Araku Valley

Most people find out about Araku by accident. Someone mentions the train ride from Vizag and that's usually enough to get you looking it up. Araku Valley sits in the Eastern Ghats, about 115 km from Visakhapatnam, and the easiest way to get there is a train ride that takes five hours and passes through 58 tunnels, thick forest, and tribal settlements the whole way up. The valley grows coffee that has won international awards. It has caves with formations over a million years old. The tribal communities here have been in these hills longer than most of recorded history. None of this is very loud about itself, which is probably why Araku still feels like somewhere you found rather than somewhere that was waiting to be found.