark and nothing can be seen from outside.

There were also rooms for the king and the queen. There was a traditional dining table with ivory edges. WC was also available with supposedly very good sanitary systems.
There was a huge kitchecn, on top again was a room where the weapons would be stored.
There were platforms made in some places so that the king could sit and solves crisis of his subjects. One of these platforms did not have open windows. Instead, it had a carved wooden wall which would have holes in it. This was menat for the queen to sit and see the temple processions go by. She culd see the procession but the public would not be able to notice her from outside.
They had a beautifully polished dance floor where the dance for navarathri functions used to take place. The floor was polished so much that it was called kannadi tharai (mirror floor).

It was nice….a different kind of palace.
For more pictures you can visit http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7SKPB&q=padmanabhapuram+palace&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=ZPdISovNGMadkAWS7p35CQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=862347009

You could also find some more interesting information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmanabhapuram_Palace

The driver had told us that if we take more than 45minutes here, we would miss the temple that we had in plan next. So we came out in 40 minutes. We decided to have a tender coconut each and then we hopped in again.

Our next destination was suchindram.

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