Konark, Orissa - February 2010

I love traveling and have found various reasons to travel – business, sightseeing, adventure sports etc. This time I decided to make my travel all about culture. Being a Bharatanatyam dancer, the idea instantly excited me. A little research on the internet pointed me towards the Konark Music and Dance festival. All it took was a few calls to the organizers and soon I found myself in Bhuvaneshwar.

As we landed in Bhubaneswar, I was pleasantly surprised by the weather. It was just about the same as Bangalore. We left the airport in search of a place to eat and an internet parlor. We found a dingy internet cafe with an infuriatingly slow connection and spent, what felt like hours, trying to open an equally infuriatingly heavy yahoo mail page. After an ordinary meal and some coffee, we found a cab to take us to Konark. Thing about taking cabs here is they charge for both ways, even if you only want to get dropped off. So we ended up paying Rs.800 for being dropped off at Konark.

The drive to Konark was interesting. There are tons of quaint little villages along the way. Most of these village houses have cute stick figures painted on the walls. But what struck me was how ancient everything looked. It was almost like we were traveling back in time. The lack of development in this place is a bit confusing to me. The place seems to be rather lush green. For an agrarian country, I would imagine, verdure has to translate to wealth and prosperity. I saw no signs of prosperity here. Sad!


We finally reached Konark and to our dismay found that it’s a smaller town that we even imagined. There is only really one option to stay at. There is the govt. run Yatrinivas with rooms in the range of Rs.800 – Rs.1400. The place is run badly, maintained poorly and is not clean. Apart from this, there is Panthnivas, the more inexpensive version of this, and perhaps even more badly maintained. And then there is the much more expensive Lotus Eco Resort on Chandrabagha beach. Rooms here range from Rs. 5000 to Rs. 7000. Apart from being completely out of our budget, it was also quite far from the centre of Konark. We did go check out the rooms there and they are very nice. I would recommend it to anyone looking for isolation and quiet. Since we needed to be close to the heart of Konark, we settled for Yatri nivas.

Yatri nivas is the best option for anyone interested either in the dance festivals or the Sun Temple. The Konark Natya Mandap is where one of the dance festivals is conducted and it’s about 1 km from Yatri nivas. However, there are not many transport options between the two. Getting to the festival in the evening was not as much as problem as getting back. Since the festival ends well past 9 PM, there are no autos or cabs available. On one day we ventured walking back. The roads were deserted and there are many excited dogs and bulls on the road, not making it a very pleasant walk. So we decided that it was a good idea to not be shy and ask cars on the premises for a drop to Yatri nivas.



The festival began at around 7 PM on all five days. So we had the first half of the day to ourselves. We visited the Sun Temple on one day. The temple has very intricate ornate carvings. These carvings depict to a great detail, life in the 13th century - everything from the sense of dressing, folklore of the day, occupation all the way to philosophy, sex life and even diseases. The entire temple took 12 years to build. That sounds like a jiffy, when I compare it to how long it’s taking us to get the city metro up.





We spent another day in Puri. The drive from Konark to Puri is beautiful. The city itself is crowded and dirty. I did not enjoy the city and we did not spend much time there. We visited the Lotus Eco resort on Ramchandi resort and got lunch at the restaurant there. The beach there is pristine and a wonderful place to spend a day with nothing but your thoughts. We chose not to visit Pipli or spend more time in Bhubaneshwar.



Orissa being so distant and so different from Bangalore, it gave me a great opportunity to forget city life all together. All the time we had to ourselves was a great way for us to unwind and disconnect from “real life”. Five days of great music and dance transported me to a beautiful world of dreams. While the festival itself is wonderful, the infrastructure is poor to say the least. Connectivity to Bhubaneswar is poor, transport within Konark is difficult, almost impossible at night, there are not enough options to stay and the restaurant at Yatri nivas is closed by the time you return from the festival at night. As obvious, I do have mixed feelings about this trip and about returning.