Visakhapatnam March 8-9

I stayed on in Visakhapatnam for two more days. On Friday March 8 I spent the morning at my hotel, browsing the internet and writing emails. At 2:30 Rani and her sister picked me up and we went to visit two early Buddhist sites that had been brought to our attention by an enthusiast for early Buddhist sites who was a friend of the Ameya World School hostel warden.

The first site was Gudiwada Dibba, recently identified on a hill not far from Tagarapuvalasa, near Bhimunipatnam. The small site consists of slight remains of an elongated building that is curved at one end and some brick fragments and rock cuttings elsewhere on the hill top

The curved structure

Rani, her sister and me with the local informant at the site of Gudiwada. (The Chitavalsa Jute Mill is just visible to our left across the river)

We then went to the second nearby site of Kota Cherkupalli, where there were only slight traces of the curve of a presumed stupa above bedrock.

The few stones aligned in a curve at Kota Cherkupalli

The view from Kota Cherkupalli. Gudiwada Dibba is the hill in the center horizon

On our way back to Visakhapatnam, we stopped at a nursery and Rani got a few plants. The nursery has an interesting sculpture garden.

A sculpture of fish morphing into human heads

Back at the hotel that evening, I watched the first half of an old Telugu movie with English subtitles that has a few scenes shot in Bhimunipatnam. We had gotten a copy of the movie from the DIET director.

On Saturday March 9 I checked out of the hotel and went to Rani’s house in the late morning. We chatted at length and I spent a lot of time on the internet. At 6:30 I took an auto to the train station to catch an overnight train to Machelipatnam.

That ended the survey project for this second year. Outside of the international airline tickets to get to India, the expenses were minimal, since we had free room and board at the school. I paid 12 US dollars a day for the ten days we hired our auto driver. I also donated ten US dollars a day for the eleven days we three had lunch with the sisters. The rented cars and drivers for the two Sunday trips, the taxis between the airport and Visakhapatnam and between Visakhapatnam and Bhimunipatnam and the hotel and restaurant bills added about 350 US dollars more, so my total project expenses for the two weeks were around 600 US dollars or 30,000 rupees.