A temple visit to see elephants

One of the most exciting things about Kerala is elephants. We wanted to see elephants and show them to Nora as we don't get an opportunity like this in other countries so easily. Kerala has a lot of temples and most of those temples celebrate festivals at one time or the other during the year. We looked up the festival calendar on Kerala tourism website and we found a temple where they had a week long festival that was not too far from where we were staying. We had to take a train and a bus, but to show elephants to Nora, the distance was all worth traveling.

The temple is called Sree Poornathrayeesa Temple which was in a town called Thrippunithura. They had an annual festival called Thripoonithura Festival. We got there a bit before the ceremony started so we were able to see 15 elephants being brought in one by one. It was a wonderful sight to watch these huge beautiful animals coming in and seeing them up close without any fence. The elephants were used to having humans around them so they were very comfortable being so close to people. We could not stay until the festival started late in the evening but we had a very nice time watching elephants and showing them to Nora. We could not take a picture of the elephants fully decorated for the festival, but we are adding an image below from the internet to show how the festivals are celebrated with elephants in Kerala.