Blogs from Andhra Pradesh, India, Asia - page 3

This was a full driving day. We crossed into a new state. It wasn't straightforwardfinding the hotel, but we got there in the end. The hotel is fairly close to a cinema and we ate at a restaurant opposite. This turned out to be a busy restaurant and good. We had biryani which is a speciality of Hyderabad.... read more

Day 2, 7 am: We were up and about, all packed and ready, waiting to leave post breakfast and the poor Hotel Spectrum staff could not keep up with our pace, especially on a Sunday morning. After hurriedly devouring aloo parathas and clearing our bill, we carried down our luggage, without having the patience either for check out niceties or for the hotel staff to come and bid us adieu. 9.30 am, and we were on the highway once more after a quick refuel. And what a highway it was....the road that stretched out in front of us was smooth and totally without potholes. The scenic beauty of undulating hills and greenery on either side of such a road left us breathless and ecstatic. 10am: We were on cloud nine, having reached Ichchhapurum. Fortunately the check ... read more

The calm before the storm. This trip was an easygoing precursor to my Roopkund trek. One of the few nearby places around Hyderabad, Papikondalu (Papi hills) is a very scenic place in the East Godavari River. Though not very popular outside, locals flock this place making it very crowded. I, Vivek and Aayush had been to Prashar Lake trek the previous month and wanted a simple luxurious trip where we wouldn't need to sweat it out. We picked this up from our backlog as we saw this was being organized at a convenient time and decided to complete it and tick it off our list. We started out initially thinking it was only the 3 of us from our gang but then got to know at the end that Aayush's friend Ankita was also joining us. ... read more

An early visit to the Undavalli cave temples was a highlight, carved from solid rock by Buddhists in the second century and adapted in the 7th by the Hindus the third level has a wonderful carved figure of a reclining Vishnu. The next hour or two was through rural countryside to the archeological site at Amaravathi where the remains of India's largest Buddhist stupa built at the orders of Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. Much of the carved stone that decorated the stupa are now in the British museum but a few pieces remain in the onsite museum. In the trees nearby was a fruit bat colony and some nesting birds. We traveled further north west to the Buddhist site at Nagarjunakonda which sits on an island in a lake created by the damming of ... read more

No planning, not much hype, we just wanted to visit some place during my parents’ stay @ Hyderabad. Inspired by few of my colleagues, we chose to go to Rajhamundry & Papi Kondalu. As always, my selfish interest to go on a long drive with full load (7 ppl) on Mobilio certainly played a part in the decision of this trip. The quick plan was to start early morning @ 5 AM on 27th, reach Rajahmundry for lunch, and visit few places there. 28thwas dedicated to Papi Kondalu and drive back to Hyderabad. I must say, this plan worked perfect, but for the part that wasn’t planned, we did have lots of surprises which again made this trip memorable. With the inputs from several people and help of ‘google guru’, the decision was to take Vijayawada ... read more