So there's two Tuts coming up on Thursday and Friday, and I'm supposed to be making notes for one of them. As in the study group that I'm in (tears of laughter, please) has decided that I should prepare notes on something to do with Keynes and Business Cycles. Expect a lot of updates on the blog this week.
As the crow flies, Goa is roughly 400 kilometres from Pune. And while there are a whole host of roads that one can choose from Gokhale to reach Goa, Chaman and I decided that we would take one of the longer ones while going. Which meant that we would go via Chandni Chowk, past Mulshi lake, into the Tamhini Ghat, and from there on down onto NH 17.
On the bike, a 2001 Hero Honda Splendor (MH-12-BE-8015), were two guys, one of them slightly on the heavier side of things, two helmets, one extremely large haversack and a smaller bag containing a first aid kit, a towel, tissue paper, and other odds and ends.
Life's Little Lesson No. 1: Pack your bag for a trip like this, and then throw out 80% of the clothes, and 50% of the other stuff. Unless you have a member of the fairer sex accompanying you. Only in that case is carrying all of what we carried understandable, and maybe not even then.
You see, thing is, the Splendor was designed to ferry two reasonably thin people around, strictly within city limits, and even in those undemanding conditions, it isn't exactly the most comfrotable joy ride around. On a trip that's going to take the better part of a day, lugging a haversack that's as big as you are is no fun.
When we left Pune, the odometer read 14,007 kilometres. By the way, that is privileged information, since that (the odometer) was one of the very few functioning parts on the Splendor. The horn was non-existent, the indicators were not working, we did not have the registration papers or the insurance papers, or the PUC, and I certainly did not have my licence, having lost it last March. It was one of those carefully planned campaigns.
At the outset, taking the route we took seemed to be a rather bad idea, since it was narrow, pot-hole infested, under construction and generally a pain in the butt.
Life's Little Lesson No. 2: Always, always remove the helmet lock that all bikes in Pune have on the rear before you leave on as long a trip as this. That last sentence ends with the phrase "pain in the butt". Very literally.
But conditions improved drastically as we reached Mulshi lake, with the road becoming better, the air appreciably cooler and the scenery taking an undoubted turn for the better. A little beyond the lake we stopped for our first pee break of the day. A little word of advise for the uninitiated. Bike rides, and the breaks in between them, can be measured in terms of pee-breaks, or in terms of cigarette breaks. I plump for the latter, since smokers seem to have developed this in built clock that times breaks to perfection. Not only the duration between breaks, but the breaks themselves are measured out very nicely by the time it takes to smoke one cigarette. Always travel with a smoker.
And then owards into the Tamhini Ghat. Starting a little below Bombay, and stretching all the way down into Goa, strung out in a long proud line, are the Sahyadri mountains. Adjoining these mountains on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other, is that part of Maharashtra which is known as the Konkan. There are a number of ghats winding their way down the Sahyadri, prinicipal among them being the Tamhini Ghat, the Poladpur Ghat, the Amba Ghat, the Radhanagari Ghat and the Amboli Ghat. There are others as well, but we'll leave those for another day.
The Tamhini Ghat leads downwards into Madgaon, which is where one hooks up with NH17. Wooded, tall, imposing, winding, scenic, and quiet.
Quiet. When you turn off your bike and stop to smoke a cigarette, you hear the sound of nothing. No vehicles, no hum-drum, no horns, no twittering of the birds, nothing. Quiet.
I know you're not going to do it, I know I wouldn't do it myself, principally because Newton was talking about more than Physics when he dreamt up inertia, but its worth a ride to a place like the Tamhini Ghat just to be able to savour the true meaning of the word quiet.
Well, it's 12.30 in the night here, and Keynes beckons. I'll be up with the second post in about half an hour or so, I suppose. Sigh.