Puri Puja

The festival season has started in earnest in Orissa and last weekend was Dusheera or Durga Puja. To celebrate a group of us decided to go to Puri, a seaside town famous for it's Jagannath Temple and the nearby Sun Temple at Konark. I had been to both before but one of the great things about living in India is you can visit places more than once as well as go to those you didn't have time to see the first time round. We stayed in a fantastic hotel that offered just the right mixture of cleanliness, good food and affordability from where you could hear the sea if not actually see it. I gave the Jagannath Temple a miss this time – I'd been three times before and you can have too much of a good thing - but I did decide to re-visit Konark mainly because a lot of the group hadn't been before. The 13^th Century temple was still impressive but the highlight of this trip turned out to be the sight of a monkey nursing a small kitten. Had he rescued it or stolen it? Was he nurturing it or saving it for supper? I kind of hoped the former in both cases. On the way back we visited a spectacular beach at Balighai. It was the kind of place you see in travel brochures – deserted apart from a few cows and a lone priest performing his evening rituals and was uncommonly clean for an Indian beach. To top it all, just as we were leaving at sunset, I saw a shooting star – a first for me. The on-and-off rain – it's still monsoon season – only made it more romantic. On another excursion we went to an artists' village called Raghurajpur – I suspect in high season it's extremely touristy but we were the only ones there and despite the constant requests to "Come my shop, just looking", it was a picture-postcard Indian village with thatched cottages, decorated with tribal art, interspersed with ponds and streams. The Durga Puja in Puri was less intimate than the one I attended in Bhawanipatna last year but good fun all the same with Durga – the goddess or power - paraded through the streets on hand pulled carts preceded by a live band and frenetic dancing. One of the most interesting places I visited, however, was the Burning Ghats. Hindus always burn their dead rather than burying them and, unlike crematoriums in the West, the cremations, called Antyesti, are carried out in public on open fires albeit in specifically designated areas. Seeing the smoke from the fires we went in very tentatively, unsure if we would be welcome, but the living participants seemed unperturbed by our presence and even tried to explain to us what was going on. It was slightly disconcerting to see the legs and heads poking out of the burning stacks but it also seemed a lot more honest than the more clinical way we Westerners have of disposing of the body and somehow seemed a fitting end to our otherwise jolly long weekend of sand, sea and sightseeing. Click here to see where Puri is. Click here to see more pictures.

Sand and seafood

Last weekend I fell in love … not, unfortunately, with a man but with a seaside town called Gopalpur. A three hour train ride from Bhubaneswar, it reminded me of a 1950s seaside town – Filey springs to mind – which in reality it is. A strategic port for the British from the mid-18th century, it was abandoned after the World War II when trade with Burma dried up and now depends on fishing and tourism. It’s long “pristine” beach has started to draw in the tourists but it remains a sleepy little place – well in low season at any rate. We stayed in a hotel that had balconies with a sea view – strangely the more modern and expensive Western hotels don't include a sea view - and in the evening we sat sipping beer bought from the bottle-shop next door and watching the spectacular electrical storm taking place out at sea. During the day we wandered up and down the beach, paddled in the sea and tried to catch the numerous little crabs scuttling in and out of their holes. We also climbed the lighthouse whose owners had clearly worked out that tourists equal money – Rs250 to get in, you have to go barefoot but there’s Rs4 charge to leave your shoes outside, Rs40 to take a picture etc but somehow all the niggles didn’t in any way affect my enjoyment of the place. Another big highlight was the food. At the Krisha Restaurant I had the best meal I’ve eaten in nearly a year – garlic prawns and chips with not a chilli or a grain of rice in sight - and in the evening I feasted on a delicious grilled fish in a small restaurant lit only by the flashes of lightening that had caused the inevitable power cut. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the fishermen pulling in their catches as there was a fisherman’s puja (festival) but, although it will take me 16 hours to get there from Bhawanipatna, I’ll definitely be going back and may even take my swimming costume next time so I can for a dip. Click here to see where Gopalpur is. Click here to see photos.