Chhattisgarh

The overnight train from Raipur to Jagdalpur is itself a minor wonder (a line that switchbacks down the Eastern Ghats' forgotten northern reaches) and Jagdalpur, Bastar's easy-going capital, makes an honest base: a palace, a market, lakes with pedal boats, no hurry. But the region's headline is forty minutes west, where the Indravati river, running wide and brown with the late monsoon, reaches a lip of ancient rock and simply leaves. Chitrakote is often called India's Niagara, and for once the comparison undersells the original: a horseshoe of falling water up to three hundred metres broad in season, thundering thirty metres into a mist-filled amphitheatre, with a small Shiva shrine on the lip where a priest conducts his duties inside permanent spray, and this is the part Niagara cannot offer, almost nobody there. I stood at the viewpoint at sunset with perhaps thirty other people, most of them local families, while the falls turned copper and a rainbow assembled itself in the gorge, dismantled, and reassembled. A boy selling roasted corn summarised the economics without bitterness: 'If this was in another state, you could not stand here. There would be a gate, a queue, a selfie point.' He handed me the corn. 'Here, only corn.'