memoirs of my trip to the konkan coast....janriza..murud..harihareshwar....diveagar

Hi guys,

well am writing this as i feel i should write on my recent 2 day experience along the konkan coast,.well as you know or may not know thats why i willmention that i am currently posted in Tatamotors at Pune. Being amanufacturing unit they got only a Thursday as a weekly off, which kills me as earlier in the IT Park we had a sat-sun off and i went for some amazingtreks in the sahayadris. This time we got 2 consecutive days of holidays(25th and 26th,,being a Thursday and a Friday (republic day). I asked several of my friends if they were game for going to Murud- Janzira on25th-26th Jan, initially some agreed, but due to some commitments , theycould not make it is what they told me. But i was determined to make the most of these two days. So here goes how i made the most of 25th and26th jan 2007 I got up around 7.30 and by 9 i had already filled petrol ( 10 litres) andbought a few bananas, picked up my shorts, a jacket and my lovely woodland trekking shoes and nuts and set off to mulshi to go via tamini ghat routetowards kolad and roha. The odometer reading when i started was27300km.Iwas all alone with just my Yamaha RZX for companion's sake.The road wasdeserted, so i could do speeds upto 70-80 and maintain them, i dint speed upfurther as i wanted to enjoy the scenic, virgin beauty all around me, Itook my first break just before tamini ghat where there is a hoarding which says , one road to lonavala and the other to kolad, the break was for a leakand some banana popping. Later the tamini ghat began, and as always being adown slope I shut off the bike engine and just controlled with the help of the two bike breaks, believe me the tamini ghat is around 7-9 km long fullof twists and turns, a bikers delight, the good road was an icing on thecake. next stop near roha where from the one rupee coinbox i rang up a friend in pune and told him about my adventure so far, he said " kya aadmihai tu, akele nikal gaya, i had covered 135 kms till then" now my confidencewas fully boosted, i was talking with the wind courtesy my bike, i kept riding, after crossing roha i came across a check post which showed tworoads going towards murud, i took the left one, went for about 10kmsnegotiating the dusty road on the mountain and stopped when i came across a young lad, asked him for directions, he suggested to take the other road( wehad a long conversation actually), finally i reverted back, came to theearlier spot, there was also a police check post there , and i asked about the places which lay ahead, two middle aged policemen provided instantdirections and told me about the places where i should stop over, i headedstraight then, as usual i ended up giving a lift to a scruffy young man as i thought he could help me with places to visit, he worked in the Birla templewhich i came across while driving, i stopped there , visited the temple, itsreally nice, a lovely break after riding non stop on the parched bumpy roads.Next stop a brief one was at Alibag bridge, i parked my bike, and went tosit on the rocks jutting out of the sea, had some peanuts there like amonkey. then headed on, and boy was the road amazing, one side the farms or barren land, adjacent to it the road and adjacent to the road the "arabiansea" i felt like i was the king of the world then. This patch of the "land,road, sea" continues for about 5 kms of which i savored every moment before i soon arrived to the kashid beach. The sand on this beach is nice andwhite, but being brought up in mumbai and goa, beaches dont fascinate meunless there are "bikini clad ladies" ;), i love the sea though! so after a 10 min stop at kashid, i headed to murud which was gettingcloser, well i was a bit nervous about my fuel level, so i stopped at theonly petrol pump in murud district, and asked the nepali guy to fill petrol worth 100rs, what he said astonished me, he said, i can fill only 2 litreswhich works out to 98rs, not 100!!! he had that old time pump if you guysremember when we were about 10-15 yrs younger. Again after a few metres a middle aged smiling muslim guy asked me for a lift( how i made out he was amuslim? well simple he had that unkept muslim beard and i guess from what isaw, 70% of the population was muslim in murud), i asked him how do i get to the janzira which is on an island about 5kms from shore. he guided meaccordingly, was surprised that ventured 200kms all alone and in 10 minsafter he got off , i was on murud beach, here i stopped over for some nariel pani=coconut water, and met two French tourists, i really loved the lady'seyes, they were deep blue, however they were a middle aged couple soautomatically ideas in my mind stopped trickling in ;), I spoke some French with them, i had learnt french for about 4 months, "jai obliye boucoup"which means i have forgotten a lot of what i had learnt, but i still made abig impression with my "petit=little" french on them. The french guy liked my bike a lot. Soon i headed on and now i could the "kasa fort,. which imistook to be the janjira fort " well guys a bit of history, janzira was afort which the great Maratha warrior king Shivaji could never capture, so thats why his son built a fort on an island close to janzira in order tocapture janzira, but it never happened. finally I saw janzira , majesticallystanding in the Arabian sea as it has been for the past 950 yrs, oh and on the way to janzira, first comes the nizam's palace called "hathi mahal", butunfortunately is was not open to public. finally i was at murud beachadmiring the janzira fort from the shore , the boatman said unless there are about 20 people he wont take me to the island, we were 10 then, me and avillage family, so began waiting for others , in the meanwhile i became thefamily 's official free photographer and clicked some snaps which i hope come out good else they would end up cursing me! ! very soon a horde of 20guys all from pune like me arrived, so all of us were in the boat and wewere sailing smoothy towards janira fort in the middle of the sea!! guys an amazing piece of information for you " the fort is built in such a way thattill you get to about 100-200 meters close to it, you just cant see the hugeentrance to the fort" it was awesome, i tried it while going and when we came back, on the boat i met two other guys from pune and they told me wewould ferry our bikes and sail to dighi on a launch and go to diveagar andhariharshwar from there!! i loved the idea, but first some trivia about janzira, well its huge, 20 acres fully fortified, i have never seen acomplete fort ever on all my earlier treks in the sahayadris, inside thefort amazingly there are two huge sweet water lakes, we drank water from a deep, deep well and it was crystal clear ,, folks nature's miracle, saltywater all around and sweet water in the island!! we explored the fort,thestones which have been used to build the fort have taken some battering over hundreds of decades, but the joints used to connect these stones arestill as they were. The fort is huge , you can get lost, no jokes, anotherinteresting trivia, the nizam built an underwater tunnel right to his palace on the shore from the fort, we ventured inside the secret tunnel but it wastoo dark, next time i will take a powerful torch and try going deeper. thenizam was named siddhi and he came from africa and captured this fort and later nobody could take it from him, well as janzira means "impregnable" itrealy is impregnable!!finally i was back on murud shore, luckily for us the sea was calm, thenimmediately got my bike and with the other two guys , the bikes and the three of us were on the motorised launch to dighi. we saw some amazing birdsflying so close to our boats, they would dive into the sea and come out withfish. soon we were at dighi, we alighted and headed straight for diveagar as we dint want to miss the sunset. the road is really nice, soon at diveagarwe managed to enjoy the sunset after biking along the beach also. we thenwent hunting for a place to stay overnite, i could have actually slept on the beach listening to the ocean waves!, but we were lucky and found a nicebunglow to stay in, the owner had cocunut, betelbut orchards , amazingorchards . we dumped our luggage and head for the beach again where we got some chicken , beer and came back late. slept till 7.30am, headed for thebeach again where we spent 2 hrs sunbathing, i decided sun tan would looknice as i was tired of all the girls asking me " how come i am so pink and they wanted to know the secret", later took a bath , went to the famousgolden ganpati temple, and then headed for srivardhan, srivardhan was againa nice , sleepy town like diveagar, but diveagar is better, huge old time bunglows and so many coconut trees. after some time at srivardhan beach, weheaded to our last destination which was harihareshwar, being 26thjan(national holiday), we encountered a lot of sumos , jeeps, rickshaws, buses which were also headed towards harihareshwar . after some nimbupani="limewater" we visited the diety and decided to check out the place, itsamazing, the diety is on a mountain and if you go to the rear side of the mountain, you come face to face with the sea and only the rocks there togive you company. i enjoyed the scene totally sat down , was completely asease admiring the battle between the rocks and the sea , the waves lashing and the rocks sustaning. soon we decided to head home, well interesting parthere is i came across acros all sorts of roads, namely, good roads, badroads and no roads!!sometimes my ride was like a desert safari when the roads were bad, other times i was cruising along the sea. i was home comfortably by evening 6 in pune, the bike's odometer readingwas 27756, so more than 450kms spread over 30 hrs. amazing!! i plannedmurud-janzira but ended going to diveagar, srivardhan and harihareshwar as well!!http://www.flickr.com/photos/pariandhiswanderlust/The above is a link to the konakn coast biking trip, view the album titled janzira trip.i plan to go again!parikshit9822474756