India has a coastline of immense variety and beauty. And—so far—many hidden treasures. Ron Hall explores, from a new resort in a forest to an old colonial backwater

This story originally appeared in Condé Nast Traveler's October 1999 issue.

"India" and "Great Beaches of the World" is not an association of ideas that leaps instantly to mind. There is Goa, of course, whose golden sands had their moment of glory in the hippie invasion of the sixties and seventies, but that is just a tiny seventy-mile blip on India's mighty four-thousand-mile coastline. For the most part it is India's landward pleasures—its deserts and mountains, its exotic palaces and erotic temples, its bustling cities and animated landscapes—that capture the imagination of tourists, not its seaside.

Yet the surprising thing is that, on closer inspection, India turns out to have greater reserves of unexploited, pristine sandy beach than almost any other country on earth. Much of it is hidden coastline, reachable only by bumpy, unmarked tracks and with no hotels except for an occasional backpacker hangout. But here and there, more sophisticated beach resorts are being built, opening up spectacular stretches of coast to a wider range of users.

The progress of this coastal development has been slow and circumspect. A state of continual war exists between hotel developers and local environmental groups concerned about the enforcement of building regulations. The most persistent skirmishes are over a law that forbids any construction within two hundred meters of the high-tide line, but there is also heated debate about many other aspects of coastal ecology. Given the corruptibility of Indian officialdom, the environmentalists have good reason to be on guard, though that is not to say that India's coastline is in immediate danger of ruination: So extensive are the hidden beaches, and so modest are tourist numbers, that it will be a long, long time before India becomes another Thailand or Turkey.

I had decided to begin my beach circuit of India in the eastern state of Orissa, at a place called Toshali Sands, conveniently situated between two of India's greatest monuments, the Sun Temple at Konarak and the Jagannath Temple at Puri. Not even the most ardent environmentalist could fault the newly completed Toshali Sands Resort. Hidden in a forest clearing, it is stepped so far back from the sea that you have to send for the resort's four-wheel-drive in order to go for a swim. After a bone-rattling jungle trek you arrive at a dazzling coastal scene.

A broad, straight beach of pale gold sand, backed by dunes and casuarinas, stretches off in either direction, its parallel bands of white surf converging at infinity like an art-class exercise in perspective. Nowhere on this enormous beach is there a person or a building to be seen. In India, where you grow used to every niche being occupied by densely packed humanity, such solitude comes as an almost physical shock. I tried to estimate the beach's dimensions, but since it melts into a shimmering heat wave on the horizon, I had no way of doing so. My hired guide, however, newly graduated from the Orissa state tourism school, had the answer down pat: "Four hundred and eighty-two kilometers of continuous sand," he pronounced, "broken only by river estuaries. " I was impressed by the precision, until I realized that 482 kilometers translates into exactly three hundred miles and so was more likely to be an out-of-date, round-figure guess than a proper calculation. Even so, this Orissan coastline must surely rank among the longest beaches in the world, easily dwarfing my previous record holder in this series, Fraser Island's Seventy-Five Mile Beach in Queensland, Australia.