Places

Rushikulya river mouthWildlifeGanjam

A three-kilometre sand spit at Purunabandha and Gokharkuda where olive ridley turtles come ashore to nest en masse. Arribada — synchronised mass nesting — happens at only a handful of beaches worldwide, and this is one of three in Odisha alongside Gahirmatha and the Devi mouth. In a good year several lakh females nest here inside about a week, with counts above six lakh recorded; in some years the event does not happen at all. The spit itself moves — the river breaches it, the longshore drift rebuilds it — so the turtles are returning to a coordinate rather than to a landform.

Best time: Late February to early April, announced only days in advance. Getting there: Roughly 35 km from Berhampur via Ganjam town; access to the nesting beach is controlled during the event.

Gopalpur-on-SeaBeachGanjam

A nineteenth-century port that shipped rice, and labourers, to Burma and Southeast Asia, and then lost the trade. What remains is a lighthouse, the stumps of a jetty in the surf, a few colonial-period buildings and a working fishing beach, with a modern deep-water port operating a few kilometres up the coast. The decay is legible: this is what a port town looks like a century after its reason for existing was rerouted.

Best time: November–February.

TaptapaniNatureGanjam

A sulphurous hot spring in the hills above Berhampur where water emerges at around 40–45 °C through a fault in the scarp, collected into a small tank beside a shrine. The forest around it is moist deciduous and several degrees cooler than the plain below.

Getting there: About 50 km from Berhampur on the Digapahandi road.

Biranchi Narayan temple, BugudaHeritageGanjam

An eighteenth-century sun temple built as a wooden chariot on a stone plinth by the Ghumsur ruler Srikara Bhanja, with its interior wooden ceiling and walls covered in painted Ramayana scenes. It is the largest surviving body of Odia mural painting outside a manuscript, painted on wood rather than plaster, and its condition depends entirely on the roof over it.

JaugadaHeritageGanjam

A rock face inside the earthen ramparts of an old fort on the Rushikulya, carrying an Ashokan edict set. Like Dhauli in the delta, what is inscribed here is the pair of Separate Edicts addressed to the officials of the conquered country — and, as at Dhauli, the famous edict of remorse for the Kalinga war is not among the texts at this site.

MahendragiriPilgrimageGajapati

A granite massif reaching 1,501 m, standing clear of the range and visible from far out at sea. Small early stone temples associated in local tradition with the Pandavas sit near the summit, a Shivaratri fair fills the hill for a night, and the mountain is named in Sanskrit literature often enough to have been a landmark for coastal navigation.

Best time: November–March; Shivaratri for the fair.

TaratariniPilgrimageGanjam

A twin-goddess shrine on the Kumari hills above the Rushikulya, counted among Odisha's principal Shakta sites and reached by a long stair or a ropeway. The four Tuesdays of Chaitra draw very large crowds and the surrounding villages organise transport and feeding for them.

Best time: Chaitra Tuesdays (March–April) for the mela; otherwise November–February.

Chilika at RambhaNatureGanjam

The lagoon's southern arm, deeper and quieter than the Puri end, with rocky islets, a colonial-period rest house and boats out to Ghantasila and Breakfast Island. Migratory waterfowl arrive from November, and the fishery here is more crab and prawn than the northern reaches.

Best time: November–February.

Brahmapur (Berhampur)UrbanGanjam

The region's commercial capital and its silk town, organised around Bada Bazar, the weaving lanes and the Budhi Thakurani shrine. It is also the labour-migration hub of coastal Odisha, and the bus and train timetables to western India are a visible part of its street life.

ParalakhemundiHeritageGajapati

The hill-edge seat of the Gajapati family, with a large early twentieth-century palace and the institutions — press, school, association offices — from which the campaign for an Odia-speaking province was organised. The town is also the inland terminus of a narrow-gauge branch line built to move timber and passengers down to the coast.

PotagarhHeritageGanjam

A star-shaped earth-and-brick fort near the mouth of the Rushikulya at Ganjam town, held in turn by local, French, Dutch and British interests, and the seat of the district administration when it was run from Madras. It is now largely overgrown, which is itself informative about how completely the administrative centre moved inland.

Aryapalli and Sonapur beachesBeachGanjam

Long casuarina-backed sand beaches, one just south of Gopalpur and the other at the Bahuda mouth close to the Telugu-speaking villages. Sonapur is where the linguistic gradient is most obvious at a bus stop.

BhanjanagarHeritageGanjam

The old Ghumsur headquarters, called Russellkonda under the Madras administration after the officer who ran the agency that fought the Ghumsur wars of the 1830s and then suppressed Kondh human sacrifice in the hills above. A reservoir on the Rushikulya now supplies the town.