Visakhapatnam

Visakhapatnam, Vizag to everyone who lives there, is Andhra's largest city and one of India's great port towns, wedged between the Eastern Ghats and the Bay of Bengal so tightly that hills rise straight off the beach road. That geography gives it the Dolphin's Nose, a headland of about 174 metres with a lighthouse on top, and the natural harbour that served the Kalinga kingdoms long before the British built a shipyard here. The seafront runs several kilometres along Beach Road past RK Beach, where INS Kursura, a submarine retired in 2001, has been cut open as a museum with a TU-142 maritime patrol aircraft parked alongside.

Above it a ropeway climbs Kailasagiri to a white Shiva and Parvati sculpture and a view of the whole bay. The city's history is older than any of that: Buddhist monasteries stood on the hills at Thotlakonda and Bavikonda from around the second century BCE, their stupa platforms and rock-cut cisterns now excavated above the sea, and the eleventh-century Simhachalam temple to Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha keeps its idol permanently coated in sandalwood paste, uncovered only on Chandanotsavam day. Swim at Rushikonda, eat prawns fried in Andhra chilli at a Jagadamba junction mess, and take the train or ghat road up to Araku the next morning.