p.r.bullen - travelogue

Orissa. Well, we flew in & out of Bhubaneshwar, the capital. On arrival in early afternoon, a car from our hotel in Puri, about an hour and a half away, on the beach, was waiting for us. Off we went.

We were staying at the South Eastern Railway Hotel, formerly the Bengal Nagpur Railway Hotel and still called "the BNR". It's a five-minute walk from the beach, but the BNR owns the vacant lot in between, so it's still got the view across the dunes to the water. The BNR is 75 years old, with British Raj architecture to match, with wide, heavily shaded porches and incredibly high ceilings. It's made valiant efforts to maintain traditions, we were told on the trip down. Indeed: "Bed Tea", which we never tried, afternoon tea and cake, and three four-course meals. Aingeal said it's the only time we'll go on vacation in India and GAIN weight!

It was hot enough for March, being in the Tropics (about 20摸, while the Tropic of Cancer is at about 23.5摸, about 250 miles north), and there were palm trees aplenty to be seen. They made it seem much greener than Delhi, for some reason. We stayed in Puri for three nights, doing very little: walks on the beach, reading books, and of course drinking tea morning, noon and night. Just to relieve the tension, we did make a few excursions, to Konark and to the Jagganath Temple.

Konark, about an hour away, is the site of the Sun Temple, a huge and largely derelict temple. It's built like a giant chariot, with large stone wheels around the bottom of the outside of the building, and has 3 beautiful statues out of some dark stone positioned for the morning, "noon" and setting sun. The temples in this part of India have several buildings, in a line, the last being a soaring tower. Here, the penultimate building (big enough by itself, incidently) had been filled in to keep it from collapsing, and the tower had apparently never been built, for reasons unknown. We clambered all over the main building, looking at the carvings and statues and enjoying the beautiful weather. Like Khajuraho, many of the carvings were "erotic", but there were many lions rampant (reminiscent of both European coats of arms and of China), and snakes. Here we saw for the first time what turned out to be a theme: statues of horses, elephants, etc guarding the temple at the cardinal points, and (at the main entrance to the temple) a pair of elephants crushing lions, symbolizing the resurgence of Hinduism over Buddhism.

Our other excursion in Puri was to the Jagganath Temple. Puri is bisected by a very, very wide road (wide even after the encroachments by stalls and vendors!). Once a year, in June, huge statues of the gods are put on giant sledges and dragged from the Jagganath Temple at one end of town to another temple at the other, and then back (hence the wide street). That's where we get the word "juggernaut", by the way, a corruption of Jagganath. You can't go into any temples in Orissa, unless you're Hindu, but we could go up to the top of a library across the street.

The view of the temple was not terribly interesting, but the view up the wiiiide street, with its shops, stalls, vendors, and pedestrian/bicycle/scooter traffic was great fun, as it had a completely different look and feel than you find anywhere else that I've seen, a lot of activity and movement but with both a sense of leisureliness and of open space, due to the sheer size of the road. We'd taken a cycle rickshaw over & back, which in a flat city like Puri is a very pleasant way to travel (being foreign tourists, we were charged probably 2 or 3 times what a local would pay, but then being foreigners we've never quite gotten used to using cycle rickshaws).

More lolling around, reading and walking on the beach, and then we went to Bhubaneshwar for a couple of nights. Not much to do there, either, but the object was more to have a bit of a relax and get out of Delhi than to see strange and wonderful sights, which was just as well. We did go to some Jain caves at the edge of town, which were a let-down having seen Ajanta and Ellora a year ago, and twice to the Lingaraj Temple, the biggest in town (first in the late afternoon, and again the next morning quite early). As in Puri, we could not go in, but the British had built a large platform right next to one of the walls so we could see in. We dutifully paid 20 rupees to an youth claiming to be a temple priest (how gullible does he think we are?) for admission to the viewing platform, writing our names and the amount in a book there for the purpose.

The guidebook said that you can't see much, but I think they missed the boat on this one: while we couldn't see the detail that we could climbing over the Sun Temple in Konark, being up high and off to the side gave a great sense of the layout of the temple, from the small building at the entrance to the ever-larger structures ending with the soaring tower at the center, the whole square compound being filled with smaller temples generally modelled after the main tower.

There are a lot of temples in the surrounding area, mostly around a large holy "tank" (man-made pond). We strolled around and, heading down a side street to investigate a temple tower we could see, found a very small, very self-contained little temple by the edge of a small stream in which a dhobi (washerman) was cleaning clothes. Next to the temple, under some spreading trees, was a tidy thatched cottage with a fenced in dirt yard, from which suddenly popped a Brahmin who went to the first of the two temple buildings to perform his pujas (religious devotions).

The next morning we returned, this time with my camera, for another view in different light, again paying Rs.20 to get onto the viewing platform. Interestingly, when we wrote our names in the book, our earlier inscription had mutated from one entry (for both of us) of "Rs. 20/-" to two entries, one for "Rs.200/-" and the other, brand new, for "Rs. 150/-". While everyone SAYS that the amounts in those books "showing" enormous contributions are a fake, it was amusing to see it in action.

After a relaxing time in Bhubaneshwar, when we could top-up our book supply at a small but decent bookstore, we headed down (4 hours by car) to Gopalpur-on-Sea. In G-on-S, there is, in fact, nothing to do, unlike Puri, Konark and Bhubaneshwar where there is little to do or see, there is nothing in Gopalpur except the Oberoi Hotel. On the "American Plan" again (i.e., room + three meals), we did nothing except read and walk on the beach until it was time to return to Bhubaneshwar for our flight home.

The last day, though, was Holi, the festival of color, when Indians throw large amounts of colored paint and powder all over each other. We enjoyed Holi last year, at a party at a friends house, but didn't feel like being painted by strangers, so went for a long and enjoyable walk on the beach (where we did end up getting a bit splattered with colored powder by villagers coming down to wash off the color in the ocean, but it was all in fun and much less contrived than the hotel party). The water, being in the tropics, was a divine temperature.

Then, it was up early for the drive to the airport (4 hours, remember), only to find that the flight was 5 hours delayed. They say that Indian Airlines has a 25% no-show rate among its pilots... ?hence our delay? All in all, it was a very relaxing time.