Affordable Travel

In Southern India the ancient temple of Jagganath Puri is visited by literally millions of people per day during holy seasons, and throughout the rest of the year it is home to thousands of daily worshippers who flock into the pyramid-like tall granite building - said by some devotees to be millions of years old - to observe the rituals of incense burning and serving of opulent offerings of food to the wooden Jagganath deity on the altar. The temple priests are born into their role, and generation after generation of such Brahmin priests have maintained the high religious standards for rituals, cleanliness, and festival observances at the monumental holy site.

The city of Puri is popular not just because it is the site of this famous Hindu temple, however. The city is on one of the rare beaches in that part of India, and many people visit Puri not just for religious reasons, but for summer fun. The waves on the Puri beach are fun for body surfing, the sandy beaches are nice for long strolls, and the weather is hot, but the coastal breezes make it much more tolerable than the scorching heat of other parts of India. Many people combine their pilgrimage to the holy sites around Puri with a family vacation, renting rooms in nearby hotels or guesthouses, so that they can spend a weekend or more in and around Puri. Sweet shops, souvenir shops, and restaurants are abundant in the town, so no matter what your motivation for visiting Puri, you should be able to enjoy yourself and find plenty to do to entertain yourself.

India is home to many of the oldest cultural traditions on earth, as well as more of the world’s religions than any other country. So many different religious systems coexist there, side by side, that India is known as a multi-cultural society like no other. But most of them meet at the river, which provides a kind of natural common denominator for the various belief systems and ritual traditions of India, where the sacred river is not only important for water, transportation, and trade, but for its fundamental function within religious practices. There are many sacred rivers - or rivers that are universally recognized in India as having great religious significance, power, and miraculous potential - throughout the country, and none is bigger or more well known that the Ganges River. The Ganges stretches through almost the entire continent, beginning as melted snow in the highest regions of the Himalayan Mountains and descending through the country to places like West Bengal, where millions of pilgrims gather each year to bath in it while chanting songs and playing drums and cymbals. Near the village of Mayapur, about 100 miles from Calcutta, the Ganges blends it waters with another significant “holy river”, the Sarasvati. Similarly, in the more northern village of Vrndaban, not far from the Taj Mahal, the Yamuna River winds its way through temple towns and is the site for daily bathing rituals, funerals, and celebrations of holy days to commemorate the many deities of the Hindu faith.

You can easily find the major Indian rivers on maps, and plan your travel to coincide with some of the major - or minor - festivals that take place at temples and in the villages that line these famous rivers. Ganges is perhaps the easiest to follow, and it is a wide, blackish-silver river with strong currents that in some places is great fun for swimming, as well.

Photography and ancient temples seem to go hand in hand, because a photographer with a good eye can capture so much essential artistry while shooting pictures of one of India’s old sacred temples. Close-ups reveal the fine attention to hand carved detail, long shots explore the awe inspiring size of the temples that must have required so much labor to build, and interior shots allow one a glimpse of a mysterious, almost secretive world that is the refuge of sages, mystics, and devotees.

But some of the old school practitioners of these religions - the fundamentalists if you will - consider it an intrusion for a non-devotee to enter a sacred space. Even in those temples where you may be invited with open minds and arms, there are very old superstitions at play that involve photos. After all, photography is a rather recent invention, especially for people who live in a place that resembles medieval times in terms of culture and consumer goods. Many devotees believe that if you photograph the gods in their temples, you steal the spirit of the god. Beware. Many innocent photographers who were simply sightseeing have been physically attacked in order to “save a god from being stolen” by a tourist. And countless tourists have at least been the subject of embarrassment and verbal abuse because they failed to follow the local code of never entering a temple with a camera around the neck.

Hot days in India are pretty much every day, and if you venture down south, India has temperatures that can literally allow you to fry an egg on a stone in the middle of the day. In fact, there are legendary stories – difficult to verify as true or false – that there are breezes in India that are so hot that if you are hit by one, you will die on the spot. But not to worry, there are ways to escape the heat of the summer sun in India that gave rise to the phrase “only fit for mad dogs and Englishmen”. But beware of how you deal with the heat, because another thing that can and will make you very uncomfortable is the stomach bug so common for tourists in India.

The first thing you want to do – and the most important thing to do from a health standpoint – when you feel too hot is to hydrate your body with a cool drink of water. The more you drink water, the more your body can deal with oppressive heat. But if you drink ordinary tap water in India, you are also ingesting lots of microbes that might make you sick. So it is advised to always drink bottled and purified water, instead. So if you are suffering from the heat, and someone offers you ice to add to your water, beware. The ice was made from water, too, and may contain ordinary tap water. If you drink and iced drink, even if it doesn’t have any other water in it, you can accidentally get sick from the ice in the drink. To be really safe, drink fresh coconut milk, straight from the coconut.

The bustling harbor city of Hong Kong is such a large business center that it boasts one of the largest gross national products in the world, larger than most nations. Yet the former British Colony, now controlled by China, is a rather small city in terms of its land mass. But the skyscrapers are crammed full, and the population is in the tens of millions. To walk the streets of Hong Kong, like the popular Nathan Road, is to be in the middle of a rushing crowd of people that move so fast that it is impossible to take a leisurely stroll along the sidewalks of Hong Kong, where you almost have to sprint to stay up to speed.

Tourists arrive primarily by air, and the Hong Kong International Airport is one of the busiest. All the large hotel chains are represented here, and one of the most prestigious local hotels is the Peninsula Hotel. Although you may not be able to afford one of its pricey rooms, you can always enjoy one of the restaurants or lounges inside the hotel.

One of the biggest reasons to visit Hong Kong is for shopping. Because this is the center of exports for the whole world, you can find anything and everything here, especially if you want electronics or fabric, two specialties. You can have a suit tailored to fit you in a matter of days, for a price that will make your wallet happy and your friend jealous. Visit Hong Kong, but be prepared to shop until you drop.