06-Aug-2006 --

My friend, Mr.Ashok, an aeronautical Engineer and myself decided to visit this confluence which is located 239 Kms. away, just near the inter-junction of a village road with the Golden Quadrilateral-NH-5, in the neighboring Andhra Pradesh state. We both started our journey in my Maruti-Suzuki’s “Swift” from home at 7.30 AM on 06th August, 2006 and stopped at Anna Nagar for our breakfast. From there, the ‘Swift’ did not have any rigors because of usual lazy sunday morning traffic. At 8.30 AM, we were at Madhavaram junction where we took a left-turn entering the NH-5.

The newly developed 4 lane highway connecting Chennai and Kalkotta (NH-5) gave us the perfect setting for a non-stop drive. Our Swift cruised at a steady speed which was a travel pleasure for about 210 Kms, bye-passing small and big towns, all the way upto the predicted confluence point located 6 kilometers beyond the town of Kavali. As soon as our ‘Swift’ bye-passed Kavali,I reduced the speed, convenient to locate the village-road leading towards east. On piercing through avenues of eucalyptus plantations on both sides of NH-5, I saw to my right few people walking towards the main road, which I predicted to be my destination at 11.45 AM. Stopping our ‘Swift’ at the junction (238th Kms from Chennai), Ashok got down with the GPS locating the confluence a few hundred feet in the South-East direction within the new eucalyptus plantation. He walked eastwards along the small road leading to ‘CHEVURU’ village to fix 80E longitude which he achieved in about 200 feet. I took my car to the point and parked there. From there, the GPS showed the confluence at 52 meters south of our car. Immediately, we took the photograph of the confluence. To locate numerical 15N latitude, we both walked down from the road into the eucalyptus plantation. Finally it was located to south of our parked car and in between 2nd and 3rd row east of the plantation road.

We were much happier to take the photograph of GPS reading showing 15N 80E. Then we took the obligatory photographs of landscapes of all the four directions from the confluence viz., looking towards the North (Pic-2: which shows the village road with my ‘swift’ in black), the West (Pic-3: capturing the NH-5 with a moving truck), the East (Pic-4: Evenly grown eucalyptus rows) and the South (Pic-5:Uneven eucalyptus saplings).

From the confluence, we also took a photo of Northwest landscape capturing the road-junction. (mid portion of Pic-7 – west at the left and north at the right of the panoramic view) Our entire stay at the confluence point lasted for 40 minutes. Again at the junction we came to know that the junction separates Nellore and Prakasam (Ongole) Districts of Andhra Pradesh (Pic-10). None of the few people available at the junction had shown their curiosity of strangers taking photographs of eucalyptus plantation. Finally we left the scene at 12.35 PM towards Nellore for our lunch. Finally, a leisurely drive took us to Chennai and reached home by 6.00 PM safely.