Roadtrip to Kanniyakumari

Road to Ganapatipule & Srivardhan

This is about our first major trip on our bikes to Ganapatipule & Srivardhan. After going through all the information on the web and reading through various blogs, even I was inspired to write about our trips and posting photographs on it. Hence, this goes out to all the bikers who like cruising around with their dashing biking gears!
This all started with a trip to Daman, Gujarat. Although Mumbai to Daman is a very small distance compared to what bikers tend to travel on their two wheeler monsters, it was a starter for us and an unforgettable one.
As far as Daman as a place is concerned, it SUCKS!! Believe me guys, there is absolutely nothing to explore in that place except that it is only place in Gujarat where you get ample booze and chicken. But the road i.e. NH 8 is awesome after the state of Maharashtra. Unfortunately, none of us had a camera to click snaps and hence, unable to post them.

Let's come back to the trip of Ganapatipule & Srivardhan. We are a gang of 4 Abhishek, Vijay, Shaminder & me. It was decided to be a 3 day trip and we were scheduled to leave on 11th Dec, 08 and it was a Thursday at 11 p.m. As our thirsty souls were not ready to wait till 11.00 in the night, we decided to leave at 7.00 in the evening and what a waste of time it was. It took us three hours to reach Panvel from Malad because of the super dense Mumbai traffic.

Day 1: Malad, Mumbai to Ganapatipule

We had dinner at a small hotel in Panvel. The food was as usual delicious!

Since we left in the night after 10 pm from Panvel, there were not many pics to be clicked. However, did manage some of them.

This was when we had to wait for the dense fog to clear at around 5:00 am. It was impossible to ride with that dense fog.

Getting better.

Finally the sun rose and we reached Ganaputipule at around 8 in the morning riding around 390 odd kms. The road to Ganapatipule is just awesome with hardly any potholes. It is a two lane highway but one can cruise at the speed of ~90 km/kr without any problems. We missed the beautiful scenery of Nh 17 since we mostly drove in the night.

Here are some pics from Ganapatipule.

After driving for the whole night, we went to the beach. The beach was crowded but still clean. One could enjoy the clean water at the shores any time of the day. We got a good room with 4 beds for 500 bucks. The food there was not that exciting but taking the cost into picture, it was good. Went to the hotel, had 2 pegs of whisky and lied flat on the bed.

Day 2: Ganapatipule to Harihareshwar

We got up in the morning at 8 and went to the temple and had breakfast. Took some pics of the temple and beach.

After roaming around Ganapatipule, we decided to head towards Srivardhan. There were two ways to reach there. One was to go back to NH 17 and the other to take the coastal route i.e. the state highways.

We decided to take the second one (God knows why!) And boy! that route was just amazing! No people on the road, infact no proper roads in the first place. But we enjoyed every km of it. It was a 220 odd kms journey but the roads were such that could not cover more than 30 kms in an hour.

There were some mind blowing sceneries on the way.

There was a surprise for us when we found that there is a huge creek to be crossed and there are is no bridge on it. We had to put our bikes in the ferry and go across the creek.

Our bikes are resting for a moment on the boat.

There was this small hotel across the creek named Aswaad. Never thought that a pomphret could cost Rs. 20. But we found it here and it was delicious.

We've reached half way and the route which we selected to travel is as shown below:

We kept on riding after lunch on those internal roads and villages came and went by. There are hardly any houses there in the village. However, there was a school and a hospital in almost every village!