A virgin beach and a vagabond

The New Year’s Eve, friends planning different things and inviting you to join in. A lame excuse like you don’t have time doesn’t work and the activities that they are too excited about to pursue don’t interest you at all. You want to hit a virgin beach and there is none in sight close enough for the time allowed. Enter Arnob, the man who know places which people have never heard of like the lanes of his muhallah. Guhagar is the name he utters and I do have some reasons to trust him.



The only long-termer kitted with disks on avail is the Yamaha Fazer, not a very lip smacking option but definitely better than the alternatives that begin with the letters CD and CT. Tank the thing up, put a tank bag over it with a pair of jeans, a couple of t-shirts and a toothbrush inside, and you’re ready to go.



Now any trip from Pune via road is bound to start on a disappointing note. The traffic would make you feel that you’ll never get out of it and even if you are the more optimistic kinds, the trenches in the road will make you feel as if there’s a war going on. You’ll shudder to hit the highway as the enemy planes can hit you far more easily in the open. Quite seriously, you don’t really understand what degree of danger are you subjecting your poor little self before you actually hit the so called highway. That’s because as soon as you leave the city, a small ghat section greets you which doesn’t have even a single square meter of road without a pothole. You can’t ride slow on these roads, because if you try to, you’ll land into one of the innumerable craters, disappear and would never come out. So you actually have to ride extremely slow.

The suffering doesn’t last for long though and after some 20-odd kilometres you suddenly realize that there is a wide grin on your face when you see the wide, smooth road ahead of you. Illusion I prefer calling it, and it could turn out to be a fatal one if one just gets too happy and goes the ballistic way. What may look like roads to you are just strips, stretches and patches that lead to death. Complimented with the trenches they render our country perfectly ready for a war. Try hitting 100 on them and you end up hitting your head on the road, as one side of the road invariably keeps ending abruptly without any warning whatsoever. I knew the fact as I had been on the stretch earlier. Anything for my country though.



Broad, wide roads are a curse for an enthusiastic biker. They are, at least for me. They don’t ever offer any challenge to you and you cannot but feel frustrated when someone on a bigger capacity machine whizzes past you looking at you as if you don’t deserve to live. My miseries ended after thirty kilometres though when I took a right to the narrower, windier and more rustic road to Mahad through Bhor village.



The drive after Bhor upto Mahar is a treat for a biker who wishes to put his riding skills to test. The seventy kilometer stretch has a never ending array of sharp turns and a yummy feast of uphill and downhill sections that only the ghats could offer. The road was tattered, not to my disappointment as I never expected anything better for my own good. But an amazingly blue and large lake, and a particularly pleasing weather that accompanied me on the stretch ensured that I enjoyed every nanometer of the ride for the entire seventy kilometres. The road was in bad shape, but even the rough had an element of predictability and homogeneity about it. There’s no loose gravel on the surface, so you could actually perform some antics without much possibility of having to see an orthopaedician who isn’t available in a radius of 50 kilometres. Now Fazer is a pretty sad bike for someone who’s used to Karizmas and Pulsars, and there is no way you could enjoy riding such roads on it in the fourth gear, I wonder if I shifted to fourth even once for the entire stretch. You have to ride in third, look at the coming corner with that wicked smile on your face, lean, shift into second and feel the rear sliding out. Since there is no gravel, it sticks and you realize that you are perfectly pointed now to make an exit, so you open the throttle fully and pull out, ready to do it all over again as the next corner is right there in sight. The speed keeps adding on and so does your belief that you could do it even better. It’s an ecstatic feeling keeping the bike in the power band for seventy full kilometres and not giving the engine a moment to relax. Try this stretch if you know what I mean, you’ll get enough dose of your dopamine with any 100cc trundler that you have on avail.



Once I hit Mahad, I happened to hit the Mumbai-Goa highway as well, which meant that I had entered into the boring zone. The cynic in me kept cursing the government for making such a smooth, straight and wide road till I reached Chiplun, where I had to turn right. The road ahead was pretty smooth, and windy but since the darkness had embraced everything I decided to preserve my hooliganism for the day.



It’s a 40 kilometre ride from Chiplun to Guhagar, which didn’t take much time. I reached the town and looked for accommodation. The night being the New Year’s Eve, everything was booked. I found a place for myself though after trying a bit, and for a price that I could never have believed, and which I prefer to keep to myself lest you think of me as a cheapskate.




I didn’t wait much before I hit the beach. And I must say, the number of people around, particularly for a New Year’s Eve deemed the place as virgin as a beach in India could ever get. There was group of local men clad in lungis dancing to the tunes of Kajara Re near the chaupati on one side, while the other half had some twenty people who belonged to a more restrained category and were there just to enjoy the serene evening. I spotted a group of five Australian students, with three guys and two girls and promptly joined them after a short introduction. The next five hours I spent on the beach eating, dancing and drinking. They were shooting with their own camera, which was far more advanced than the one I had and which doesn’t produce too good a result in the night. We had decided to share the photographs at some cyber café on the next morning. But as we were drunk, we didn’t have the wits to figure out that this was a remote town, at least 200 kms from the nearest big city and to expect a computer, forget Internet was being an optimist of the nth order. Obviously I never got the photographs that I would have loved to keep with me.




The following day I took to the beach on the bike, and boy, was it fun. The beach stretches for around 6-odd kilometres and the experience of riding a bike on the soft sand is something totally different. You have to be some 15 to 20 metres away from the point where the water last hits the shore and you’ll be almost as good as being on a tough tar surface. Stray more than five metres to your left or right and you could clearly hear the engine dying down, as the tyres dig down into the soggy and dry sand on your right and left respectively, if you have your right towards the sea that is. I rode some fifteen times across the beach and never found myself satisfied. I was looking forward to my sixteenth trip when I stopped to make doughnuts. And trust me, there isn’t anything more fun than sliding the rear wheels, kicking sand violently off them and still not having to put your legs down for support. The best part being, you never have to worry about falling down, as you would stand up again and start sliding even if you landed on your chin. The time I had was a blast and I left endless circles and slidemarks on the beach before I gave in to hunger.



The seafood was exotic, delicious and above all, cheap. I ate like a Bull and swallowed six Surmai fish as a snack, and ended up paying not a penny more than 200 bucks. Bring me the people who want to be at Goa on their next New Year’s.



I did whatever I could with the beach and the bike while also giving myself time to get wet into the sea and being laughed upon by an eleven year old kid who made out at once that I didn’t know how to swim. I also visited the beleaguered Enron Power Project which is in the process of revival, being undertaken by NTPC and GAIL now. I wasn’t allowed in, but the view from outside gave me a fair idea of why there was such song and dance about the project in the parliament. Further ahead, I met a river which was peppered with countless number of boats. It might be a common sight for the residents of coastal areas, but for someone like me who belongs to the drought stricken land of Rajasthan, it is something that is good enough to leave you gasping in awe.




After a day and a half of unprecedented fun, it was time for me to head back. In a quest to see more, I took the route through Poladpur, Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani. On my way back, I met this black Nepalese guy on a paragliding peak. His name was Ram Bahadur and he offered me this strange looking little thing for 180 rupees. Not interested, I declined. He put one of those bean-like things in one of my palms, told me close the fist and asked me to rub my other palm wherever I liked. He said it was musk. I rubbed it at a couple of places, and every single place where I rubbed my palm - from the bike’s handlebar, to the camera bag and even the seat under my bum smelled fantastically. I negotiated for 30 rupees a piece and I still have the woody bean with me. It is as devoid of fragrance now as a piece of wood could ever be, but I still keep rubbing it around hoping I was not fooled. Actually I know I was not, as the memories of the trip that it brings across are worth much, much more.