“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

JAGANATH PURI: This trip was one of the most exciting one....We had planned to visit Bhubaneswar for a friends wedding & had blocked the tickets, but then decided against it as there were no rooms available in a good hotel as there was an all India conference being held in Bhubaneswar at that time and all trains were canceled due to some reason. Just 3 days before the wedding, Ruchi decided that she wanted to go and take my parents and her parents along to visit the Jaganath temple….a task that seemed impossible because all trains were canceled, all hotels booked, but as they say that the Lord was calling us…surprisingly when we checked for the train, we got to know that the train would start functioning the next day, the hotel that we wanted said that there was a last min cancellations and that he had exactly the no. of rooms that we were looking for. We had booked the rooms in the Ginger group of hotels in Bhubaneswar and also booked a car to take us to Puri, the 2nd Dhaam on our list. We started from the hotel immediately after breakfast and reached Puri by 8am and did our darshan of lord Jagannath, Balbhadra & Subhadra. The temple was a beautiful structure with a height of 214ft being tallest in in India. The prasad at the temple was simple rice & daal made in earthen pots which became our lunch for the day. The darshan was good, the only thing that we felt was disappointing was the commercialization of the pandits.

Jaganath Puri Temple

We relaxed at the Puri beach for a while, enjoying the weather and the splashing tides and having completed the Dhaam we proceeded to the famous Konarak temple (Sun Temple) and then Lingaraj Temple (Jyothiling) which was very peaceful and nice. We got back to the hotel in the night by 9pm.