V: Vizag

Vizag, or Vishakapatnam was our last vacation location (alliteration and rhyming attempt #fail). We were looking for a beach destination for A’s first beach outing, but Goa and Kerala seemed too expensive, so we thought hey, why not look closer, and zeroed in on Vizag. We went in with no major expectations. And what lovely surprise it turned out to be. 

We stayed at the AP tourism hotel, Haritha, atop a small hillock overlooking the Rushikonda beach. The view of the coastline from the hotel room was fantastic. The beach wasn’t exactly clean, but there were small fairly clean stretches. A’s reaction to the waves was mixed across the three days we spent there. Oh well, more reasons for more beach holidays 🙂

The more popular Rama Krishna beach, or RK beach was great as well, but very crowded on the weekend evenings that we visited. Driving along the Beach Road gave us some great views of the coastline and we wondered, over and over again why the Eastern coastline of India isn’t as developed as the Western one. What’s more, Vizag is green, dotted with parks, and very, very clean. Apparently the 5th cleanest in India. And boy, what a splendid job they’ve done of rebuilding after the 2014 cyclone Hudhud struck!

We also visited the Kailasagiri hillock and took in the 360 degree views from the toy train. The rope way, unfortunately wasn’t functioning so we took a taxi up the hill. On our last day, we had some time, so we visited the aquarium and A enjoyed looking at the fish and the turtles. The aquarium could do with a lot more work to make it a more pleasant hour to spend there. 

We had wanted to take the famous train ride to Araku valley, but we decided to save that for another trip. In all, it was a lovely little vacation and I think we returned pleasantly surprised by what a lovely city it seems like. 

The day we left was the day after Maha Shiva Ratri, and apparently it’s auspicious to take a dip in a large water body. I clicked this pic just as we were leaving. The crowds had been swelling up since 7.30 am. The first pic in this post was taken about four hours before this one below. Count the number of people if you can 🙂