Winter vacation-trip to Orissa

Happy new year ! This is my first blog for this year and I am excited. Okay enough of this gay banter...let me get to the point.

This christmas vacation was great, especially the trip that I took with my parents to Orissa. We booked a Qualis for the road trip. The first leg of our journey was from Visakhapatnam to Bhuvaneshwar, which served as a base camp so to say. The second day, we went to Puri via Pipli to visit the beautiful and magnificient Jagannath temple. Winter is a good season for tourists so the temple was reasonably crowded. We then went to a place called Satpada, where there is the Chilka Development Authority's knowledge center. We arrived late, so we quickly explored the knowledge center and proceeded into the lake on a boat to catch a glimpse of the Irrawady dolphins. Unfortunately it got a bit dark but we did manage to spot the dolphins as they came up to the surface to catch a breath. It was a thrilling experience to see dolphins in such close quarters and in its natural environment.
We then proceeded back to Bhuvaneshwar for the night halt. The next day we started off to Konark. Boy o Boy, the famed temple of Konark is a huge structure with intricate and beautiful sculpture. We took a lot pictures and spent quite a bit of time exploring the temple. After this, we headed to a place called Barkul which is on the shores of the Chilka Lagoon.
We halted there for the night and woke up early in the morning to visit a couple of temples in Barkul. The Prajapati temple is a beautiful temple that resembled the Puri Jagannath temple albeit scaled down. It was then time to take a boat to explore the lake and visit the world-famous bird sanctuary deep inside the lagoon. After travelling about an hour or so on the motor boat (not speed boat), we reached the bird sanctuary (you need special permission, which is quite hard to get, to go into the sanctuary).
Immediately as we entered the sanctuary, the setting of the scene changed quite suddenly. Different kinds of wetland birds surrounded us in all directions. We slowed down and went to the watch tower where we were greeted by a bunch of forest officials who were eager to receive us. Luckily for us, they had recently installed a telescope on the tower (courtesy some VIP) and we were overwhelmed by the sight of rare, endangered and beautiful birds like flamingoes, aucets, etc which were busy feeding at a great distance and in such huge numbers (in thousands !). The one hour or so stay in the bird sanctuary was just an amazing and unforgettable experience. It is one thing to see these birds on the television, but it is wholly different thing to be in that surroundings. It seemed like we had been magically transported to a different world, the world of birds, where we completely forgot about everything else and just enjoyed the experience.
All good things come to an end and so did our visit to the bird sanctuary. Sadly we took the boat back to the shores and later returned to Visakhapatnam. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip and felt sad that it ended so quickly. I highly recomment this trip to anybody...infact I was very surprised to learn from our car driver that this route is not frequented by people from Andhra Pradesh despite the obvious attractions such as the glorious temples of Puri, Konark and the chance to relax in the arms of nature (Satpada, Chilka, etc.)
Anyways more pictures of the trip can be found here.