On top of the usual packing decisions tourists must make—this shirt or that one? a money pouch or a fanny pack? white tube socks or black tube socks?—our intrepid group of travelers from Columbia University had extra considerations to weigh for our recent visit to India.

When a two-week trip entails visits to a dozen holy places, each with different rules regarding appropriate attire of the devout pilgrim, the idea of sensible footwear acquires a new meaning.

From Mathura to Varanasi, almost every site of worship we visited required visitors to enter in a shoeless state as a sign of respect. So first and foremost, shoes must be easy to take off and put back on, a lesson that Ari Paul had learned the hard way from a previous trip to India.

“I’d been to India a year ago, and on that trip I was wearing Doc Martens,” the popular British boots, Paul said. But his boot laces ultimately took too much time to tie and untie.

“At temples, everyone had to wait for me every time and I really held up the group. I really regretted bringing the Doc Martens,” he said. “This time, I was wearing Pumas,” sneakers that Paul said, “you can just slip on really easily.”

At times there seemed to be a cottage industry centered around the protection of visitors’ shoes. Outside some temples and mosques there were stands where visitors could leave their belongings. At the Golden Temple in Armritsar, our group checked in our sandals and sneakers en masse, which attendants placed together in a large dusty jute bag and kept behind a counter.

Mariana Martinez Estens takes off her shoes outside a temple. Again. (Sophia Chang)

But at sites like the Jama Masjid in New Delhi, a couple of local residents sat on stools and kept watch over the assortment of shoes left on the steps outside the mosque. It was an ad-hoc arrangement that Maura Moynihan, daughter of former ambassador to India Sen. Daniel Moynihan, had warned us might result in a few pairs of stolen shoes, but luckily no one lost footwear on this trip.

The shoe guardians do not watch visitors’ belongings just for fun, of course, a fact that Michal Lumsden learned early in the trip while we were in New Delhi. There, she went with a group of students to visit the shrine of Nizamuddin Chishti, a Sufi saint.

“We took our shoes off and there were two little boys out front who were watching the shoes. I thought they were just making sure no one was going to steal them,” she said. “But they demanded that we pay them. I wasn’t going to pay them to get back my shoes. So we walked away and they started yelling at us.”

Like putting on a yarmulke or a headscarf, the simple act of shedding one’s shoes serves both as a sign of respect but also as a preparation to enter a sacred place, Paul noted.

“When you’re taking off your shoes it’s a real reminder that you’re entering another space, and it’s the defining moment between the outside and the holy,” he said. “For actual worshippers and for journalists like us, that moment of taking off your shoes really reiterates the fact that we’re entering a sacred space.”

Other rules were in play, especially for the 14 females in our group. The women had to cover our heads with scarves during trips to Muslim sites, such as our visit to the Darul Uloom Wakf madrassa in Deoband. At the Golden Temple, even the men had to cover their heads, with white cloths offered by temple officials. And at the Jain Temple in New Delhi, all visitors were asked to remove leather items in deference to the Jains, whose belief in nonviolence eschews the use of animal products.

Some of the prohibitions reflected not sacred dogma but modern reality. In Varanasi, we could not bring in electronic equipment to the Sankat Mochan Temple where a recent bomb explosion had killed several people, and we filed past metal detectors in Mathura on our way to Lord Krishna’s birthplace, Shri Krishna Janma Bhoomi.

During our sunrise visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra, tour guides offered visitors slipcovers that resembled shower caps for their shoes to protect the beautiful expanses of white marble. Erik Wander, who had already abandoned the notion of wearing socks with his sneakers earlier in the trip, chose to paddle around barefoot.

“Walking up on the marble with no shoes or socks on, it was nice and cool and smooth. That made me feel a little more in touch with the place,” Wander said.