In Visakhapatnam, tourism learns to tread lightly

Tourism is usually counted in arrivals, room nights and places ticked off. Along the Visakhapatnam coast and in the Eastern Ghats, a small set of nature-based ventures is testing a different measure — how lightly a visitor can pass through a landscape.

Their formats vary: an eco-stay near Araku, guided treks, tidepool walks and scuba diving. What they share is an effort to make travellers more attentive and to ease the load that tourism places on fragile terrain.

Building with what the land offers

At Pravaham, an eco-stay in Mettavalasa village near Araku, the approach begins with the structure itself. Founder V Samved says close to 90% of the construction uses soil, hay, timber and bamboo sourced locally. Mud, cob and hydrated lime plaster help keep indoor temperatures steady without relying on artificial cooling.

Food, staff and experiences are drawn largely from surrounding villages. Guests are nudged towards the stream, local trails and activities such as the Plant a Memory initiative. Samved describes the aim as letting visitors settle into the rhythm of slow living, with a Black Box digital detox programme replacing packed sightseeing schedules with time by the water, around a campfire or learning about natural building.

Composting, waste segregation, limits on single-use plastic and restrained energy use are part of daily practice, and carpooling and shared logistics are encouraged to trim transport emissions.

Fewer boots on the trail

For Ravi Teja, a trek leader with EcoHikes, sustainability is tied directly to how many people enter a landscape. Over nine years the group has run more than 600 treks with over 8,000 participants in the Eastern Ghats, and has brought group sizes down from about 30 to roughly 12.

At camps, gas stoves replace firewood collected from the hills. Meals are home-cooked with local ingredients and served on banana or Bauhinia leaves. Packaged food and plastic have been pared back, and participants are expected to carry out whatever they bring in.

Ravi is wary of what social media can do to little-known places. A single viral reel can draw crowds within weeks, he notes, and every landscape has a carrying capacity that, once crossed, costs both the place and the experience. Some trails have been closed when publicity threatened to bring excessive footfall. The group also works with local families who supply food and share guidance and traditional knowledge. Locals have cared for these mountains for generations, Ravi says; the trekkers are only visitors.

Reading the tidepools

On the coast, the East Coast Conservation Team is using tidepool walks to introduce people to marine life. Led by Deepu Visweswar and Priyanka Vedula, the walks focus on an ecosystem that appears and vanishes with the tides and can hold hundreds of species in a small area.

For Deepu, the point is to change how a familiar beach is seen. People may have visited the same stretch hundreds of times, yet it can open into a completely different world. Tidepools serve as nursery and feeding grounds, home to algae, corals, fishes, crustaceans and other organisms adapted to repeated cycles of exposure and immersion. Groups are capped at eight participants per instructor, and visitors are briefed not to touch or handle animals.

The conservation effort extends past the walk. Participants are encouraged to photograph organisms instead of disturbing them and to upload observations to citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist. Priyanka sees the walks as a way of getting people hooked on marine life — once fascination sets in, protection tends to follow. She argues that marine tourism can create economic opportunities for coastal communities if managed carefully, while cautioning against permanent structures and poorly regulated activity in sensitive habitats.

Diving with restraint

At Platypus Escapes, founder Subhash Chandran treats scuba diving as an entry point to the underwater world. The team pairs recreational diving with conservation dives and underwater clean-ups, asking participants to see themselves as visitors in a living ecosystem. Years of diving off the Visakhapatnam coast have shown him how far marine pollution has spread, with plastic and discarded material becoming part of the habitat of marine species.

That experience has shaped the training. Divers are encouraged to understand the environment they are entering and to join ocean clean-up activities, so conservation becomes part of learning rather than a separate exercise. People protect what they experience and understand, Subhash says, and seeing plastic tangled around marine life or a damaged reef forges a different kind of connection.

Responsible diving, in his telling, starts with acknowledging that divers are guests in another habitat. Good buoyancy control, keeping distance from marine animals, avoiding contact with corals and other sensitive organisms, and preventing anchor damage are essential. He is also careful not to call scuba tourism entirely carbon-free, since boats, transport and equipment carry an environmental cost. Marine tourism can be designed with a very low footprint, he says, but the focus should be on minimising it and ensuring tourism gives something back rather than only taking.