And so we started out – a road trip along the Konkan coast, ending up in Goa for 31st December. Later, I would realize that I will always avoid road trips around ghaats as much as I can!
December 24, 2007 – Day 1
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya
Manish and Chandan picked up Ajinkya and me at the Fantasy Land signal on the JVLR (that’s where Aji and I stay). Ajinkya wasn’t there on our last trip. He’s my old school friend and lately he’s been hanging out with my Bhavan’s gang. And I also think Rajesh has fallen in love with him.
Anyway, there we waited for Gayatri who came with both her parents who dropped her in their car. Many kisses and hugs later (it was like she was going to Africa on a UNICEF mission of something!), we left for our first stop – Shrivardhan. Now this is one of the beaches on the still under-hyped Maharashtra coastline, about 250 kms from Bombay. It takes around 6 hrs to get there are good local joints to have breakfast on the way. We left JVLR at 0630 hrs and after many halts to eat and pee, we reached Shrivardhan at 13:00 hrs. We checked out quite a few places to stay but they were all full. Thankfully, we got a place where someone had just cancelled accommodation and it was one of the cheapest motels. Rs. 500 a night per room and 50 bucks per extra bedding. It wasn’t such a great place, but it was clean and had clean washrooms. What else do we want anyway? Booked for two nights, we freshened up a little (which means we opened cans of beer and sat and played on the beach like little kids)! Manish found a poor little centipede like insect on the beach and ‘Pearl-Harbor’ed it with sand to its probable death. If that wasn’t enough, Chandu picked up our football, and pretending it to be a UFO, landed it right on the spot where the insect was buried, thus killing it for sure. Brutes! Anyway, I guess they made up for it with the tomb that they then made for the insect.
Shrivardhan beachAfter we were through being 5 year olds (and after Gayatri was through sleeping all this while), we went into the water and spent the rest of the afternoon in the sea. We then decided to try out the hookah we had brought. Manish has a friend who owns a hookah joint and he lent us one of his hookahs. Kashif and I had bought flavors from a store in Bandra for just 30 bucks each (each flavor makes about 4 hookah joints). After a little help from the internet, our hookah was ready and smokin’!!!! One more feather in our hat…we’d done something new again!
A bonfire in the night and a lot of personal talks between me and Chandu finished the day for me. At 0200 hrs, we finally went to sleep.
December 25, 2007 – Day 2 – Merry Christmas!!
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya + Kashif
The next day, we woke up quite late and had breakfast at the motel itself. It was a ghar-guti place which means that the food cooked by the owner (his wife usually) is served to us. So we get to each authentic local food. A lot of poha later, the guys went to pick up Kashif, while me and Gangu took showers and changed into more holiday clothes.
Kashif came at about lunch time so we immediately went for lunch to Hotel Shrivardhan. This place has an amazing artifact – there’s half of the bone structure of what they claim to be a dolphin that was found dead on a beach many years back. But it looks so huge, you’d think it was actually a small whale! If you’re at Shrivardhan, you must have a look at this.
After lunch, we headed for Harihareshwar, which is very close to Shrivardhan and is supposed to be very beautiful. However, I didn’t find it great. It’s a small beach with water not as clear as Shrivardhan, but its probably amore popular destination because there is a beautiful MTDC resort there. On the beach, there was one guy with a small jet boat who was giving 2 minute rides for 50 bucks per person. It was really fun and I got to see this cute little fish jumping in and out of the water, which the boat guy told me was a boi (which I googled and found is also called the grey mullet).
Ajinkya at Harihareshwar beachNight was about to arrive and we needed booze, raw food for barbeque and ice. So we went hunting for those. After picking up the booze and chakna, we couldn’t find ice anywhere. That’s when our friendly neighborhood ‘Spiderman’ came to our rescue and got us ice and loads of shrimp for the barbeque, and at crazy low rates – easily one third the price of what we get them in Bombay for.
Kashif and Manish, our all time designated chefs, marinated the shrimp and some veggies that we had bought. I was as usual, the fire girl, or as we decided to be gender neutral later – the fire person! Chandu and Ajinkya made the hookah and Gayatri did the jacket potatoes.
At 0330 hrs, two inebriated girls wandered on to the beach to wet their feet. Two very bad men came running from behind, caught hold of our hands and took us into the water. Although Gangu and I didn’t want to get wet, the water was so warm in the cold night that we didn’t curse Kashif and Manish for their folly. After half an hour, the boys were bored / hungry and left us to fend for ourselves. I had learned in an earlier trip to Shrivardhan that the sands there are therapeutic. So Gangu and I started coating our exposed parts of our bodies with sand (Now I’m making this blog sound good! Haha!). On one such occasion, as Gangu scooped up some sand in the cup of both her hands, we saw a medium sized crab resting on the sand over her palm! We screamed loudly and threw the crab back into the water. After a few seconds of shock, we both laughed loudly and continued with our “therapy”.
After a lot of waiting for the guys to come back, we lost hope and walked back to the motel for a quick shower and a change of clothes. A lot of fighting over bathroom space ended up with Gayatri biting Manish on his forearm (which he later had to explain to Roopali). Sleep time had come!
December 26, 2007 – Day 3 – A day of traveling
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya, Kashif
This whole day went with us traveling from Shrivardhan to Tarkarli, which is a beach on the Sindhudurg coast. This has been by far my most favorite beach in India till date. It’s about another 250 kms from Shrivardhan and took us almost 8 hours to get there. This was the time I realized I’m not made for traveling in ghaats coz I kept feeling queasy and I finally felt better when I induced myself to throw up in the nice and clean loo of a Reliance petrol pump on the way.
We reached Tarkarli only at night, had dinner at a restaurant of some big hotel on the way and found that the place we were supposed to stay at was a wretched house with no place to sleep in peace. Ajinkya had to sleep on many chairs put together and Chandu slept in the car.
December 27, 2007 – Day 4
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya, Kashif
Ajinkya and Chandan got up in the morning and went looking for a car mechanic. Chandan had mistakenly used up all the battery power in the car and the car wouldn’t start. So they took the neighbor’s bike (that had no break) and wandered the countryside. Like a honeymooning couple, while all of us were asleep. The rest of us went to the beachside a while later and witnessed totally clean sea water. I don’t know why I am still obsessed with clean water…seeing the Bombay ocean has really corrupted my opinion on the oceans!
Tarkarli beach at MTDCWhen Chandu and Ajinkya were back, we all did a dhakka-start to the car (yeah we girls helped too, we Macedonian women!) and were on our way to find a good place to stay. Our first stop was the MTDC resort which was beautiful but too expensive for us. Rs. 2500 for a couple and not more than two in a room. Period! We had breakfast there anyway and had a lot of fun on their beach. Aji had some work back in Bombay and had to leave so we dropped him to the ST stand where he got a bus at 1500 hrs. We went back looking for a place to stay in and found a really nice place called Sumati Resort right at the end of the road and facing Tarkarli beach.
Directions: Get out of the MTDC Resort and take a right, then take a right again when you get a board saying MTDC Houseboat. Go straight on this road and the road becomes really bad, but keep going ahead. At the end of the road, you’ll find a board with a dolphin picture and Sumati Resort written on a board.
Sumati resort is owned by a really nice guy. And it’s a cheap but clean place. We got a big room with two beds which can hold four to five people for sleeping, each. It’s got an attached toilet, but outside the room! And all this for 800 bucks a night! The owner told us we should go snorkeling between 1100 hrs to 1300 hrs the next day since that’s when the sun’s rays are perpendicular and we get the best view in the water. We could also do a dolphin ride, but he had fishermen friends who he said he would contact and only if they spotted dolphins in the sea on that day, then it would be a good idea for us to take that ride. It’s always best to see dolphins early in the morning at about 0700 hrs.
Another interesting thing he told us was that there was an island created during the tsunami nearby in the backwaters of the Arabian sea at Tarkarli and it was a good place to spend a few hours in. So that night, we picked up a few bottles of beer and went to the island on a boat with two boatmen. It was beautiful, although it was so dark! When we switched on the torch in the water, we could see all the tiny fish in it. The island is only sand and gets submerged in the water on full moon nights. On the island, the boatmen made us a bonfire, we gave them beers and we all sat down drinking. Unfortunately, that’s when we came to know that earlier that evening, Benazir Bhutto had been shot dead. For some reason, it really affected us. For the next two hours, all we spoke about was politics and how the world was getting worse, and all bad things. The news really screwed our moods. But then, there were these little creatures that kinda neutralized our moods – crabs! There were soooo many on the island, it was scary! We had to pee far away from the bonfire and getting far away was a scare! Thanks to our torch, we managed to spot and avoid crabs. But there was this one crab that wanted to fight with me and Manish! If we would go right, it would go right. If we would move left, it was moving right there, intimidating us! No amount of stomping on the ground made it back up. It must’ve been the alpha crab there. LOL. Few hours later, we hopped back on the boat, noticing the tide had swallowed up at least 15 meters of the island (and did I mention that the island itself must have been about a kilometer in length at a maximum).
The island at Tarkarli
The scary crabs!December 28, 2007 – Day 5
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya, Kashif
The next morning, we were to snorkel at noon and rushed to the main market to buy ourselves snorkeling passes. An authentic Malvani breakfast of amboli ussal (which is ussal from ussal pav fame and amboli which is like a dosa, except thicker) and pohe and the not-so-authentic omelette later, we were ready to snorkel!
Snorkeling was a lot of fun! I love water anyway and this just made me feel like I was among the fishes and part of the sea! We saw so many colored fish – red, blue, yellow, white, black – and so many sizes – little ones in big schools and huge loner red snappers. The highlight of my snorkeling visit was this one red snapper who my snorkeling guide and I followed for about 2 minutes, and we were right above the fish all the time! The snorkeling was done close to the Sindhudurg fort and there was an area in the water that had a small trench. That was where we saw the most exotic of fishes…I had to ask my guide for another round of that trench coz it was just so beautiful! And how can I forget the coral we saw! It was just beautiful! There were only two things that could have been better in this whole experience – (a) If the water was clearer (sure it was clear, but I’m so used to National Geographic!) and (b) If the guides quit encouraging people to touch the coral. Being guide I really thought they would know the harms of doing so, and I even gave a piece of my mind to my guide when he asked me if I wanted a piece of coral!
By the time we finished, it was about 1400 hrs and we set off to buy material for our barbeque that night. I really think that it’s been too many barbeques in the trip and the novelty factor has now gone down to a level where I honestly think it’s becoming too much effort. Plus the guys (read: Kashif and Manish) keep making the preparation more and more elaborate. On this day, they made three kinds of marinade for the large amount of chicken we bought! This was so much, by the way, that the next day, we gave away quite some marinated chicken to our resort guy, so that he could cook it if he pleased! Anyway, so it was our regular barbeque – hookah – bonfire setting and we generally chilled out on the sandy ‘backyard’ of our room. Our favorite puppy, who we had been playing with all these days, was also with us, next to the warmth of the fire. The little doggie was really cute, but had a lot of ticks – so Gayatri and Chandu had bathed her the earlier day. When the fire went out, we looked at stars until we were really sleepy, and I eventually went off to sleep with only Manish and Kashif awake. Later I learnt that they took a walk on the beach nearby for really long. Having guy talk maybe?
Our puppy dogDecember 29, 2007 – Day 6 – Goa!
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya, Kashif + Fahim
Goa is just about 3 hrs away from Tarkarli and we left our resort at 1200 hrs. The road was really good. Instead of taking the NH-17, we took a new route called the “Saagari Mahamarg” (or something to that effect) which has beautiful views all through the road. At a few points, it crosses gorgeous stretches of rivers (or backwaters…debatable) and at some places, there’s a striking view of the Arabian sea from the road. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a view from any major road before.
Backwater view from Saagari Mahamar
The beautiful view of the Arabian sea from the highwayFahim was already waiting at Vagator in Goa when we reached there. Our hotel was pre-booked and Fahim was taking a nap. Prices were crazy high – Rs. 10,000 per day (not night) for two small rooms. Thankfully, this was inclusive of extra mattresses. Things were now gonna be really expensive!
After we all had lunch and a session of pseudo raping Kashif, the guys went off to Vagator beach while Gayatri and I took a small nap. We then walked to the beach which was about a kilometer away from our hotel, noticing that the lazy guys had taken the car. By the time we reached the beach (after checking out numerous shops on the way), it was dark and the guys were leaving. Nothing much to see on Vagator anyways. It was time to go to the Saturday Night Bazaar at Arpora, my favorite thing to do in Goa! Once in the bazaar, the girls and the guys split. So while we chicks were shopping, the guys were at the live performance being given by a band called Kundalini Airport. They were playing good music, so if you’re into Indo-trance-funk-reggae mix, you should listen to them.
All my clothes worn in the rest of the trip were bought at the Saturday Night Bazaar. :-)
December 30, 2007 – Day 7
Me, Manish, Chandan, Gayatri, Ajinkya, Kashif, Fahim + Preeti + Gazala + Pedro + Roopali
The next morning, Chandu’s friends Preeti and Gazala had arrived with Manish’s friend and my acquaintance (now my friend…I can’t believe I never knew how funny this guy is in so many years that I have known him), Pedro. We went out for breakfast at this place called Mango Tree at Vagator which I recommend to anybody going to Vagator. It’s good for a meal at any time of the day. I can’t remember us doing anything interesting the whole day. We picked up Roopali from the airport and went to Baga in the evening, where Chandu – Preeti and Gayatri – Fahim joined us on rented bikes. The rest of the evening we spent finding out places we could spend 31st night in Baga beach. At dinner time, we went to a shack that had a lot of options of fish, crabs, calamari and shrimp to choose from, for an open air barbeque with our choice of preparation. Dinner done, we headed back to the hotel. Kashif, Chandu and Pedro went to Vagator beach to drink while the rest of us slept. The next morning, I woke up to Roopali telling me how Kashif came in the room (I was sleeping with Roopali and Manish) calling “Alpana” not so softly. Apparently, everybody in the room, except me, heard this! I do love the way I sleep hehe.
December 31, 2007 – Day 8 – Traveling in Goa
Me, Manish, Chandan, Ajinkya, Kashif, Preeti, Gazala, Pedro, Roopali
Gayatri and Fahim left the hotel at 1030 hrs coz they had a flight to catch. Poor Fahim only got a 2 day vacation.
Roopali had been working since morning and we kept bugging her. We went to Baga for lunch again coz Baga is the best beach in Goa (I’m soooo biased hehe). Kashif and I decided to take one of the bikes and leave a little after the other guys coz we still had to take our showers. For a first (or maybe second) timer, he was pretty good at riding, considering it was a very badly maintained bike. By the time we reached there, the other guys had finished a round of jet-skiing. After some well deserved lunch, we played some football in the sand and Kashif had a blackout. We are still making fun of him for that! Then it was time for the banana ride where about 5 – 6 people sit on an inflatable banana being pulled by a motor boat. Two times during the ride, the boat takes a sharp turn and we fall off the banana. It was so much fun that I took the ride twice. Roopali kept thinking she would drown and Kashif didn’t help her much in that – he once fell on both of us, pushing an already afraid Roopali in the water and giving me a black-blue mark on the arm that my mom questioned me on when I was back home! And to top it all, he doesn’t believe that he did it! He insists it was Roopali that hit me. What a liar, I tell you!
It was 8 by the time we finished the rides and playing on the beach. We went back to the hotel quickly and took our showers, many people having to do so while the lights went off! Roopali and I wore some really sexy outfits, only to realize later how it would come of no use. You see, we idiots decided to try out Morjim when we left the hotel at 2300 hrs.Yes, there was a good party there, but one that had a line that would take 2 hours to reach the passes-selling stand, and that would cost us 2500 bucks each. That’s not what we came to Goa for!! So we decided Baga was the place for us. But Morjim is in the other direction from Vagator that Baga is. So we had to travel even more and at 0000 hrs when the new year came in we wished each other Happy New Year in the car! Pedro and Chandu were on the bike and after a few minutes we asked them to stop at a nice spot on the road. We hugged and wished each other and saw a lot of fireworks at the distance. It was actually a great place to see all the fireworks from many distant places.
We decided to move on to Baga coz the parties would still be on anyways. But luck wouldn’t have it that way. Half a kilometer from Calangute (you see, all roads were made one ways, so to get to Baga, we had to get from Morjim to Calangute and then take another one way from Calangute to Baga), we got stuck in a traffic jam. So we parked the car nearby and walked to Calangute. OH MY GOD! It was like an exodus or a Ganpati Visarjan! Every 5 minutes, drunk people were having fights, some more violent than the other. We got out of there, looking for a restaurant off the beach to eat. Soon, we found a place that was open and had an open kitchen. By this time it was about 0200 hrs and most places were only offering booze. We ate and left for the hotel. That was our 31st night story!
January 1, 2008 – Day 9 – Happy New Year!
Me, Manish, Chandan, Ajinkya, Kashif, Preeti, Gazala, Pedro, Roopali
After brunch at Mango Tree, Kashif and I left for the airport at about 1300 hrs. Manish and Roopali were leaving by Manish’s car in the afternoon and the rest of the gang was to take a bus in the evening. They had time to go para-sailing that afternoon so they had an eventful 1st of January.
We saw Shaan at the airport. TV does put 20 pounds on people! He was such a skinny guy! On the plane, we took a lot of crappy pictures of the view outside. On reaching Mumbai airport, we wanted to eat so we sat on the lounge section of the Café Coffee Day and saw that the prices were astonishingly high. So quietly, we moved out and bought a coffee, brownie, sandwich and a sub from the more reasonably priced CCD below. We sat in a really quiet place in the airport and ate and talked. I think we had a great time there – so simple yet so fulfilling (don’t know if that was Kashif’s or the brownie’s effect!)
At Bombay airportAnd so we finished another trip, as Kashif dropped me home and kissed me a cute goodbye. Next year, hopefully, I’ll have a bigger and better story to tell!
