Ahobilam is located in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh in the hills of the eastern ghats, about 360 KM from Hyderabad.  Ahobilam is the place where the Lord killed Hiranyakasipu and saved Prahalada.  We have seen fascination depiction of this story in many Telugu mythological movies.

Not just the belief that visiting this place which has 9 temples for 9 avatars of Lord Narasimha, replenishes one’s karma balance account, I also got fascinated by the fact that visiting some of the 9 temples required intense trek in Nallamalla forest region. Today, we walked over 20,000 steps, amounting 95 floors of ascent, covering 14 KMs in hard terrain (thanks to summary from the fitness gadget)

However, we could only visit 7 out of 9 temples, as we had started the trek around 11:30AM, and most temples close by 5:30PM.  Since the entry path to Pavana Narasimha temple closes by 3PM, we could not make it to temple number 9. Also, we could not make it to temple number 7.  We missed to spot this on the return trip from upper Ahobilam to lower ahobilam.

The Nine Narasimhasthalas are :- 1. Jwala Narasimha 2. Ahobila Narasimha 3. Malola Narasimha 4. Kroda Narasimha 5. Karanja Narasimha 6. Bhargava Narasimha 7. Yogananda Narasimha 8. Kshatravata Narasimha and 9. Pavana or holy Narasimha.

As you have read in other blogs, some of the temples does require trek on ‘not so’ friend terrain, climbing 100s of steps, cross huge boulders.  Though we are reasonably fit, we did have to stop quite a few number of times to take a break, pause for a gasp or two.  However, entire experience was pleasant, and worthwhile.  We did capture some cool pics.

There are zillion Monkey around Ahobilam. Sometimes we reminded on the scenes from both Planet of the Apes, or a scene from Jungle Book, where monkeys were strategizing, in our case, swarming to grab food or get attention. We saw several monkeys watching us with sparkle in their eyes, when we slowed down on Ahobilam road. So, we decided to feed organic popcorn and organic mango soft candy that we had with us.

Aniketh and Manikanta said, let us record it. We got it captured this footage on GoPro Hero 4, powered by sound track from PLANET OF THE APES. We thought we were feeding bunch of monkeys. But after watching footage, we realised the bullying monkey, later we named him “Caesar”, pretty much grabbed all of our food. Here is WhatsApp and YT clip just for fun.