Friday night roughly 9.30pm at Aranmula. A priest from the temple has come to officiate over the preparations for us to leave as pilgrims. The priest (in the middle of the photo, dressed in white dhoti and bare chest) helps us do various rituals including filling the coconut with ghee and putting all of the offerings in the cloth bundle to carry on our heads.
Friday night about 1am - we've reached the Pampa River at the bottom of the climb to Sabarimala. Our group of pilgrims prepare to wash in the river before the climb.
Maybe 2am-ish. The incline has lessened but it's not necessarily kind to the bare feet. That's me on the left in the orange shirt, with my red cloth bundle slung over my shoulder.
Some time after 2.30am - we've reached the "queue" and this is how we will stay for the next 6 hours, inching our way forward
The sun has long ago risen and we are still in the queue to get into the temple. The line has moved into the "warehouse" and the line snakes around this building 3 times before it reaches the steps to go up into the temple compound. It's a good one to have, though.
We have completed all of the rituals and are now waiting, exhausted, berfore the decent back down the hill. Matthew, sitting next to me, is a staff member from VKV and the one who organised our group. He is a Christian and also one of the most enthusiastic of the Ayyappa devotees in our group - an interesting mix, I thought.
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"Mangalam" is a Malayalam language newspaper. In Sunday's edition of Mangalam there was a small article and photo of us, the 4 white people who went to Sabarimala. Apparently the headline of the article says something like "Foreign Ayyappa devotees go to Sabarimala" The article mentions the 4 of us by name and what county we come from and that we are studying music at Vijnana Kala Vedi at Aranmula. It says that the foreigners were led by Tony from Australia (that's what Matthew told the journalist)
