Odisha

Odisha's coast has 480 kilometres of sand, but its identity is carved in sandstone. Bhubaneswar was a temple city long before it was a capital, and shrines like the eleventh-century Lingaraja, the small jewel-box Mukteswara and the sculpted Rajarani show the Kalinga style developing over four hundred years. Konark, built in the thirteenth century under Narasimhadeva I, imagines the whole temple as the sun god's chariot, with twenty-four carved wheels and seven straining horses. At Puri, the Jagannath temple's Rath Yatra sends three enormous wooden chariots down the Bada Danda each June or July, hauled by lakhs of devotees, with the deities remade from neem wood every twelve to nineteen years. History runs deeper still at Dhauli, where Ashoka's rock edicts record his remorse after the Kalinga war, and at the Jain caves of Udayagiri and Khandagiri. Chilika, Asia's largest brackish lagoon, holds Irrawaddy dolphins at Satapada and vast winter bird flocks at Mangalajodi. Signature journeys link Bhubaneswar, Konark, Puri, Raghurajpur and Chilika.