Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Diveagar-Perfect weekend destination...


It was for a while that we people were planning for a overnight trip and suddenly Siddharth came up with the idea of Diveagar. Since I had not even offered anyone ride in my new i10, I was more than eager to jump on this opportunity and shut my critics on this account !
The planning started some 1 month back and we finalised Diveagar on the weekend of 17/18th January 2009.Siddharth already got a joining date in Wipro in March so he wanted to enjoy his few weeks of freedom to the fullest.
Finally when we headed to Diveagar on early Saturday morning, we were total 7 ppl with 2 of them coming by ST and me,Sonal,Rohit,Sid and Vrushali coming by i10. I was not a very good driver until this trip even though its been well over 6 months since I bought this car. Somehow I manage to convince myself about driving as much as I can and later I realised,driving is not all that difficult !!
It was great fun for me to get on to the driver's shoes and the 1st patch till Kothrud to Mulshi went without any hiccups. At our 1st halt for breakfast at 8, I had decided to go till the end including the Tamhini Ghat. The joy and feeling of 'I-have-made-it' was evident on my face ! With beautiful music to sooth our ears,I went on like a born driver with confidance boosting by each passing km. Soon we crossed Tamhini ghat. This place has so many school and colleges around that Sonal humorously named it as Tamhini University and a series of related jokes followed (as happens with every situation)!
At around 9:45 we had reached near Mangaon which is a place on Bombay-Goa highway. This is the 'next-big-thing' on the highway with some sort of liveliness and typical village types chaos around. With full swing,I drove into the Mhasla road,forgetting we were running low on Fuel. Next came Mhasla, a very small place on the way to Diveagar. U get an option of going to either Srivardhan or Diveagar from Mhasla so its a sort of local junction there. Both the places are around 25-30 kms from here. We obviously took the Diveagar road.
By now, I was under visible tension for fuel.Infact we had about 10 litres of Petrol in the car, and I was consistantly getting an avg above 16-17 anywhere with i10. But still its never too bad to have a fully loaded car with petrol. Somehow we found 2 petrol pumps near by Borli, an even smaller place than Mhasla but both of them waiting for the fuel tank to come and fill their dry state. With a dejected face, we took our final route.
Finally reached Diveagar at 11:30 and got a unpleasant surprise from Awlaskar(where we had booked a room 3 weeks before) . The uncle simply refused to give us the room since we had not confirmed the bookings 2 days before !! What a looser he was..I mean,there should be some sort of professionalism if you really want to get into a good business.You just cant live on reputation for the whole of your life !
I just felt so helpless for those few moments but Sid managed to get through another deal which later turned out to be very good. We booked a cottege called "Dolphin Resort" which is run by a Pune based PMC official,Jagdish Chavan. He is also a renowned Rangoli artist running his exhibition in Ganeshotsav festival every year in Pune.
Chavan kaka welcomed us with a wide smile on his face and I was damn sure there that our stay will be extremely pleasant in his Cotteges. And what a place it turned out! Very specious room with attached Toilet,extremely clean and neat only for 1000 Rs. This can accomodate 5 ppl and you can get en extra bed for 150 bucks. A fair deal, we thought.
Just when Rohit and Sid were finalising the deal,we suddenly realised that we need to 'book' the lunch at the famous "Bapat".Here too, Chavan uncle came in for rescue and managed to book 7 lunch with Ukdiche Modak(even though the booking time was already over accoording to the rules!typical..huh?).But Bapat didnt let us down in any department with some awasome food lingering in mouth. Once we finished the lunch,everyone was so tired that we scraped the initial plan of going to beach right after lunch and headed back to catch some sleep!
Evening beach was as usual a great affair ! I am anyways scared of water since I cant swim at all,so photography was the only thing that I could engage myself in when everyone was enjoying the water and trying to pull everyone into it.Diveagar beach is not great types, but still clean enough that you can get into it without much worry. And it is long enough for the no. of tourists that are coming here so its still not THAT crowded.Bottomline, 2 hrs of uninterrupted enjoyement!!
The worst part after such type of watery enjoymment is to wait for your turn to get a good shower !! And we had our full share of waiting in the queue and got ourselves cleaned up in the order 4,5,6 and 7 !!
Meanwhile Vrushali had other plans to make me think even at such a wet condition. She wanted some inputs for her speech topic. I wasn’t at my imaginative best at that time but still we could carve out some good points for her topic.
With some good food again in the night, we finally went back to the cottege at around 11:30 . Walking in the sand on beach at night is one of the most satisfying thing you can do in the coastal area. We got ourself some sort of bonus because of the clear and pollution free sky to enjoy an extremely beautiful night view with hundreds of thousands of never-seen-before stars
That was an amazing sight to watch and remember too !
I always love to take the night on.By that I mean, I find it very exciting and satisfying to see night through. The joy of chatting throughout that span is unexplainable. There is always pin drop silence around you, and if you are sitting in some open area outside your room and have like minded people around to discuss any damn topic under the sky, its more than just joy! I had the privilage of having Sid and Vrushali accompnying me on this...we discussed n no. of things till about 3 am in the morning.Sometimes you dont even need to talk anything. Just sit back,relax and enjoy the "emptyness" of the night.A very rewarding and satisfying experience,truly !
Next day morning again had some bad treatment from Awlaskar stored for us.Dont want to get into the details though,we somehow finished breakfast and went for the final sightseeing-A very beautiful Ganesh Temple.Now it was Sid's turn to drive the car, where I sat behind-much satisfied by previous day's effort. On our way,we stop by to see the Rangoli Exhibition by Chavan Uncle. As usual, it was a sight to watch out for.
Return journey wasnt really any special as such except we all were in some nostalgic mood after spending a perfect weekend in Diveagar. With some old hindi music being played in the car, we returned back by 6:30 pm. Too good, these 2 days...:)
Some figures:
Pune -Diveagar=160 km.
Route: Pune-Chandni Chowk-Paud-Mulshi-Tamhini Ghat-Mangaon-Mhasla-Borli-Diveagar.
Dolphin Resort-Suvarna GaneshPakhadi,Diveagar-09420696499
Jagdish Chavan:09823686005
Total expenses-650 Rs per head! (Including petrol,1 night stay,3 times food etc)
Car expenses-20 ltr Fuel for 360 km.

2 comments:

Pankaj - भटकंती Unlimited said...

Wonderful trip put in the words. DiveAgar has been always my favorite beach so far. Calm and long shallow water. Also you could have walked down to the extreme right after entering the beach to see the colony of thousands of migrated sea-gulls.

Walking along the DiveAgar beach at early morning is my theme for the dream :-)).

And do you remember your drive from Kothrud, Katraj and then to my home at Kharadi and back to Kothrud... that day i was sure you gonna to be a fantastic driver :-P

Rahul said...

Hello All,

This is Rahul from Pune few days back I and my friends had been to Divegar. We were looking for a good place to stay and we got refered to "Manas Resorts" we saw the facility which was kept neat and clean. We booked a room for just 1000/- for 4 people. This place had all the facilities that are required on a short trip like this Inverter Back up, Parking for vehicles etc.
We thought these rates were very reasonable compared to other resorts in Diveagar. Interestingly we got to know this resort is managed by bunch of 4 guys from Pune as we spoke with them they showed us around their property and we saw beetle & coconut trees rite in their facility in which they allow all the guest to relax they also have built couple of tents in which they have installed tables & chairs for their guests to chit chat and sip on a coffee or anything they want :) Intertestingly these guys also arraged for food unlike others who would not even give contact numbers for the nearest khanawal. All in all it was a memorable experience at "Manas Resort" worth a visit again. I have their contact details for others who would like to visit this place.

Manas Resorts
www.seashellsholidays.com