December 27-29, 2012: Bidar

Just before 11 am on the 27th I left Hyderabad on a comfortable bus heading about 80 miles (a four hour trip) to Bidar, just over the Karnataka state line.  Karnataka is another one of India's four large southern states, with a population of over 60 million people.  It's main language is Kannada, another Dravidian language completely unrelated to the languages of north India.  The center of Hyderabad was clogged with traffic and it took us about an hour and a half just to clear the city and its suburbs.  We passed through the western suburbs, near Hi-tech City.  I saw some very high apartment buildings, maybe 30 stories or more, some built and some still being constructed.  The route to Bidar was flat at first and then hilly as we got closer to the city.  There were some crops, including cotton, corn and, later, sugar cane.  There probably was some rice, too, though I don't remember seeing it.  Most of the land was scrub, though, with yellow grass, but quite a few green trees.  About 15 miles south of Bidar we passed a big sugar factory, with dozens of trucks and bullock carts lined up to deposit their cane.

My first view of Bidar was quite dramatic, with an ancient minaret seen poking over the medieval city walls and with domed white tombs to the east of the city walls.  I got a room in a comfortable and friendly hotel just across from the bus station on the west side of town and after resting an hour or so in my room, went out about 4 to see some nearby domed tombs.  These tombs are not the ones I had seen on my arrival, but are of a successor dynasty.  The Bahmani (originally from Persia, I've read) Kingdom moved to Bidar from Gulbarga (west of Bidar) in 1424 as Bidar's fort was more defensible.  Their tombs are to the east while the tombs near the bus stand and my hotel are from the successor dynasty, the Barid Shahis, who apparently were at one time Turkish slaves to the Bahmanis and usurped the Bahmani's power about 1490, and later became kings in their own right. 

I went to two tombs set in a lovely grove of trees.  Quite a few people were out for a late afternoon walk around the tombs and the trees.  The largest tomb belongs to Ali Barid, with a smaller one for his son and successor Ibrahim.  Ali's is over 80 feet high and both are open, without walls, just high arches on all four sides.  They are nice and airy and Ali's has some remnants of blue and other colored tiles depicting flowers, geometric designs, and Arabic calligraphy.  People were quite friendly.  I don't think Bidar gets many tourists.  As I was walking through the grove of trees I stopped to hear a man in white robes and an Islamic skull cap singing away beneath the trees. He saw me, came over and sang two songs in front of me, occasionally pointing upwards with his index finger.  He was very friendly, but spoke little English.  He told me his songs were "God songs."  A full moon rose to the northwest just as the sun was setting in the southwest just before 6.  The air was a little chilly.  Bidar is at about 2200 feet elevation.  During the afternoon, air force fighter jets had roared through the sky.  An air force base is about a mile from my hotel and specializes in flight training.

The next morning about 8:30 I took an autorickshaw to the Bahmani tombs east of the city.  There are eleven of them, I think, in a rural area with lots of green parrots in the surrounding trees and on the domes of the tombs.  There are two very big square tombs with bulbous domes.  Unlike the Barid Shahi tombs, they are enclosed.  The tomb of Ahmad Shah I rises to about 115 feet and is beautifully decorated inside with designs and calligraphy, though the paint is streaked with pigeon droppings.  Next to his tomb is that of his son,  Allauddin Shah II, which was closed but had some beautiful tiles on its facade, though most of them disappeared long ago.  The next tomb, that of Himayun the Cruel, has a cracked, mostly collapsed dome, with only about a third of the dome surviving.   Serves him right for being cruel.  There are a few subsidiary tombs for wives and children, and the kings' tombs get progressively smaller and less decorated as the Bahmani's power declined.  The last four tombs are small and square, without domes.  A guy in a skull cap came up to me with a newspaper article saying he was the 12th generation descendent of one of the last Bahmani kings.  He showed me his family tree, an old coin, and invited me to come to his house to look at old coins.  I declined and he asked for money.

I had asked my auto rickshaw driver to wait for me and we drove next to the tomb of a Muslim saint just a few hundred yards away.  No one was there, but the grave was covered with green cloth and red rose petals.  There were many other graves, of family members the rickshaw driver said, nearby.  Two veiled women in long black robes showed up and asked the driver to place their offerings inside the tomb while they prayed just outside the doorway.  He lit the stick of incense they had brought, placed it near the grave, and picked up a peacock feather broom next to the grave and brushed their heads with it after sweeping it across the grave.  They asked me for money and then for a ride to town.  We all got in the autorickshaw and headed to the entrance to the fort at the northern end of the old walled town, where we got out just inside the old city gate and I walked to the fort.

The fort, built or rather rebuilt by the Bahmanis when they relocated to Bidar from Gulbarga in 1424, is very impressive.  It is entered through three gates and across a triple moat on the south side.  I've never seen a moat like this one, carved out of rock with two rock walls dividing it into three separate moats.  The last gate is domed and there were impressive views everywhere.  Inside the third gate, just to the left, is a small palace beautifully decorated.  This small, late 15th century palace, the Rangin Mahal, its size said to be an indication of the Bahmani's declining power, has wonderful colored tiles, plaster designs on the walls and intricately carved wooden beams and ceilings.  There are mother of pearl inlays in the wood and in the black basalt on the walls.  I think some of the decoration dates from the Barid era.  There were also some great views from the roofs.

Nearby is a huge mosque, which was closed, but you could look through the metal gates and see the thick columns inside.  A garden is in front of the mosque, well kept up with green lawns.  There are other palaces nearby, but they were locked up.  In fact, I had to ask at the little museum, in the former baths, to get let into the Rangin Mahal.  The area inside the fort is huge, with I don't know how many acres, mostly deserted now.  The Dwan-i-Am, the former Public Audience Hall, another huge building where the kings were crowned and received important visitors, is partially destroyed and, again, locked with metal grates.  Nearby is an equally huge palace, also in ruins and also locked. 

I sat for a while in the shade of another building against the southern walls and ate some cookies I had brought with me, and then spent another two and half hours or so walking along the walls.  I think I read that the circumference of the fort walls is over three miles.  There are two little villages inside the fort, with some agricultural plots, and a big tank of water.  I saw some water buffalo with very long horns, painted bright orange.  I went through one gate on the southwest that led outside the fort to an opening in the wall of one of the moats and then up to the other side.  I disturbed a couple of guys taking dumps in the old moat.  Back in the fort, I found huge old cannons on some of the bastions.  The north and east walls of the fort sit upon rocky cliffs maybe a couple of hundred feet high, with a couple of intricate gateways.  Off to the east I could see the Bahmani tombs, about two miles away, and the nearby shrine of the Muslim saint.  Fighter jets roared through the sky at intervals all during the afternoon.  Boys were playing cricket in the vast open areas of the fort as I headed back about 5:30 to the gates I had entered in the morning.

In the approaching dusk I headed south from the fort through the walled city (Bidar has something less than 200,000 people and extends now beyond the old city walls) to an old madrassa (school) built in 1472 by a chief minister of the Bahmanis.   Boys were playing cricket all around it and the mosque in the madrassa filled with men just after sunset.  I took a quick look around and then walked a bit longer through town before taking an auto rickshaw back to my hotel.

The next morning I walked to some more of the Barid Shahi tombs, about five or ten of them, including those of the first and last kings, near my hotel.  They were not as impressive as the two I had seen my first afternoon in Bidar, and were in an ugly, recently redeveloped  park with light poles obstructing views and lots of animal mannequins.  Indians certainly know how to uglify a beautiful spot.  The two other Barid Shahi tombs are in much nicer natural surroundings. 

A little after 10 I took an autorickshaw back to the madrassa and looked around.  It has one thick minaret left, perhaps close to a hundred feet high.  The other one and a good part of the building were apparently destroyed when gunpowder stored in the madrassa exploded in the late 17th century.  Even with the second minaret and about one third of the building missing, it seems a huge structure.  It is four stories high and has dozens of beautiful jali screen windows.  Some very curious schoolkids from a small city in Karnataka were visiting the madrassa on a school trip and I posed for several photos with them and their teachers.  From the madrassa I walked two blocks to a round, 75 foot high watchtower in a city intersection, and from there down a street with bidri hammersmiths banging away at their craft.  Bidri is a beautiful form of silver, with silver etchings on a black background on vases and other objects.  About noon I came back to my hotel and spent most of the afternoon in an internet cafe before leaving about 5 and going back to the two Badri Shahi tombs I had visited my first afternoon in Bidar.  I stayed until after sunset.

December 20-26, 2012: Hyderabad

I left Warangal on a train bound for Hyderabad, about 85 miles to the southwest, just before 10 on the morning of the 20th.  It was crowded and I sat on my backpack near an open door, with two young Indians sitting on the floor in front of me with their legs dangling out the doorway.  I had a good view of the countryside, with cotton growing and lots of outcrops of big boulders.  Those marauding transvestites came through again, snatching the glasses of one of the fellows sitting in front of me when he didn't give him as much as they wanted.  I snatched them back and returned them to the guy.  For some reason, the transvestites for the most part leave me alone. 

We passed a fort on a big, rocky hill on the way and arrived in Secunderabad about 12:30.  Hyderabad and Secunderabad are twin cities, the former mostly south of a large man-made lake and the latter north of the lake.  I think it's all now one large municipality, one of India's largest cities with something like five to ten million people.  From the railway station, I took an autorickshaw through the clogged, polluted streets to a good hotel in Hyderabad and about 2:30 began to walk south along the very busy streets to the Musi River.  Hyderabad was founded by the Qutb Shahi monarchy in 1591 along the Musi River.  It was conquered by Aurangzeb (or actually his son) in 1687, but in 1724 (soon after Aurangzeb's death in 1707), as the Moghul Empire began to fall apart, the Nizam (or Governor) of Hyderabad became independent for all intents and purposes.  The Nizam sided with the British in their struggles in the late 18th century with the French and Mysore in south India and became a faithful ally of the British.  Hyderabad was the largest (about the size of France or  Italy) and highest ranking of the princely states under the British Raj.

Along the now dirty, polluted Musi River are three huge building built around the 1920's.  The first is the very run down Osmania Hospital, which was first rate when built.  It is white, with many impressive domes.  On the opposite (south) side of the river is the High Court, with red domes.  It is in much better shape.  I walked along the filthy river and crossed it near the third of these buildings, the City College, where boys were playing cricket in the yard and a student showed me around inside.  Passing the heavily secured High Court, I turned south along a clogged thoroughfare, passing all sorts of shops and street side vendors, and eventually reached the Charminar, built at the city's founding.  It is a four sided arch, about 100 feet wide on each side, with two stories perched high above the street and four minarets rising to more than 180 feet above the ground.  It is beautifully decorated and the area was full of people.  You can climb up narrow staircases to the first floor for the view, but it was near closing time, so I left that till later.  The story above is a mosque, now closed.  I watched the big crowds and talked for a while with a friendly English speaking guy.  Hyderabad is largely Muslim and a very large proportion of the women were veiled and dressed in black robes.  Nearby are the bazaars, which were also clogged with people.  About 6, as it was getting dark, I took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel.  For dinner I had an "Andhra Meal," with lots of rice and four vegetable dishes served on a banana leaf, with a banana and pan (a betel nut concoction) for dessert.

The next morning about 9 I took an autorickshaw to the Golconda Fort, which used to be west of Hyderabad but now is surrounded by the city.  This is quite a fine fort, perched on a rocky hill about 400 feet high.  (Hyderabad is at about 1600 feet elevation, I think.)  There had been forts here previously, but it was the Qutb Shahis in the 16th century who made the fort what it is.  They established their independence from the Bahmani Empirre in 1518 and Golconda was always their main fortification, even after Hyderabad was built in 1591 because of disease arising from water scarcity at Golconda.  There were three rings of defensive walls, and I passed the middle one, perhaps a little less than a mile, from the citadel on my arrival.  I wandered around inside for almost five hours.  Lots of people were arriving when I arrived at 9, but by late morning they were pouring in.  I wandered around the gardens and palaces and then climbed up the rocky hill to the durbar hall on the summit, where there were great views, despite the ever present Indian haze, of the lower walls and the countryside.  You could see the domed Qutb Shahi tombs to the north, just beyond the second set of walls.  This set of walls has eight gates and 87 bastions.  The weather was really very nice, warm and sunny (in the mid or high 80's), but not too hot, and in fact cool in the shade.  It is supposed to be very hot here in April and May.  I walked down to the extensive palaces at the foot of the hill.  There were bats in part of the harem.  There are big water tanks and the remains of terracotta pipes.  Water wheels used to help transfer water up to the summit.  Golconda was fabulously rich, famous for its diamonds, from the diamond mines south along the Krishna River.  In fact, the Koh-i-Noor, the huge diamond now a part of the British royal crown, came from Golconda. 

I planned to walk to the Qutb Shahi tombs, but was told they were closed that day, a Friday, so after a small lunch just outside the citadel walls, I walked through the streets to the Naya Qila, or New Fort, dating from the 17th century (I think) and adjacent to the second set of walls.  A golf course has been created inside the fort walls in the last couple of years, with smelly waste water used to water the grass.  In places I saw the water foaming into a thick lather, quite odd and unappealing.  I stopped to see a giant baobab, brought from Africa and more than 80 feet in diameter, near a small mosque, and then climbed a couple of the bastions of the fort.  A huge cannon, maybe 20 feet long, was on top of one, in part covered with weeds.  A friendly security guard, who had worked as a truck driver in Saudi Arabia for years, showed me around and I sat and chatted with him next to an old mosque.  The developer of the golf course came along, playing golf with his grandson and an American guy who I think was perhaps his son-in-law, and introduced himself, telling me about the golf course.  I walked around some more and eventually through the town to the Fateh Darwaza, one of the big gates in the second set of walls, before getting an auto rickshaw back.

The next morning I took an auto rickshaw to the Mecca Masjid, just south of the Charminar.  It is India's second biggest mosque, begun by the Qutb Shahis but finished by Aurangzeb, with room for 10,000 people in the courtyard and minarets rising to 75 feet.  It is not particularly beautiful, though.  There were many pigeon droppings and large nets to keep the pigeons from entering the enclosed areas of the mosque.  Nearby are the graves of most of the Nizams, five of the seven, I think.  A bomb went off at the mosque in 2007, so there is enhanced security.  Leaving the mosque, I walked over and entered the Charminar.  There isn't much to see inside after you climb up the narrow staircase, but the views are interesting.  A couple of guys selling very pink cotton candy below spotted me, and happily posed for photos.  It was crowded there, but somewhat less crowded that morning than it had been my first late afternoon there.

From the Charminar I walked over to the Chowmahalla Palace, built for the Nizams from about 1750 until the 1800's.  It is actually four palaces, plus a beautiful durbar hall where the Nizams were crowned.  The Durbar Hall had many spectacular chandeliers and a marble pedestal for the throne of the Nizam.  In the 1930's and 1940's the Nizam was considered the world's richest man, with gold, silver and jewels stored in trucks in his palaces.  The seventh and last Nizam, who ruled from 1911 to 1948 and died in 1967, was, however, an eccentric and miserly man who is said to have worn the same shabby clothes every day.  He was a Muslim and wanted to unite with Pakistan in 1947.  The Princely State of Hyderabad was surrounded by India and its population was overwhelmingly Hindu, although the city of Hyderabad was largely Muslim and there many Muslim villages.  In 1948 the Nizam declared his independence and India invaded, crushing his army quickly, with much murder and rape following.  You read nothing of this in the background history at the palaces and other places.  The Nizam later became a sort of ceremonial governor of Hyderabad state until it was dissolved in 1956. 

There were many very interesting photos in the palace, especially those of the daughter-in-law of the last Nizam.  She and her sister, both daughters of the last Turkish Caliph, were married to sons of the Nizam in 1931 (in Nice, of all places).  She was a beautiful woman.  The captions say she was the most beautiful woman of her time, and she certainly married well, or at least financially well.  Her son is the current, powerless, Nizam.

There was lots of other interesting stuff in the palaces, including paintings and ceramics, furniture and old automobiles, including a 1920's Fiat and Wolseley (which I have never heard of), both with starter cranks in front) and a 1950's Packard and Buick convertible, and even motorcycles, including a clunky looking Harley Davidson and one with a logo of a winged "W."  I spent about four hours wandering through these palaces and then walked through the bazaars before making my way back to my hotel.  Before independence, Hyderabad is supposed to have been full of wonderful palaces of the Nizam and his nobles, but most have been pulled down and replaced by ugly concrete buildings. 

The next morning I took an autorickshaw back to the Golconda Fort, and then walked to the Qutb Shahi tombs, passing another gateway of the second set of walls along the way, with a stagnant moat along the walls to one side.  I spent almost four hours wandering around the tombs of the seven Qutb Shahi monarchs, dating from the 16th and 17th centuries.  The tomb of the last monarch is unfinished, as he was deposed by Aurangzeb in 1687 and died imprisoned in the fort at Daulatabad to the north, near Aurangabad..  The tombs have bulbous domes, said to be three-fourths of a sphere, set on square, usually multi-storied bases with the graves inside.  In one tomb, the caretaker took me down below to the real grave of the king, using matches and my flashlight to guide our way.  The tombs became increasingly large and elaborate as time went by.  Besides the kings, there are tombs for at least one queen, a couple of hakims (doctors) and at least two dancers/courtesans.  There is also a large bath building where the royal bodies were bathed before burial.  The whole complex is a pleasant places, with lots of trees.  Some of the tombs are in ruins, and others well kept up.  There were big crowds there by midday.

I took an autorickshaw back to the city center and visited the State Museum in an old British era building.  It contains some relics of the Buddha and copies of the Ajanta frescoes.  (Ajanta was in the Nizam's domains.)  There is also a very high, perhaps 20 or 30 feet, wooden cart for religious processions.  Nearby is the Health Museum, which seems little changed since it was established about 1950.  There is a photo of Nehru visiting in 1953.  Despite its age, and in some way because of its age, it was interesting, with exhibits on diet and diseases and pregnancy, among other things.  Formaldehyde bottles contained human fetuses from one to nine months old, plus several Siamese twins.  Also nearby are the Public Gardens and the Legislative Chamber, formerly the Town Hall, with a very large statue in front of Gandhi sitting cross legged.  I walked up to the 1970's Birla Mandir, a temple on  a hill overlooking the lake, but didn't go in because of the long lines.  I did talk with a engineer who moved here from New Delhi to work in the "Hitech City" that was built in the western suburbs starting in the late '90's.  Hyderabad, nicknamed Cyberabad, is now India's leading IT center.  He told me there are 350 businesses in Hitech City, which is solely commercial and not residential, and that you can't enter without ID and clearance.  

The next morning I walked to Osmania Woman's College, centered on the crumbling former British Residency, built about 1800.  It was built by the first British Resident, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, who dressed in Moghul style, married a Muslim princess, and was rumored to have converted to Islam.  The huge building, however, is quite Western, with columns in front flanked by two British lions.  Inside the dusty rooms of the cavernous, almost empty building are chandeliers, large mirrors, a few old portraits and a winding staircase to the second floor.  It is a shame it is so dusty and deserted.  Around it are newer buildings of the college, with lots of women students around when I was there, probably wondering what I was doing there.  I was escorted by a cranky, old security guard.

From there I went to the Salar Jung Museum, a collection of a nobleman during the Nizam's time.  The modern museum building was filled with people, which made viewing the contents difficult.  I later read that the museum was averaging 13,000 people a day in this Christmas-New Year's holiday period, when many Indians travel, compared to an average of 4,000 on a typical weekday.  And I was disappointed by the contents.  The European stuff was somewhat interesting, if not particularly high quality, including a lot of paintings and sculpture by now obscure 19th and early 20th century painters and sculptors.  Highlighted is the "Veiled Rebecca," said to be considered a masterpiece at one time.  There is a photo of the Nizam gazing at it.

Nearby is the H.E.H. Nizam's Museum in an old dilapidated palace.  (The H.E.H. stands for "His Exalted Highness," the only such title given to any Indian prince by the British.)  A large part of the collection consisted of gaudy silver objects presented to the Seventh Nizam at the time of his Silver Jubilee in 1937.  But there were also some interesting historical displays and one long room that contained, on both sides of the room, teak wardrobes two levels high and each about 230 feet long.  Apparently, the Sixth Nizam, quite unlike the Seventh, never wore the same clothes twice.  Some of his clothes are on display.  In the museum compound are a couple of other very large palace buildings, one in very derelict condition, with broken windows, peeling paint and even some collapsing walls.  I had an early mutton biryani dinner a little after 5 near the bazaars and then walked back to my hotel through the thick early evening traffic.

The next day was Christmas and I decided to take a tour and visit Ramoji Film City, which proudly describes itself (on a sign maybe 30 feet high) as the Guinness Book of Records holder of the title of world's biggest film studio, with 1666 acres and 47 sound stages, where not only Telegu (the language of Andhra Pradesh) movies, but movies in Hindi and other Indian languages, are made.  It also is a big tourist attraction.  It's about 15 miles from the city, in a hilly area, and it took our bus about an hour and a half to get there.  The entrance fee is quite steep for India at 700 rupees (about $13), but there were thousands of people there.  We arrived about 11 and stayed until 7, a lot more time than I would have preferred.  (And yet an Indian lady, from Calcutta, told me at the end of the day that there just wasn't time to see it all.)  There are dance shows and a weird stunt show on a Wild West set, including Deadwood Saloon, but where both the good guys and the bad guys arrive on motorcycles.  They played to huge, appreciative audiences.  I guess it's a little bit like a cut rate Disneyland, including a Wild West section (with a Gunsmoke Restaurant), a Hollywood section (with statues of Stallone as Rambo, Schwarzeneggar as the Terminator, Jim Carrey as the Mask and Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, all with many people posing happily next to them), and a "Fundustan" with rides. 

I took a bus tour with several stops that passed by sound stages and sets, including one area said to be London, an airport entrance and a train station, among other places.  We stopped by an enclosed area with hundreds of butterflies, large ones with magenta bodies and black wings, and I spent a while in there.  A bonsai area was interesting, with even bonsai baobab and peepul trees.  There was a fake cave with colored lights and a mock battle between a moving giant cobra and giant rat.  I got back to my hotel about 8:30, had a late dinner and watched India and Pakistan play cricket on television.

I spent most of the next day at an internet cafe, with a couple of forays to a camera service shop conveniently close to my hotel to have a black fuzzy spot (apparently dust) removed from the inside of my camera.  I had bought this camera just last March in Bombay, so it was still under warranty.

December 16-19, 2012: Taboda-Andhari National Park and Warangal

On the morning of the 16th, I left Warangal, taking an autorickshaw to the neighboring town of Kazipet and arriving at the railway station just in time to catch the train heading north to Chandrapur, about 150 miles away in the state of Maharashtra.  This train was a "Super Fast Express" heading from Hyderabad to New Delhi and was crowded.  I didn't have a reserved seat, but eventually got a place to sit.  The fast train passed through increasingly drier, but still green, terrain, with rice and cotton and other crops, but also lots of scrub.  We crossed the Godavari and other rivers and reached Chandrapur just before 1 p.m., a little over four hours from Kazipet.  About 2:30 I caught a very crowded bus, though I did get a seat (saved for me by a guy who instructed an old woman sitting next to him to move to another seat) on the bumpy road further north to the village of Moharli.  We passed a huge open pit coal mine on the way, with mountains of tailings on the other side of the road. 

It took only about an hour to get to Moharli, a small village at the southern edge of Tadoba-Andhari National Park, a tiger reserve.  I got off near the interesting village market.  There were a lot of police around and I had seen a helicopter on the way into the village.  I walked through the village looking for a place to stay and arrived at the gates of the park, where I noticed two other westerners.  They were Australians who were visiting India for the wedding of an Indian friend from Chandrapur who now lives and works in Australia.  They were hoping to enter the park that afternoon, but it turned out that the Chief Minister of Maharashtra was touring the park (hence the helicopter and police) and all others were forbidden entry till he left.  We chatted and waited for the Chief Minister, as did the District Collector and other dignitaries, some with bouquets of flowers.  I had asked about sharing a gypsy (a jeep-like vehicle) with them for touring the park and they agreed.  Sometime after 5, with the Chief Minister nowhere to be seen, they gave up on being able to enter the park and decided to go to another area nearby and try again in the morning.  They were staying in Chandrapur and I decided to go with them and stay there after checking out one very expensive, though not very nice, hotel in Moharli.  We took off in their vehicle with a driver and their newly-wed friend.  We did drive into a bit of the forest in the dusk and saw some sambar deer.  On the way back to Chandrapur in the dark we spotted some of the spotted chital deer in our headlights.  The hotel in Chandrapur was expensive, almost 1000 rupees, but was fairly decent.

I was up the next morning before 4:30 and we left at 5 for Moharli.  Along the road outside of the city numerous people were defecating in the dark along the road.  One of the Australians exclaimed in surprise, "They are all dumping!"  A large proportion were women.  I've been told, or read, that it is immodest for women to defecate in public during daylight hours, so perhaps that explains the large proportion of women.  Last year I read that a higher proportion of households in India have telephones than have toilets of any kind. 

We got to Moharli and the gate shortly after 5:30.  Our entry was arranged and we entered about 6:30, with it getting light about 6.  Tadoba is at about 600 feet elevation and it was chilly in the early morning.  We heard a sambar warning call and waited, but without luck.  The guide said there was a tigress with four cubs in the area.  We drove north through the teak forest (there was also lots of bamboo, more than I've ever seen anywhere else) and spotted sambar and chital, but no tigers.  The two Australians had to drive to Nagpur, three hours away, in time to catch a 1:30 flight, so we left the park about 8:15 so they could get back to Chandrapur by 9.  We could have stayed until 10:30, so that was disappointing.  On the other hand, it turned out that the safari was paid for by their friend, so I got it free, too, much to my surprise.  Tadoba doesn't charge foreigners more than Indians, unlike the other tiger parks I've been to, but it still is somewhat expensive:  2700 rupees ($50) per safari in total, with the gypsy at 1500, the guide at 200 and entry at 1000.

I drove back to the hotel in Chandrapur with them and had breakfast at the hotel while deciding whether to try other safaris.  Eventually, I decided against it, as I was told it was very unlikely I could share with others and that tiger spotting was much harder in December than in the hot months.  I had such good luck last April in Kanha and Bandhavgarh that I was pretty well satisfied with tiger spottings. 

I got to the railway station about noon and my train back to Warangal arrived about 45 minutes later.  A digital temperature display at the station registered 35 degrees Celsius (95 Farenheit), but it didn't feel that warm.  Most of the temperatures I've seen in the newspapers have shown highs in the upper 80's and lows around 60.  The train was the return from Delhi of the same "Super Fast Express" I'd taken the day before.  With just a general, unreserved ticket, you are not supposed to travel in the carriages with reserved seats, though it seems that people always do so, and generally people make way for them, sitting four or five to a bench supposedly for three.  On the previous day's train the conductor had told me I should be in the general seating carriage and that I would have to pay extra.  I gave him an uncomprehending look (which I've perfected, perhaps because it comes naturally) and he decided I wasn't worth the trouble, sighed and turned away. 

The general seating carriages are at the beginning and end of each train, and as the train entered the station the general seating carriage at the front didn't look crowded, so I hurried forward to board it.  Once I got there, I saw I was badly mistaken and it was packed.  Nonetheless, I hopped aboard and jammed myself in, and others jammed in behind me as the train started up.  A big guy saw me being pushed and motioned me forward and then pulled me and my pack towards him, motioning me to put my backpack on the rack above (where another guy used it as a pillow) while he squeezed me onto a spot on the bench with him and five others, a bench made for four people.  They were a very friendly bunch and did their best to make me comfortable.  The seats and aisles were jammed.  The guy who had found me a seat gave me his card.  His name was Md. (for Mohammed) Shakeel Khan of M.P. Repairing Works, "Holemaker Specialist in Marble and Granite, Demolition Work Undertaken, Hard Concrete Breaker." 

Despite the cramped conditions, I enjoyed the trip with these friendly people, all men.  One very talkative guy spoke pretty good English, offered me tea when a tea wallah came by, and when I declined said, "Please let me buy you tea."  He bought tea for about eight of us.  Feet dangled down from the guys sitting on the luggage racks and people could barely move through the aisles.  Still, a singing, begging family of a mother and two children came through, as did two or three transvestites together who apparently demanded money from people, most of whom seemed to meekly hand it over to them.  I'll have to remember to ask someone about that.  The talkative English speaker sitting near me didn't explain it to me to my satisfaction.  We arrived in Kazipet soon after 5, and soon after 6 I got a train to Warangal, less than ten miles away.  I checked into the same nice hotel I'd stayed in before.

The next morning I had the hotel's complimentary breakfast, two idli (a sponging, rice bun) and a vada (a sort of mildly spicy donut), served with a coconut yogurt based sauce and a tomato based sauce.  About 9 I headed to the old Warangal Fort area south of the city.  Warangal was founded by the Hindu Kakatiya Kingdom in the late 12th century, and the Kakatiyas ruled the area until conquered by the Delhi Sultanate in 1323.  At the center are the ruins of a temple, with four restored gates and a lot of interesting scattered sculpture.  I roamed around there for a while and then walked to a nearby large hall built about 1500.  Four roads radiate from the temple and I walked the one to the west and reached the intact inner wall of stone, 20 feet high, with an impressive gate.  I walked further to the second line of earthen walls, but with another impressive stone gate.  There is a third line of walls further out. People were friendly, surprised, I guess, to see a foreigner walking about.  I took an autorickshaw back to the city center and came across a labor demonstration, with red flags bearing hammers and sickles, blocking an intersection.  I was told by a fellow bystander that they were only going to do if for fifteen minutes. 

About 2:30 in the afternoon I took an autorickshaw north to the Kakatiya "Thousand Pillar Temple" built in 1163.  It seems about 990 pillars short.  But it had some interesting sculpture and a massive Nandi (Shiva's vehicle, a bull) statue in front.  People were very friendly and I was much photographed.  I met an Indian couple from Cincinnati and an English couple from Yorkshire as I spent most of the afternoon there watching the goings on.  Back at the hotel I climbed up a little more than a hundred feet to the temple under construction on top of the pile of boulders next to my  hotel.  There was a fairly good view over the city at sunset from the top.

The next morning I watched a woman as she made a rangoli, a design in chalk drawn each morning in front of doorways to deter evil spirits.  I've seen a lot of these in Andhra Pradesh.  Dick and Chris, the English couple I had met the day before, and I had decided to hire a car to visit the Ramappa Temple at Palampet, about 40 miles northeast of Warangal.  We set off after 9 through flat terrain with hills in the distance.  Rice was in abundance, as was cotton and palm trees.  We passed many bullock carts, often laden with rice.  We reached the 13th century temple about 11 and spent almost two hours there.  The sculpture was particularly beautiful.  The temple is made of a yellow sandstone, with some white streaks, but much of the sculpture is of a shiny black basalt.  Many of the female figures, dancers and musicians, are much taller and thinner than other Indian sculpture.  Some of them were placed as brackets, maybe six feet or more long, along the roof of the temple.  They were quite striking.  One had her sari being pulled off by a monkey.  It was all quite interesting.  Inside was more black basalt sculpture on the walls, pillars, roof and entrance to the inner sanctum.  There were hundreds of figures.  A Nandi lay in front of the temple, and another temple nearby had a Nandi in its center.  A third temple was being pulled apart by heavy machinery, with the numbered pieces placed nearby, presumably for later reconstruction.

After the temple, we drove to nearby Ramappa Lake, a reservoir built by the Kakatiya.  An old, very dilapidated temple is next to the lake and I explored inside, with many of the stones in a jumble.  It gives you an idea of what the much larger Ramappa Temple was like before restoration.  Nearby you could also see the sluice where water leaves the reservoir, presumably to irrigate farmland.  We headed back towards Warangal and stopped where a bullock cart was being emptied of burlap sacks of rice, to be later picked up by trucks.  We were taking photos when a journalist stopped by (his motorcycle said "Press") and took photos of us.  He had me climb onto the bullock cart, where I took the reins and was given a stick to pretend I was driving the cart.  He said it would be in the next day's newspaper.  A bunch of local people gathered around and seemed quite amused with us.  I looked for the photograph in the newspaper the next morning before I left Warangal, but didn't see it.  Dick later emailed me that he got a copy and will scan and email it to me.

December 11-15, 2012: From Jagdalpur to Andhra Pradesh

In Jagdalpur on the morning of the 11th I was looking forward to the leisurely and scenic train ride through the Eastern Ghats back towards Visakhapatmnam and the coast, but when I got to the train station I was told the train had been cancelled and that it wasn't certain for the next day.  There is only one train each way per day, as this line appears to service primarily a huge iron ore mine at Kirandul in southern Chattisgarh.  I had seen many freight trains on my way from the coast, each with more than fifty open top freight cars, full of iron ore on the way to the coast and empty on the return trip.

I made my way to the bus station and was told there was a bus at 10:30, arriving in Visakhapatnam at 9, which didn't sound appealing.  Two Indian guys at the bus station approached me and suggested hiring a car to take us to Visakhapatnam.  We were charged seven rupees a kilometer for the 644 kilometer round trip, so a little over 4500 rupees, over $80, a lot more expensive than the train fare of less than $2.  But I decided to do it and enjoyed the trip.  After making the arrangements, we left soon after 10, crossing flat terrain at first and reaching the Chattisgarh-Odisha state line after about half an hour.  Some of the roads in Odisha were terrible, but it was by and large a comfortable and interesting ride.  We passed many bullock carts, often filled with rice.  A few hills appeared as we neared Jeypore and we had a steep climb on a terrible road through the jungle covered hills on the way to Koraput.  From Koraput we did not follow the train route through the Araku Valley, but headed southeast through other scenic hills on a road rising to 3500 feet on the way to Andhra Pradesh.  We made a lunch stop near Salur just after crossing the Andhra Pradesh state line and reaching the coastal plain.  We reached Visakhapatnam soon after 5, but with the rush hour traffic we didn't reach my hotel until about 6.  I tried for a room at another one than the one I had stayed in before, but no rooms were available, so I ended up where I had been before, but with no bedbugs. 

The next morning about 10 I left on a train heading about 125 miles southwest to Rajahmudry on the Godavari Delta, arriving about 2.  The train was crowded, but I got a seat with some engineering students headed from Ranchi to Bangalore and opposite a family from Kerala.  The Eastern Ghats were visible to the west as we passed rice fields and palm trees.  In Rajahmundry I checked into a good hotel at 800 rupees per night just across from the train station.  There wasn't much to see in town, but I did look around the train station, where a long freight train full of coal was waiting.  For dinner I had a south Indian "Full Meal" for about a dollar that included lots of rice, plus dhal, three vegetables, curd, papadam and a banana for dessert.  Andhra Pradesh is one of the four large southern states of India, all four organized on a language basis.  The languages of the south are Dravidian, not Indo-European like those of the north, and have different alphabets, too, with very curly letters.  (Odisha, though it speaks an Indo-European language, also uses a different alphabet than the north, and it, too is very roundish and curly.)  The people of Andhra Pradesh are generally much darker than those of the north, too.  The state is huge, with over 80 million people, though there is a movement to break it into two states. 

The next morning I headed to the banks of the very wide Godavari about 7 and about 8 headed north along the east bank of the river on a bus for about an hour and a half on a narrow road through many little villages, with Christmas stars and even posters of Mary and Jesus here and there in celebration of Christmas.  I saw a few small churches, too.  We got out of the bus along the river and about 10 left on a tourist boat headed up the river to the gorges of the Papi Hills.  This was a scenic journey through lovely, green, forested hills, with some rocky banks here and there, and sandy ones, too.  We passed thatched roofed villages and a few canoes.  Lots of herons flew along the river and I saw large numbers of bats in several riverside trees.  But the boat was packed and noisy, with very load music and an annoying emcee.  I was the only westerner.  We made several stops along the way and had both a breakfast and a lunch on board.  At about 2 we reached a spot called Papikonda, with a temple and very small waterfall, and spent maybe 45 minutes there.  The trip downstream was better, quieter and with fewer passengers (as some were spending the night along the river).  We disembarked about 6, just as it was getting dark, and took the bus back to Rajahmundry, passing lit up Christmas stars along the way.  There were also large numbers of very overloaded sugar cane trucks, moving very slowly. 

I didn't leave Rajahmundry until about 11:30 the next morning, on a train bound for Vijayawada, further southwest, traveling through the rich green farmland of the Godavari and Krishna Deltas.  These two major rivers of southern India rise far inland, near Bombay.  The train wasn't crowded, but the scheduled three hour journey took five hours, with a very long delay just before reaching Vijayawada.  We passed lots of stacks of rice, lots of water and lots of palm trees.  The terrain was flat, except for a few hills near Vijayawada, which is on the banks of the Krishna.  I had trouble getting a hotel, and finally ended up in a not so good one for 850 rupees, far overpriced.  It was on a quiet street, though.  The street had several shoe stores on it.  I've seen this before in India:  streets that have store after store all selling the same thing. 

I thought I might spend two nights in Vijayawada, but couldn't get a room in a better hotel the next morning, so decided to skip a trip to the ancient Buddhist site at Amaravathi, 30 or 40 miles away.  Amaravathi had India's largest stupa, though it is now only a pile of dirt with a nearby museum.  Before leaving Vijayawada, a city of more than a million people, I did pay a visit to Victoria Jubilee Museum, a very small building built to commemorate her 50 years on the throne in 1887.  Inside was a massive portrait of her, maybe ten feet by six feet.  Below that, oddly, was a much smaller portrait of Napoleon, and surrounding it were copies of paintings by Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt.  The building had a frieze of elephants, camels and dogs, and a statue of a turbaned guy out front.  In the garden were Hindu sculpture and massive Dutch gravestones from the 17th century, some of the gravestones seven feet high.  At a 1921 meeting of the Congress Party here, the tricolor Indian flag was adopted, with the wheel in the center added by Gandhi. 

Soon after noon I left the city on a crowded train heading away from the coast and into the Deccan towards Warangal, about 125 miles away.  We passed through green countryside with hills to the east before the terrain flattened out.  We rose from about 40 feet above sea level to almost 900.  The countryside, though still green, became drier, and while there was still rice growing, there were other crops, notably lots of cotton and some corn.  I began to see outcrops of giant boulders.  The train arrived in Warangal about 3:30 and I got a nice, but relatively expensive (840 rupees, about $15-16) hotel near the station and right next to an outcrop of giant boulders that towered over the three or four story hotel.  After checking in, I walked around the train station and found an interesting notice on a bulletin board put up by the All India OBC Railway Employees Association.  It contain three demands:  Reservations in Promotions for OBCs; Abolish Creamy Layer; and Enhance OBC Reservation as per Population Ratio of OBCs (27-52).  OBCs are "Other Backward Castes."  The 1950 Indian Constitution made special protections for certain "Scheduled Castes and Tribes" and years later other low castes (the OBCs) claimed that they, too, need protections.  A big issue in India now is whether a certain proportion of promotions should be guaranteed to SCs and STs, and even OBCs.  There already exist hiring quotas for SCs, STs, and OBCs.  I find it interesting that they described themselves as "backward."  And I liked the "Abolish Creamy Layer," whatever that refers to.

December 6 - 10, 2012: Jagdalpur and the Bastar Region

Disappointed that I couldn't visit the weekly Onkadelli market, I walked to Jeypore's bus station the morning of the 6th to see about buses west to Jagdalpur, in Chhattisgarh state.  My hotel had told me there was a bus every hour or half hour, but at the station they said the next one would be at 1 in the afternoon.  I spent a leisurely morning at the hotel and then walked to the bus station before 1.  There was no bus at 1, but I was told there would be one at 2 or 2:30.  I think perhaps the Naxalites were still threatening buses.  Rather than wait any more at that fly-blown bus station, I made my way to the railway station and bought a ten rupee (less than twenty cents) ticket to Jagdalpur.  The train arrived about 3, only 35 minutes late (it had been two hours late the day before), and I hopped on and enjoyed the pleasant late afternoon journey past more rice fields, most already harvested, and reapers and threshers.  Arriving in Jagdalpur, at somwhat under 2000 feet elevation, at 4:30, I was asked by an Indian guy also getting off the train, "Are you going to the Rainbow Hotel?  Are you traveling with the Lonely Planet?"  We headed to the hotel together.  Rahul, from Pune, is a medical doctor who later studied anthropology and now works as a consultant in advertising.

Early the next morning, I walked to the whitewashed, blue trimmed former local palace that now seems to be a school, passing a multi-story statue of the monkey god Hanuman along the way.  I also saw a huge, derelict wooden cart, with wooden wheels maybe three or four feet in diameter.  Perhaps it has been used for religious processions.  After breakfast, Rahul and I went to a crafts emporium, with some very fine, and quite inexpensive, tribal crafts.  At 11 we caught a small bus headed west to Chitrakote Falls, about 25 miles to the west, on the Indravati River, a tributary of the Godavari.  The trip took about an hour and a half through flat, dry landscape, much of it harvested rice fields.  The bus dropped us right at the falls, India's broadest, about 1000 feet wide (at least during and just after the monsoon), in a semicircular curve.  They are said to be two thirds the size of Niagara.  The falls are much diminished from their monsoon breadth, but still are very impressive.  An immense amount of water crashes down more than 100 feet over the steep semicircular cliffs.  Now there are two separate plunges of water, side by side.  From photographs, I can see that there are at least two more (now dry) at the height of the monsoon.  You can walk right up to the top of the falls.  The Indian tourists there were friendly and I was photographed quite a lot.  I walked down to the river at the base of the falls, passing soldiers with rifles on the way, no doubt protecting us from Naxalites.  You can take a boat ride and get immersed in the mist at the base of the falls.  I walked all over and sat here and there and enjoyed the views before boarding the bus for the very crowded trip back to town at 4.  (Rahul had arranged to spend the night at a hotel near the falls.)

The next morning I tried without success to get a bus to one of the weekly tribal markets, or haats, at Mardum, near Jagdalpur.  I had no success and eventually gave up and spent most of the afternoon at an internet cafe.  Later, sitting in my hotel lobby reading newspapers about 6, I heard music and drumming and went to investigate.  A wedding procession was forming, setting out from a men's wear shop.  The white horse and about ten large light standards were waiting on the road off to the side, and several older men, some in colorful turbans with long tails, were sitting and standing in front of the shop.  Sweets were being passed out to them.  After a short while, the horse was brought up to the shop (where it proceeded to deposit a large pile of manure), women placed the light standards on their heads, and the turbaned groom emerged from the shop and mounted the horse via a plastic chair.  Some of the wedding party pulled me out from the crowd to get a good vantage point for photographing the groom on his horse, and then I was photographed with the groom and horse.  Finally, I was pulled into the knot of dancing men in the procession, where I participated briefly, no doubt to great amusement, before melting back into the crowd.

Rahul was back in town the next morning and about 9:30 the next morning he and I left on a chartered autorickshaw and headed generally southeast from Jagdalpur about 25 miles towards Kanger National Park and the Kutumsar Cave.  We left the plains surrounding Jagdalpur and entered hilly terrain covered with sal forest in the park.  At one spot we had a view across the jungle to Tirathghar Falls, another hundred foot or so waterfall.  We passed a tribal village surrounded by mustard fields in the park not too far from the cave.  The cave has a very narrow entrance, only discovered by the local people by the presence of bats.  The limestone cave reaches about 70 feet below the surface and is quite long, about 1000 feet.  We had a guide with a strong light who guided up through.  I think I enjoyed the ride through the forest more than the cave.  The only animals we saw were macaques. 

On the way back to Jagdalpur, we stopped about 1 o'clock at the weekly Pamela haat about six miles from town.  At these haats, held weekly in various spots, the tribal people come from their villages to trade and socialize.  Chhattisgarh is, by percentage, the most heavily tribal state in India, with 42 different tribes.  This haat is held in a lovely grove of sal trees beside the road and was filled with cattle and water buffalo for sale.  We were told a big cow would go for about $500.  Besides the livestock area tended by men, there was a produce and fried food section tended mainly by women, most of them with interesting nose rings.  People were friendly and didn't seem to mind being photographed.  We were the only tourists there.  Palm toddy, called salfi, and a stronger liquor called mahwa made from the flowers of the tree of the same name were on sale, dispensed from plastic jugs and old beer bottles.  I had a sip or so of each.  The milky palm toddy was not very alcoholic and tasted good.  The clear mahwa was stronger, but not all that strong, and without as pleasant a taste.  (When I declined to drink more, Rahul told me one of the men asked him about me, "What does he do for enjoyment in life?")  We wandered around, watching all the activity and trying to avoid the tipsy guy who tried to latch onto us.  Quite a few men were holding their prize fighting cocks, preparing for the cock fights to take place later in the afternoon in a circular area limited by barbed wire. 

We watched several of the cockfights, attended by large numbers of men pressed against the outside of the barbed wire.  Many were betting on them.  I saw hundred rupee notes being waved around.  In the center of the ring, two men would hold their cocks opposite each other, spurring them to confront each other.  Each cock had a sharp blade, maybe two inches long, attached to one leg.  Finally, the two cocks were put on the ground and went at each other.  Sometimes the fights were intense, with flapping wings and a lot of action.  Other times it seemed to be over rather quickly, with one cock making a decisive, quick attack.  The first drawing of blood ends the fight.  One or two of the cocks died rather quickly after being wounded, but others seemed to survive and were taken away.  The dead ones were left on the floor of the ring.  We were told there might be 25 cockfights in all, but we left after maybe five of them.  We headed back to town soon after 3, as Rahul had a bus to catch to Raipur, on his way back to Pune.  After he left I looked around the weekly Jagdalpur market, near the hotel.  It was quite large, with tribal women also, but not nearly as atmospheric as the Pamela market.

The next day I chartered another autorickshaw to take me to another weekly haat, this one at Tokapal, about 11 miles from Jagdalpur.  I got there about 1 and it was much larger than the Pamela haat.  There were thousands of tribal people, a very colorful affair.  There were no livestock (other than chickens and ducks) and no cock fighting that I saw.  On sale were all sorts of produce, including mahwa flowers and the sticks used for brushing teeth.  I wandered all around in the sun, seeking shade when I could find it.  I noticed that almost all the older women were tattooed (usually just dots) while almost all the younger women were not.  Again, there were lots of elaborate nose rings.  Few of the older women wore the short upper garment, called a choli, I think, that Indian women usually wear under their sari. 

Among the many things on sale were huge baskets, maybe six feet high, clay pots (I saw one sold for ten rupees), and the bell-metal objects made through the lost wax process by the Ghadawa people.  There were bells, cows, elephants and other figures and I would have liked to have bought some if I didn't have to carry them for months.  I watched people bringing sacks or even shopping bags full of unhusked rice to be weighed on a large scale.  A man with a handfull of cash paid them after the weighing, and then the rice was dumped onto a large pile behind the scales while the sellers would go off to spend their new cash.  Nearby, chickens were being sold, 70 rupees (about $1.30) a chicken.  Purchasers would pick them out of their baskets by their legs or wings and examine them before buying. 

I walked all around, but spent most of my time near the women selling palm toddy and mahwa at one end of the market.  The sellers that I saw were all women, selling the stuff from plastic jugs, metal pots, and old beer bottles.  Most of it was poured into green leafs pinched at one end to make a cup, the leaves discarded after drinking.  Another woman was selling slices of potato, dipped into batter, and then deep fried.  A field of rice stubble nearby was filled with people, almost all women, drinking.  Towards 3 o'clock I noticed that streams of people, mostly women, were leaving the market, but many of them stopped off to drink toddy or mahwa before going.  I even saw one mother give some mahwa to her maybe ten or twelve year old son.  It was all quite a scene and I enjoyed it.  People were friendly, though mostly shy.  There were no other tourists there.  In fact, I haven't seen any western tourists here in Jagdalpur.  My driver came and got me around 3:30 and we left about 4.  These haats are said to end about nightfall.  As we headed back to town, we passed groups of mostly barefoot women walking along the highway, returning to their villages after the haat.

November 29 - December 5, 2012: Visakhapatnam, Araku, Koraput, and Jeypore

On the 29th, my last morning in Puri, I walked out to the beach fronting the fishing village soon after sunrise to watch all the activity.  The waves were smaller, so the boats had an easier time coming and going.  I saw the shell and remnants of the carcass of an olive ridley turtle on the sand.  The head was gone, as was most of the body.  The two front flippers remained.  A few crows picked at it until a dog shooed them away and pulled out some viscera to eat.  Olive ridley turtles nest along the coast here in the thousands, usually during the full moon in February, I think.  Back on the beach closer to my hotel, some women and girls were holding some sort of ceremony, with lots of marigolds and incense.  They were making mounds and designs in the sand.  After they finished, I noticed the mound was a representation of a woman delivering a baby.

I left Puri on an uncrowded train about 12:30 that first traveled about 25 miles inland to reach the main east coast line, and then headed southwest a hundred miles or so, passing the large, scenic, salt water Lake Chilika and lots and lots of rice fields, some being harvested and some already harvested.  It was all very scenic, in the late afternoon sun, with little hills here and there.  We reached the town of Brahmapur about 4:30, where I broke my journey and got a dirty, but friendly, hotel near the station.

I slept okay despite a thin mattress and the next morning ate a huge paper dosa for what the restaurant called "tiffin."  A paper dosa is a particularly large, thin, crispy rice pancake (maybe two feet long), that you break into pieces and dip into little bowls of vegetables, yoghurt, and so forth.  It was very good, and filling.  My train for Visakhapatnam left about 11:45 and we soon left Odisha and entered the northeast arm of the state of Andhra Pradesh.  We passed more rice fields, plus lots of palm trees and other trees, through a very scenic countryside.  The Eastern Ghats rose to the west inland, and we passed lots of roundish, low hills.  The sea, unseen, was to the east.  The train was not too crowded, with the usual assortment of hawkers and beggars coming through the aisles.  We reached Visakhapatnam, a city of well over a million people, about 4:15.  I had great difficulty finding a hotel, and finally settled for a none too clean one near the station.  I had trouble getting to sleep, finally felt a bite, and turned on the light to discover my sheets were full of bedbugs and other, larger bugs.  I squished a few and they bled red blood:  mine, I imagine.  I changed rooms but it took a while to fall asleep as I kept turning on the light to check for bugs.

There is not much to see in Visakhapatnam and what there is is somewhat dispersed, so I decided to take a city tour offered by the local tourist office.  It lasted from about 9 to 4 and wasn't too bad.  We first visited a Hindu temple on a forested hill surrounded by other forested hills outside of town.  As always, the crowds of pilgrims were interesting.  There was a spot that appeared to be a place for the blessing of cows and calves, some of which appeared to have black eye liner around their eyes.  I also saw what appeared to be a guru-mobile:  a bus outfitted to look like a mobile temple, with a yellow clad guru in the back dispensing blessings.  We visited a hill overlooking the city and the sea, the remains of a 2000 year old Buddhist monastery on a hill up the coast, a not so attractive beach (where we had a good lunch), a city museum and a Soviet built submarine used by the Indian Navy from 1969 to 2001.  Our last stop was the very smelly fishing harbor.

I was at the railway station the next morning at 6 standing in a long, but relatively quick moving line, to get a ticket on the daily train that heads up into the Eastern Ghats.  It cost me all of 20 rupees (37 cents) for an unreserved ticket to go all the way to Araku, a trip of about 80 miles.  The platform was jammed with waiting passengers, and, following others, I leapt onto the still moving train as it reached the platform.  Still, I had to fight for a seat.  The train was packed, with little boys climbing up onto the luggage racks for a place to sleep.  It was a Sunday and I figured most of the passengers were day trippers headed to the hills before coming back on the returning afternoon train, though another passenger told me there were also people returning from a festival in a town near Visakhapatnam.  The train left about 7.  I had some friendly women and girls in the seats facing mine and enjoyed the rolling green hills as we headed to the Eastern Ghats.  Unfortunately, as we began to climb, all the views were on the opposite side of the train, and the aisles were so packed that you couldn't see out the opposite side windows.  My views were mainly of the cliff along which the track ran.  We climbed to over 2000 feet and reached the stop for the Borra Caves, where lots of people got off.  Continuing, we were on a green, hilly plateau for another hour or so until reaching Araku, at about 3000 feet (917.803 meters, according to the wondrously precise sign at the station), about 11:30.

Araku isn't much of a town, and I found a hotel about 15 minutes walk from the station.  Unfortunately, Araku and its surroundings were full of noisy Sunday tourists, with all the attendant speeding and honking.  Lots of garbage, too.  Not the pleasant hill retreat I had been led to believe.  I had lunch and walked around a bit.  I put on long trousers and wore my fleece for dinner.

It was somewhat quieter the next morning, but I left on the train at 11:30 and had a pleasant, uncrowded trip further up the line into the Eastern Ghats.  We continued on the plateau, at about 3000 feet for the most part, following a river for a while and passing lots of rice fields, with people reaping and threshing the rice.  We crossed into the southwestern part of Odisha state and reached the small town of Koraput about 2.  Koraput is a pleasant little town surrounded by hills, and with quite a few hills in the town.  It took me more than an hour to get a hotel and I ended up at the expensive one I had stopped at first.  A room was 900 rupees ($16), but the other hotels were either full or the rooms terrible.  I had a late lunch and then walked to a somewhat interesting tribal museum, with what may have been a century old poster of the world's three races:  Negroid, Mongoloid, and "Europeanoid," with a drawing of a bearded European man.  At dusk I walked to the hilltop Jagannath Temple, a smaller, newer version of the great temple at Puri.  It was almost empty.  A friendly young priest clad in yellow cracked young cocoanuts given him by pilgrims and then returned a half cocoanut with a small marigold inside it, for ten rupees a pop, it seemed.

The next morning I walked around town a bit and again climbed up to the Jagannath Temple.  There were adivasi (tribal) women selling produce along the town's streets.  Almost all seemed to have three nose rings, one through the septum and one other on each side.  Most were barefoot.  At about 11 I walked to the bus stand to catch a bus for Jeypore, 13 miles away, but was told that most buses weren't running because the Maoist Naxalites guerrillas in the hills had ordered them to stop service.  Apparently, the Odisha state government has an ongoing operation to find the Naxalite leader in Odisha and the Naxalites are threatening the buses to pressure the government to stop the search.  (They are called Naxalites because the movement started in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari, in the 1960's or 70's, I think.)  Two young guys told me a bus from Andhra Pradesh would be coming through at noon bound for Jeypore.  I guess the Andhra Pradesh buses either weren't targeted or weren't intimidated by the Naxalites.  It arrived, but was far too packed to board.  I gave up on buses and took an autorickshaw to the railway station.  The uncrowded train arrived sometime after 2.  My ticket for the short trip to Jeypore was seven rupees, about thirteen cents.  It took almost two hours, though, as the rail route is longer than the road route and we had a couple of long stops waiting for trains coming in the opposite direction.  We passed through very hilly terrain before dropping down to plains about 2000 feet in elevation.  The station is about four miles from the town, so I took an autorickshaw on a bumpy road and then walked about fifteen minutes to reach a pretty good hotel.  I wasn't feeling well, so I skipped dinner.

My stomach was still upset the next morning, but not too bad.  I was very tired, though, and rested and slept most of the day, with a short walk in the early afternoon to the local high-walled fort, with a derelict palace inside.  As in Koraput, there were tribal women on the streets selling produce.  I felt better in the evening and had a very good dinner with four Americans living in Hong Kong who had just arrived with their own car, driver and guide.  As I, they were hoping to go to the weekly Onkadelli tribal market about 40 miles from Jeypore the next day, but were unable to get permits to go there.  Two Italians were kidnapped last February by the Naxalites, who style themselves protectors of the tribal people, and since then the state government has made it a lot harder to visit tribal areas.