Vaishno Devi is beautiful temple situated in a cave in the Trikuta mountain in Jammu and Kashmir, the Vaishno Devi temple is one of the most popular pilgrimages in India. Located at an altitude of 5200 feet, you have to go through a trek of nearly 12 km from the base camp at Katra.
Vaishno Devi is open throughout the year, but the best time to undertake the journey is between the months of March and October. A lot of pilgrims visit Vaishno Devi between these months as the weather is best.
The trek is a bit steep but you can take enough stopovers to complete it.
How to Reach Vaishno Devi?
- Jammu is well connected through flights to rest of India and you can take a bus from Jammu towards Katra
- Take a direct train to Vaishno Devi( Katra) from Delhi
- Take a direct Bus from Delhi/Haryana/Punjab
India had just won the world cup 2011 and we friends decided to give a tribute by visiting Vaishno Devi. We had a wait listed ticket of a train from Delhi but it never got confirmed.
We were almost about to drop the plan but all of a sudden decided to visit Kashmiri gate and took a direct private bus to Vaishno Devi. We spent the entire night in the bus playing various card games and having a lot of fun.
Reached Katra in the morning around 9 AM. We took a shared room, freshen up had our breakfast. We decided to rest for few hours after that as we were extremely tired with the journey. Everyone had a sound sleep and by evening we were ready to start the trek.
We started the trek at 9 PM. The trek is a little tough but an average person can complete the same within 6 hours. There were also stairs that you could use to ascend.
There are few other means of travelling as well like ponies and helicopter but we decided to do it ourselves.
Saying in loud tone " Jai Mata Di" we kept on moving.
Me and my friend were real quick we just got into our trekking zone and within 3 hours we reached the temple. It took around 2 hours more for rest of our friends so we both decided to sleep on the pavement till the time everyone joins us back.
The temple, the lightnings, the hills were looking so beautiful.
We had amazing darshan at the temple and by 8 AM we were free to start our journey down. But we decided to go few KMS above to a temple called Bhairo Ghati. The trek was damn steep and it took us about 2 hours to reach the place as we were tired.
Then started our long way back to Katra again. As we were tired so took us a bit more time to reach Katra from Bhawan ( Logically it should have been way less)
We reached at the starting point by 7 PM got to our rooms and took our Luggage. We boarded a bus back to Delhi at 10 PM.
It was one fun trip and we had a lot of Fun. Images are attached for your reference
