| 150 Year old Bridge-Vast River |
Mr. Venketa Reddy owns the Royal Park hotel where we stay in Kakinada and is the highest elected official in the district. The hotel is outstanding and he is such a nice man. He had attended the official opening of the children’s home as the Government representative for that opening. The government owns a nice tract of land behind the church building that has no access from any direction. We are hoping to get the government to turn it over to the children’s home for it’s use and have made formal request for that. Mr. Reddy is an important factor in that. As the representative for the area, we are hoping he will exert his considerable influence to achieve that goal.
Also we paid the fees from our travel funds for opening a school there at the church building to begin next June.
We left Kakinada at 9:00 A.M. after saying goodbyes to everyone and headed for the airport. When we left Kakinada it was still raining and again rained on us most of the day. Water was over the road in many places and the flooding is widespread. Some rice is laid over by the water and will probably be lost to the farmers.
After a very wet drive to the airport in Rajamundry we encountered a problem we had more or less expected. The flights from Rajamundry to Hyderabad were cancelled due to the weather. The small planes that fly to RAJ are just not equipped to handle the heavy rains. Since our flights were cancelled, we had a lunch with the Rao family there in RAJ. We had put a back up plan in place so we could make it to our International flight from Hyderabad. Ricky Gootam and their driver drove us to on Hyderabad arriving at Rajiv Ghandi airport at 11:00 P.M. The drive from RAJ took us 9 plus hours of rough narrow roads with traffic you could not understand even if I tried to describe it. Just feature big trucks, cars, goats, scooters, bikes, etc. all trying to weave in and out passing each other for nearly 600 kilometers. I slammed on my “Back seat” brakes (not there, of course) so much my feet felt as if I had walked. We made a couple of stops along the way to walk a bit and bathroom breaks and were able to see a few places we had not seen before it got dark. Crossing the Godavari River and the Krishna River on the way, we got a look at vast waterways that are the life line of all of Southern India. Under British rule, the Godavari was diverted into what are really 12 river channels enabling irrigation to millions of wide spread acres of land area. We are grateful they were willing to drive us on what was a very LONG day!
| "Water, Water Everywhere..." |
| Hindu Crematorium at Rajamundry |
| Many houses filled with water |