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Imagine a place where the heights meet the depths...the mountain meets the sea...yes, a place where all you can see, feel and experience is 'Nature’. By my good luck, I got a chance to visit such a place last weekend...Hari-hareshwar...a beautiful beach and this beach was much more beautiful than the popular beaches of Goa. I thought why not share the experience. Let me start from the start.
Day one:
Place: dadar station, Mumbai, 8.30am
I am ready with my bag-pack to travel. No it’s not to harihareshwar…that’s not even among the rarest of my ideas...I am travelling to Pune, where I have to meet my friends to spend my weekend with. My exam of GATE has finished a few days ago and I m free, after months of studies, for some gala time with my friends. As the train leaves I decide to log into the messenger on my cell for a small chit chat before the cell looses network. And I see a friend online who has just arrived at pune station. We decide to meet up at the station itself before we move on to visit our other friends.
After three hours of journey I reach Pune station at 11.30am and see my friend waiting for me. We decide to take a few of other friends with us and travel to some place away from the city. After searching for getaways near pune the place Harihareshwar, 180 km from pune, is decided…
Place: swargate bus-stand, Pune 2.30pm
After lunch at famous chaitanya’s parathas at FC road, without loosing any more time I and a few friends have arrived at swargate, where we’d be getting a local bus to take us to Mangaun. We have got not much money and just the names of major stops ‘mangaun’ and ‘shrivardhan’ to start our journey with. We board the bus and the conductor tells us that we’d reach mangaun in approximately 3 hours…the bus is full of local villagers and we talk to some small girls about their lives.
Place: mangaun bus-stand, Mangaun 7pm
We have just arrived at mangaun. The journey to mangaun was good without many stops in between. One of the major stop was Mulshi Lake, which is also one of the major tourist spots near pune. After talking to the local people and a few bus drivers we came to know that we have to take another bus from here to Shrivardhan (one of my friends has major difficulty remembering this name and I suggest him to remember the name Govardhan which has much importance in Hindu mythology.) We also come to know that we won’t be able to get any bus service from shrivardhan to harihareshwar and will have to rely on local transport for that. After waiting for almost one hour we finally spot a bus to shrivardhan and with much difficulty fighting crowd we finally board the bus and get a place to sit. The journey from Mangaun to Shrivardhan is roughly of one and a half hour long.
Place: Shrivardhan bus-stand, Shrivardhan 9.30 pm
As we get down the bus we figure out that our timings were wrong and we are running late. Shrivardhan being a small village, we can’t get anything to go to harihareshwar until dawn. So the only option left for us was to find a nice place to rest and spend the night and start early morning for harihareshwar. But as it was a small village we had much difficulty in finding a proper accommodation for the night. After walking for about half an hour and the guys rejecting many motels (because of girls’ safety and bla bla) we finally reach a recommended place and take rooms for the night.
As for what happened the next day just wait a little more as my next post will be on day two which is the last day of the journey and where I get to see two most beautiful beaches of harihareshwar and shrivardhan.
