{"id":4123,"date":"2004-04-13T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2004\/04\/13\/2004-04-13-temple-official-makes-record-pilgrimage\/"},"modified":"2004-04-13T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-13T12:00:00","slug":"2004-04-13-temple-official-makes-record-pilgrimage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2004\/04\/13\/2004-04-13-temple-official-makes-record-pilgrimage\/","title":{"rendered":"Temple Official Makes Record Pilgrimage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hindustan Times<\/P><P>HYDERABAD, INDIA, April 9, 2004: Some people believe a pilgrimage is successful only if a person undergoes hardships during the journey. That is why many a Hindu pilgrims walk or pant all the way to reach hilltop shrines such as Vaishnodevi or Tirupati Balaji. A 58-year-old temple official at Tirupati has created what is considered a world record of trekking maximum number of times to any hill-top shrine. R. Appa Rao, joint executive officer of Tirumala Tirupati Devastahanam [TTD] has visited the temple at Tirumala Hills 108 times in four months. The temple is located on a hill 1,820 feet above sea level and one has to cross over two hills to reach there. The nine-km-trek during which one has to negotiate a total 3,550 steps takes Rao two hours on an average. &#8220;When I started it used to take three-and-a-half hours. Now it takes me maximum two hours,&#8221; he told HT. Rao completed 108 trips [108 is a sacred number] on Thursday evening , in the process logging in 972 kilometers of trekking.<BR><br \/>\n<\/P> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hindustan TimesHYDERABAD, INDIA, April 9, 2004: Some people believe a pilgrimage is successful only if a person undergoes hardships during,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}