Kosta Andhra · Eastern Coastal Plains
The tract enclosed between the Gautami and Vasishta branches of the Godavari — coconut on every bund, canals instead of roads in places, ferries as ordinary transport, and villages whose ground level is barely above the water in the channel beside them. It is the most distinctive landscape on the Telugu coast and it is entirely man-managed.
Best time: December–February.
The anicut completed in 1852 that made the Godavari delta what it is, replaced in 1970 by a modern barrage carrying the engineer's name. There is a museum and a memorial at the site, and Sir Arthur Cotton is still garlanded here — a colonial engineer honoured in a way very few are, because the works are still functioning and still irrigating.
The Bhimeswara temple, one of the five Pancharama Kshetras and also counted among the Shakta pithas, with an eleventh-century two-storey sanctum and an unusually large inscription corpus on its walls.
A Lakshmi Narasimha temple at the point where the Vasishta Godavari meets the sea, with the confluence itself treated as the sacred object. The annual kalyanam and rathotsavam draw very large crowds to a village with one road in.
A small temple holding a single stone image carved as Vishnu on one face and as Mohini on the reverse, so the same block is two deities depending on which side you stand. It is an unusual sculptural solution to a theological point and worth the detour for that alone.
A shallow freshwater lake in the sag between the two deltas, designated a Ramsar site in 2002, with breeding pelicans and painted storks at Atapaka. Much of the lake bed was converted into fish and shrimp ponds through the 1990s; a court-ordered demolition drive in 2006 removed a large number of them, and the tension between the lake and the ponds has not resolved.
Best time: November–February.
One of the largest mangrove formations in India, at the Godavari's northern mouth, sheltered behind Hope Island — a sandspit that grew across the bay and is the reason Kakinada has a usable harbour. The creeks hold fishing cat, otter and a very large wading-bird population.
Getting there: Boats from Kakinada and the Coringa sanctuary boardwalk off the Yanam road.
The site of the East India Company's first factory on the east coast, established in 1611, and before that a Golconda port trading to Persia and Southeast Asia. The port is gone — a storm surge in 1864 destroyed it and killed tens of thousands — and what remains is a quiet town, a Dutch cemetery and the kalamkari printing units at Pedana a few kilometres inland.
An ordinary delta village of a few thousand people that gave its name to a classical dance. The families who held the performing obligation still live here, there is a teaching institution, and the annual village performances are a different proposition from a city recital.
The remains of a very large Buddhist stupa on the Krishna, built and enlarged across several centuries from around the third century BCE and faced with carved limestone. The Amaravati school of sculpture — crowded, fluid, low-relief narrative — is one of the formative styles of Indian art, and much of the surviving carving is now in the British Museum and the Government Museum in Chennai rather than here. The site museum holds what remained.
An Ikshvaku-period capital and monastic complex on the Krishna, excavated and then submerged by the Nagarjuna Sagar reservoir in the 1960s. Selected monuments were dismantled and rebuilt on a hilltop that became an island, which is now reached by launch. It sits at this region's inland limit.
The Krishna's crossing point, dominated by the Kanaka Durga temple on Indrakeeladri and the Prakasam Barrage below it. The rock-cut Undavalli caves with their monolithic reclining Vishnu, the Mogalrajapuram caves and Kondapalli fort with its toy-making village are all within a short drive.
The last city on the river before the delta, with the decommissioned 1900 Havelock bridge beside its modern successors, and launches upstream into the Papikondalu gorge where the Godavari cuts through the Eastern Ghats. The boat journey is the only easy way to see the river as it was before the barrage.
Best time: November–February.
Somarama at Gunupudi in Bhimavaram is one of the five Pancharama Kshetras, and all five — with Draksharamam, Palakollu, Samalkota and Amaravati — lie inside this region, which makes the circuit unusually compact. Bhimavaram itself is better known now as the centre of India's shrimp farming.
A shallow brackish lagoon behind a long barrier island, the second largest of its kind in India after Chilika at the other end of this coast. Nelapattu, on its inland side, holds one of the larger spot-billed pelican breeding colonies in the country, in trees inside a village.
Best time: November–February.
One of the largest chilli markets in Asia, where the Guntur Sannam variety is traded in bulk and graded by hand. It is worth visiting as an economic sight rather than a pretty one; the air in the yard is genuinely difficult and the traders are used to visitors coughing.
Places worth visiting in Kosta Andhra — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (16)