Rajahmundry & Papikondalu Hills, AP, India    (Dec 2022)        

The Godavari, the second longest river in India after the Ganga, begins in the Western Ghats. Though, as Duryodhana said, as with men, the origins of rivers are often unknown. Countless springs emerge from the crannies of mother earth to produce what we call the Godavari, swelled only seasonally by the monsoons. Flowing across the Deccan, the mighty river cuts through the Eastern Ghats, including its Papikondalu hill range. State ferries through this stretch of the Godavari afford gorgeous vistas untrammeled by human settlements. Our views however were marred by the smoky haze that now envelops much of India, most of the year—the price of "development" and the locals' pyromaniacal penchant to set any and all municipal waste to fire—all ultimately paid for by citizens with their respiratory health.

We reached the ferry port 90 minutes north of Rajahmundry via a broken, dusty road lined with villages—and, every few meters, pale-golden statues of gods, saints, and leaders, with Ambedkar appearing often. Upriver from these villages is where a new mega dam, the Polavaram Dam, is coming up. Further upriver, its reservoir will drown 276 mostly-Adivasi villages and submerge lots of valleys. The ghostly remains of many such villages, emptied by diktat over the years, can be seen on this cruise. Our ferry's crew, seemingly without resistance (except from sticks-in-the-mud like me), tried their best to not let anyone commune with nature by putting up a super loud variety show with dance and comedy on the top deck. The Godavari at Rajahmundry, still ~60 km from the Bay of Bengal, is wide and voluminous, though the dam might change this. Rajahmundry itself struck me as just another noisy, dusty, congested Indian city, though the riverfront areas we saw, and a couple of ghats, were pleasant enough.