Nagarjuna Sagar

The Transporter asked if I would like to take a road trip this weekend to see Nagarjuna Sagar. I knew sagar meant lake, but I didn’t know what Nagarjuna was. He explained in a bit of broken English that it was the where Buddha was from. At Nagarjuna I’d see Buddha’s home. Well, it wasn’t actually Buddha’s birthplace, but I didn’t think the Transporter was trying to mislead me.

He told me to eat a big breakfast and get the hotel to pack me a sandwich and we’d head out. He said it would take a while to get there because sometimes “the highway” was busy. It turned out to be about a three hour drive down a (barely) two lane road. It was actually pretty thrilling because The Transporter kept trying to open up the Chevy and he got to practice his evasive maneuvers around slower traffic- and even oncoming traffic at times (why do trucks and busses like driving at oncoming cars?). Eventually we got to practice high-speed livestock aversion driving.

It was kind of interesting to finally see the countryside. There were a few villages on the way and I knew that the language had changed from mostly Hindi and some Telegu to exclusively Telegu- even the road signs changed.

We finally got to the area we wanted to go to and it is a huge lake. I thought for some reason it would be like the lake between Hyderabad and Secunderabad, Hussain Sagar. But no, this was a huge lake that looked manmade. There was a big earth dam that we couldn’t drive across so we went around it to an even bigger dam. That’s how they made the lake on the Krishna River.

We parked the car and took a boat out to the island out in the middle of the lake where the museum was. It was about a 30-45 minute boat ride, and I got to hear from some passengers who wanted to practice their English with me more about the lake, the dam and the museum. The conversation was a bit surreal though:

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