Goa to Bombay (2)

The day after the next, we hired a WagonR and started off for Kolhapur.
The journey was fun; with the driver playing just the one CD he had on loop. By the time we stopped for lunch, I knew all the Kishore Kumar songs on that CD by heart.

We passed through some scenic points, which were like all tourist spots crowded. The crowd spoilt the view really with their insane chatter, when they should have been staring at the horizon peacefully. Breathing in the smells of the forest that lay below us.

By the time we reached the Goa-Maharashtra border it was 1. We stopped at a small roadside restaurant for lunch. They said the food would only be coming at 1.15. This idea of food being bought form home to a ‘restaurant’ was quite novel to me.

It was delicious! Piping hot, home cooked and very different from what I usually have back home.

By four that evening we had reached Kolhapur.
Getting to the hotel proved to be quite exciting. No one seemed to have a clue about where it was located. The locals would point to the right and say go to the left and vice versa. We went round in circles for over half an hour before finally finding the hotel.

 To my delight the hotel we were staying in had a Baskin Robins store right in the lobby. We made plans to go to the Mahalakshmi temple the next day.

Goa to Bombay (1)

My first trip this summer. And it was to Goa, from where we had to get to Mumbai. With pit stops of course!

The bougainvillea

We reached Margaon, Goa at 10 in the morning. Getting into a taxi, the feel of a small lazy town soon drifted to us. Our hotel ‘La Flor’ was a small place, in a rundown area with a railway track opposite the hotel. Imagine waking up at midnight because of a train horn!
Of course the first task was to find a good place for lunch. Asking a taxi driver where we would find local food, we set off asking locals for the directions. At Khamat we had a delightful ‘thali’.

A truck on a train!

The hotel was lovely. Small but you could sit out front under a mango tree. The fusion of bougainvillea, mangoes, cats, trains and shouts of children enjoying the summer accompanied by a gentle breeze was enthralling.

In the evening, impatient to shoot a sunset at a beach, I dragged my parents out asking an auto to take us to the closest beach.
We soon reached Colva, which was your typical tourist beach. Cafes, roadside shops selling beach dresses and water sports. A lot of people were parachute sailing, others using jet skis. Frolicking in the surf was fun. After which I settled onto the sand getting some spectacular snaps of the sunset.

Dinner was cold pizza, and cola at a small café by the sea.

A tryst with Sharman Joshi

A few weeks ago, while taking a walk around Fort area, Mumbai, I noticed a crowd gathered next to Jahangir Art Gallery. Curious, I went and became a part of it. There were whispered conversations from which one could decipher that it was a film shooting, and the star was Sharman Joshi. He came out of his van, and was having a chat with a man before they started shooting. I, being the quintessential shutter-bug immediately took a snap. Unfortunately it came out blurred so I deleted it. A man saw this and came and requested quite politely that I delete the snap saying it’s not allowed.

Telling him that I had already deleted it wasn’t enough. He wanted to see for himself. I really wanted to ask him if he’d like to go through all the 144 snaps I’d taken of Mumbai, that very day.

Ok so maybe snaps like these are taken and released when they aren’t supposed to. But do you think that it’s fair to do so when it’s a public place? For all he knew I could have been taking a picture of the cobbled street, or of the lights.

The streets belong to everyone. Or so they say.

 Apparently they don’t.

If you have a different point of view which you wish to express, please post a comment or write to me at ritealot@gmail.com. You never know, you could be the inspiration for my next article. :)