Karjat Feast in a Day

 

Many Bombay-dwellers have visited Karjat at least once. Part of a sub-district in Raigad district, on the outskirts of Mumbai in Maharastra, I made my first trip there too.

About a three-hour drive from Bandra, we were lucky enough to skip the traffic from all the road-digging. The roads were pretty decent, much better than city roads for sure, narrower, but pothole-free. But these roads don’t come free, right? We live in India, so some three toll nakas (booths) had us pay them about Rs 250 both ways… not a bad deal, add a couple more hundreds and you could be in Goa.

On the brighter side, my eyes and lungs were in for a treat! Since it was just a month after the rains, everything was still green, the air seemed cleaner, and best of all, noiseless. Aahh how a city rat loves some peace and quiet…

In Karjat

And I wasn’t going to drive all the way to go get smashed under the influence in the hills (which I’m thinking is a good idea now), I can do that at home too. We went to Karjat because it was the feast of Our Lady of Fatima on October 13. There is a shrine in the tiny village, the only one in India. It was feast that day.

The local maushis (women) were all dressed, in their colourful saris and heavy jewellery. Their ears looked like they’d rip any moment.

People come to this shrine from all over. Many hire buses, or come in groups. The railway station is a 5 min walk from the shrine too.

After mass, there was a big feast being served to the devotees, but my brother being so picky in life, had us leave and go eat lunch at a restaurant.

Our way back was pretty normal, getting stuck in evening traffic, not long before our car was punctured on the Western Express Highway. While the boys changed the tires, I was busy revelling in being stranded at sunset.

Timeline:

9:45 am – Leave
11:50 am – Reach the shrine in Karjat for the 12:30 pm mass.
2:30 pm – Finish mass, check the area out a bit. Eat lots of cucumber sprinkled with salt and masala.
2:45 pm – Reach restaurant. Eat a delicious thali.
3:30 pm – Cruise around, check out the road to Neral (which leads to Matheran). Then decide to head home.
6:30 pm - Home sweet home

** Remember: Carry water, a cap, sunglasses and some hard-boiled sugar sweets. And keep your windows down. Use your air conditioning in the city, to stay away from pollution…(while you’re creating it :P).

50 Inspiring Travel Quotes

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” –John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson 

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” –Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. 

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

Thanks, Lola!

Kanchanaburi's Hidden Tiger Temple

   

Tourists visiting Thailand usually have Pattaya, Phuket, and Bangkok on their places-to-see list. And feeding the cubs? How can you not have a picture of that if you visited exotic Thailand? 

Well, the six of us who made a trip there had quite a few touristy wishes too. So while we did the usual Pattaya, and Bangkok, cabaret shows, watched hookers standing 2 steps away from each other - in utter cultural shock - we wanted to get a different, not-very known version of the tigers. 

If you, like me prefer getting away from hoards of tourists, read up and you'll see what I mean.

the 1000 baht photo

We called Laila [the guide] who came up with a pretty cool package that had us driven all the way to Kanchanaburi from Bangkok which was a good 3 hour drive. **Don't believe the locals when they say anything is close by. Don't. Just be polite and nod.**

Finally we got there and the long drive seemed to be worth it. Here's what you should take in at first hand:

* Please be covered. Shoulders and knees cannot be exposed. This is a Buddhist temple, and so is disrespectful. You can buy a t-shirt from there just in case.

* Only some 300 people visit this place everyday.

* It's about a 150-metre walk from the entrance to where the highly sedated [or calm, meditated] tigers await your arrival.

* But there are quite a few attractions on the way. You will see massive grizzlies in their cages. A boar sunk neck deep in mossy water. Monkeys. Cubs.

yes, these are cubs

  

* There will be volunteers and monks feeding tigers chained to the trees. Playing with them, pushing and pulling them around like lifeless objects. I still have to see a wild tiger respond so calmly due to meditation alone!

* There are a couple of tigers that you can walk.

look ma, I walked a tiger :D

* Then you reach the tigers. They're sappy, and look stoned almost out of their minds.

* But these are only the tigers. The tigresses are chained at the back, and you can't go around them. Apparently "all female beings are snappy, so leave them alone", I overheard someone say.

* Then the resident guide will take you through the history, a little about the tigers there, their names, ages etc. Once that is done, you can take pictures with the tiger in your lap for 1000 baht each. It's a lot cheaper in a group, but only 1 person gets to hold the head.

stoned, sedated, consequence of meditation? ...you decide

*It's free if you don't want the tiger's head in your lap.

* After that, go around pick your favourite tigers, smile, take pictures, and walk back to your car. There's no limit to this one!

There's more to do at this forest temple, here. 

If you love this place to the ends of the world, you can also stay back and be a volunteer. It was one of the coolest places I've ever visited, don't know when I'll be back, but I haven't said my goodbyes to it just as yet. 

You will need at least 7 hours for your trip to the Tiger Temple in  Kanchanaburi. There is the Damnoensaduak floating market on the way, so you can drop by. 

P.s. it's not the cleanest.

Mumbai Local Daily: Ladies Compartment

I have been commuting by train to work for the last 18 months, and somehow I manage to cross paths with new situations... almost EVERY day!

Twitter is my companion at times like these. Soon I had people asking me to shut the fuck up, while some even suggested I write a tiny book. So obviously, since shutting up is something I won't do, I decided to create and then update a blog that can fit all my train travel experiences now on, and what first-time travellers should expect.

I'm already having a bad feeling about this. #dammit

Anyway, here we go:

* First things first. The trains between 9:00 am and 10:00 am are always packed.

* Indian women usually have extra long hair. Mine for one is short. And these long-haired folks enjoy the breeze through their oil-loaded locks. So be ready for a whiff of coconut oil. If you're passing Bandra, Mahim and Matunga, on the western line, you will be lucky enough to have a bonus of human dump stench, and a good look at about 20 black buttocks.

* Some women don't shave their underarms, and see no problem in sporting sleeveless tops. 

* This one time the only view I had was of a woman's ear. Infested with blackheads. And I had no where else to look.

* Quite a few have to be introduced to deodorants. 

* They will elbow you in the face, stomach, chest, back and anywhere else they can. They will. I have learnt to too!

>>Check this space for more updates on what to expect while travelling in the ladies compartment!