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Published: January 15th 2015
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Rasmoncho
First one we visited I thought of starting this blog with a week end destination from my home town Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
There are many traveled – untraveled spots in the state. It has historic monuments, beaches, mountains and jungles.
One among them is Bishnupur, which has remained mainly untraveled destination by the people outside of Bengal.
Bishnupur is a small town in Bankura district of West Bengal, India, 132 km away from Kolkata. The uniqueness of this place is terracotta temples built in 17th and 18th Century. The architecture depicts the socio economic condition of the era. Innumerous big and small temples still exist in the city.
Five of us planned to visit the place in October 2014. Kolkata to Bishnupur can be a same day return trip. However, we wanted to spend time in the serenity of Shaniniketan, hence made the trip 3 days long.
We started our road journey at 8am only to repent later. We missed to enjoy the free roads of Kolkata and also missed to see the colour of River Ganga during sunrise.
But never mind, we crossed the hustle and bustle of cities in some time and reached to the countryside
Another one
Amazing..... which we call suburbs. We took Durgapur express way route to avoid the bumpy ride of the other route.
For some time, we all just quietly enjoyed the fresh breeze, beauty of long stretched paddy field, white wild flower covering (called Kash Phool in Bengali blooms in early October in eastern part of India) the sides of the roads.
To our surprise even kids watched the beauty silently.
We decided to have our breakfast at around 9:00 – 9:30am after reaching a place named Shaktigarh near Burdwan city.Although entire Bengal is famous for wide variety of sweets, this place is the originator of a sweet named Langcha.
We noticed a unique thing there. All the eating joints (approx 25-30 in number) on both sides of the road is named after the sweet Langcha like Langcha Dham, Langcha Bhavan, Langcha kutir etc. ( Dham, Bhavan are all synonyms of the word house)
They have well maintained the copyright so could not find repetition.
A unique way to market a product.
We entered in one of them. Aroma of hot Kachori and Bengali potato curry made the sound of our growling stomach quite audible. I must admit
one more
Beautiful...... that the taste and enjoyment of eating local cuisine on roadside joints is unparallel. We signed off our heavy breakfast session with famous Langcha.
The car took a bit of high speed as we knew that we are going to get few Kilometers of rough roads.
Kids growing up in metropolitan city are generally deprived of the lovely view of the nature, so they were the one enjoying every moment of the journey. Right from looking at the grazing cattle, herders sitting on a small rock with a stick in hand, men and women working in the field, bullock carts and many more.
It was around 12pm, when our vehicle entered onto the hard road. We knew this stretch of few kilometers is going to bother us and as always we will keep complaining throughout.
However, for a change this time we decided to concentrate more on the beauty of the place and less on the condition of the road. And we agreed that the nature’s beauty subdued the agony. We passed by small villages, long stretched foliage, bamboo trees, small winding rivers…….
We crossed Bankura town and the small station of Bishnupur.
As we entered
Bishnupur, we started enquiring about the way to the temples. We had an impression that being small place we will find the way easily but to our surprise we got only one reply “Which temple?”
Finally a senior person obliged us by showing us the route of one of the temples. By then we understood that there are numerous temples known by different names. I took out the list of name of the temples I had. He asked us to further enquire there. That was a fair and honest suggestion.
During this quest, kids got bored and started showing the boredom syndrome as feeling hungry. But our aim was to visit the spots so some how with additional junk eateries chips and cold drink kept them occupied. Frankly speaking the last half an hour was quite annoying for the adults as well.
However, fatigue, anger everything vanished the moment we saw the beautiful temple – our first stop.
We hired a guide who took us to12 different temples each of them with unique art and different stories depicted on the walls.
We also visited one of the rarest temples of Hindu goddess kali built by king
selfie
Neck piece-ear ring - made out of coconut shell by the local artisans of that century. The idol is famous in the name of CHIINOMASTA KALI (CHHINO meaning separated; Masta came from the word Mastak meaning head).
Our eyes were stuck on the beauty but could not give a miss to the local handicraft being sold outside every temple.
We were quite behind our schedule late still could not resist to buy a few neck piece-ear ring sets and few more articles.
We had earlier planned to have our lunch at Durgapur but it was already close to 3pm and there was no way kids could have waited for another hour. So we had our lunch in one of the restaurants there.
A surprise was waiting for us after that. We all got into the car but it refused to start. The driver tried all his tricks but no use. It was a Sunday and markets were closed. We were not sure whether we will be able to manage to repair the vehicle or not. Our hotel in the next city was booked. Hence we hired another car and moved ahead.
We decided to come back again to see another set of 10 temples.
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