India’s hidden Grand Canyon

Taking the last APSRTC bus out of town got us to the new Jammalamadugu bus stand around 3 am with stray dogs and a station master for company. He mentioned the first local bus to Gandikota would start off at around 15 minutes to 4 am. True to his word, the station master ensured the driver of our bus didn’t start without us. About 45 minutes later in absolute darkness, he mentioned we had reached our destination. There were about four other tourists waiting at the bus stop trying to figure their way around. Using flashlights, we moved around the fort to find an opening from the fort into the gorge. 

With the first light of daybreak at around 6 am, we headed far right towards the gorge crossing Charminar, a granary, Jamia Masjid and the Ranganathaswamy temple till the edge of the gorge. You don’t realise what you are in store for till you reach the edge and find a vantage point as the sun sneaks into the horizon. Words cannot paint the picture in front of you. After spending 30-odd minutes mesmerised by the sunrise and the patterns it formed on the gorge and canyon, as the mercury started rising, we headed back to catch a glimpse of what remained of the dilapidated temple and the mosque, imagining a sense of lost grandeur in these monuments. It is a living fort as villagers stay within the perimeter and there is also a school within. There is an AP Tourism resort Hotel Haritha where you can grab decent breakfast, check out the local photo gallery of forts in Andhra Pradesh before catching the hourly local bus back to the town reaching by 11.30 am. 

From there we caught another local bus headed to Kolimigundla (around Rs. 35), the nearest bus stand to Belum caves. After another hour-long journey via a rural landscape of villages, farms and the odd industry, we took a shared auto (Rs. 5 per person) from the bus stand to Belum caves. One of the better managed tourist destinations, after a Rs. 50 entry fee, you find yourself in a surreal lit underground cave network with good ventilation so you don’t feel claustrophobic. With Deshi Basara from The Dark Knight Rises playing in my head, we explored the caves till we felt we were circling back to the same place. Mapping the same return journey with the same bus for the conductor recognised us, we were back in the town by 3 pm. There was only one vegetarian place where we grabbed a quick lunch. The sizeable Muslim population in the town speaks Hindi so we could manage to find our way around. With time to kill till the late night bus, we ended up watching a movie in the local single screen theatre with a lot of hooting to drown out the dialogues. All in all a ‘gorgeous’ day outing to capture two lesser known wonders of Incredible India.