Bodhinatha and Shanmuganathaswami spent a busy day in Kansas City and will be winging their way home tomorrow arriving on Star Two.

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END OF PHASE
Today is the last day of our phase.
This edition of TAKA will remain posted
over our coming two-day retreat,
until Dasami Tithi, Sun One, Thursday, August 17th.

At the Aadheenam today the big news is the beginning of the Nandi Mandapam, which will sit on the South end of the temple, at the entry. After pilgrims take a holy dip in the Wailua River, they will climb the steps and arrive here before entering the temple. This is an artistic, computer generated rendering of the future mandapam. You can see the sacred, golden temple flagpole (kodimaram) with Nandi in front kneeling before Iraivan.

Stage one of this project is the forming up and pouring of a concrete foundation, which will also include the three side extensions of Iraivan. So the next two weeks is all about concrete.

Today, after months of planning by several teams, work began on the foundation of the Nandi Mandapam. It began at 8am with this meeting at the site.

Concrete executives, excavation crews, form-building teams, power-screed reps all working out the logistics of the next few weeks.

Right after the session, this loader arrived. Here it makes a space nearby for dirt that will be removed.

In order to make room for the new foundation (which is basically an extension of the existing foundation), we had to take apart the dirt ramp that has been our sloped access to the top of the foundation for six years. You can watch our movie of the day showing this behemoth in action.

This job is one of the biggest concrete pours done on Kauai in recent times, not as big as the iraivan foundation, but still it will take about 65 truck loads of concrete, all to be delivered in a single day. Yoginathaswami meets with the different contractors who all work out a game plan together.

Yoginathaswami writes about this moment:

“Here is a group photo of the various team members who are working so harmoniously together to make the Nandi Mandapam foundation a reality on August 26th. From left to right: Gary Avrice from Kauai Precast, he and his team will be handling the fly-ash application into the silo and the cement truck at the batch plant; Pat Debusca, Plant Manager at Honsador/Glover, is our local concrete batch plant; Craig Kawakami from Craig Kawakami Builders, our general contractor who is guiding all the subcontractors; Richard Basulto who will be operating the power screed; Yoginathaswami; Bill is Richard’s assistant; Jesse and Mark Evans from Small Line Concrete Pumping, a father-and-son operation, they will be pumping the concrete from the concrete truck into the four-feet-deep form.

More pictures tell the story, from puja, to ground breaking and final removal.

And you can watch a short video below.