Trip to Mathura-Vrindavan

I am herewith writing down the craziest trip I have ever planned in my life. I remember that was Saturday evening and after the office I went to a tea shop close by to my office with couple of colleagues. While we were enjoying the tea along with cigarette suddenly few beggar kids came and started asking the money, initially we refused and just for the sake of fun we asked them what you will do with the money and surprisingly one kid gave the reply that we will purchase colors and play Holi. Okay this incident is few days before the Holi festival, so when the kid gave us such a instant answer we were amazed and one of my friend gave him 10 rupees to buy color to play and once they left we started discussing about Holi as its been long time none of us played Holi although when we were kids we used to play a lot.

As the discussion was going on, one of my friend came up with a saying that the most special Holi is played in Mathura-Vridhavan which is on the way to Agra and even one month before there people starts playing the Holi and he started telling us how it goes in Mathura and it was very fascinating. Suddenly one friend told why don’t we go to Mathura so see Holi but none of us agreed as we couldn’t take leave because of our project deadlines.

So we planned that since Mathura is not so far from Delhi so we can go in the morning, look around and then will come back in evening. Listening this all came in full enthu that they have decided to leave next day morning and the craziest part was on there motor bikes….crazy guys.

It was decided that everybody will gather at same place by 5:30 and latest by 6 am we will leave. As decided 5 of we turned up, including me…oh god getting up so early was horrible. We all came with our bike but instead of taking all the bikes it was decided that 2 will ride on 1 bike and all of us agreed and started. It was Sunday morning 6 when we all started and stopped at petrol pump on Delhi-Faridabad highway, got our bike’s tank full and zoomed.

Mathura is 145 kms from Delhi and since all of us were driving on a pretty good speed and that too without taking halt, by 8:50 am we touched Mathura. After reaching Mathura we stopped at some tea stall which was near the bus depot and had our morning tea. 2 of my colleagues got the nature call and they went to a pay to toilets near bus stop. We were thinking to go to some hotel or ashram or dharamsala for bath, our colleagues landed up and said that the pay to toilets are well maintained and they do have an option to take bath for just 5/-. All of us agreed and we hit the pay to toilet and had our bath one by one, in just rupees 25/- we all took our bath. Now it was time to have breakfast so we hit a small time restaurant near by to bus depot and ordered parathas and rates were quite cheap then what we thought, per paratha cost was 7/-. Once we were all done, now the time was to explore the city and we geared on.

We asked couple of people about the places so see, mainly Mathura is Lord Krishna’s birth place and it was full of temples, since we went during Holi so everywhere we find people selling colors and even playing also…and per the saying during this time they play Holi for full day no matter what age you are in. We visited couple of famous places like Lord Krishna’s birth place named as Shri Krishna’s Janam Bhoomi, visram ghat, and Lord Krishna’s temple which is known as Dwarkadheesh Temple.

As soon as we went inside the temple we were invited by putting colors on us, they were light colors and none of us minded, infact we enjoyed the bhajans, keertan, music, dancing of old age people. We met people who even came from Kanyakumari to Mathura to celebrate Holi, that was I think more craziest but anyway. We all were done by 12:30 and then we decided to go to Vrindavan which was 15-20 kms away from Mathura and he headed to Vrindavan.

After reaching Vrindavan we saw the same enthu in the people, here also people were enjoying playing, in other words all together in a different world. There we visited Radha Valabh temple, Banke-Bihari temple, and Madan Mohan temple, by this time only the time was 4 pm so we decided not to visit more temples as we have go back to Delhi and most importantly office so we took off and while coming back we stopped at Delhi - Faridabad border and had our lunch. I think we also got involved with those people there that’s why we even forgot to have our lunch, I think that was a magic of land of Shri Lord Krishna.

I must say that one should visit that place in his or her lifetime at least once.