The ‘Chandipur’ Travelogue

This post and maybe the subsequent post would be about my quick getaway to Chandipur, made famous by ISRO (our interim missile test range is there). This holiday came after almost 3 years and was a welcome break from the maddening work schedule. This was also the first time my wife and me got to travel with my office colleagues, since we had relocated to Kolkata. We were four families in all, Jishnu, his wife and two kids, Sumanto and Basetti along with their wives and daughters. We were 12 members in all and that, in my reckoning, is not a bad party size!

We left Kolkata (Howrah) early in the morning of 12 August by the Falaknama Express. We were enroute to Balasore, a small sleepy town in Orissa, from where Chandipur is a 30-minute drive. We had already booked our hotel accommodations before leaving Kolkata and saved ourselves the pain of hunting for suitable staying places! It was drizzling when we alighted at Balasore and with Jishnu not keeping well we had to pay the coolies literally through our noses to cart all the luggage that got shipped along with us. Jishnu took the cake when it came to luggage. He had managed to cart one large suitcase, two big side bags and two small bags. Basetti bagged the leanest traveler award with only one suitcase. The steady drizzle did not help matters since we had to haggle with the taxi drivers for a solid 20 minutes before we could arrive at the most ‘amicable’ price to drive us down to Chandipur.

The road connecting Balasore and Chandipur is fairly good, thanks to ISRO, and scenic. Feasted my eyes on the earthly rural view of farmers busy planting the ‘ravi’ crop. By the way saw a number of shrimp farms, for the first time in my life. Checking into the hotel was a breeze and in no time we were in our rooms sipping good hot tea. A quick shower and lunch (totally veg, since Sumanto had this weird idea that after so much of traveling we couldn’t stomach non-veg stuff) later we all plonked for a leisurely siesta. It had got somewhat dark by the time we got up. We decided to take it easy in the evening and walk up to the beach and hear the waves. Imagine our shock when we landed there and found that the sea was nowhere to be found and the vast expanse of the beach staring at us. We were terribly dejected, specially my wife since this was her maiden visit to a beach front. We decided to return in the morning.

Chandipur is a one-street town and I have rechristened the street as ‘Souvenir Street’. Expect for a string of souvenir shops selling sea shell based trinkets and marble carvings there is a rickety doctor’s clinic – walls pasted with posters of the human anatomy, a restaurant, a couple of cigarette shops and tea stalls. We walked up and down the ‘Souvenir Street’, got bored and landed up in the hotel for some drinks.

The guy who served us at the hotel enlightened us on the mystery of the ‘beach without the sea’. Chandipur is perhaps the only beach in the world where the sea resides upto 5 kms twice a day. We were advised to hit the beach at 9:30 – 10:00 am in the morning if we were to enjoy the sea!

The next day we dutifully landed up at the beach at around 10:30 and lo and behold the waves were lapping right upto the edge of the barren expanse that we had seen yesterday. We all eagerly jumped into the sea, me with my jeans et all. Had a splash of a lifetime and felt getting drowned by the waves a number of times.

More to come in the next post......