Dhabosa Falls...

Picnics are meant to be fun, though the definition of fun is where the haziness starts drifting in. This is something I keep on learning and re-learning during my frequent trips with my MST. Chicken is fun for Devdatta, "Funda" is fun for Rama, Talking is fun for Gau, Arguing is fun for me and as far as Manjusha is concerned, I guess “she is fun”.
The morning was very ominous with thunder clouds and lightning acting as my alarm clock and waking me up well before time. After a flurry of smsing with Manjusha on what should be done, we decided to hold it out and think on lines that since the worst was over only the best [not the bus] was to follow. Gau had some starting trouble getting his mom convinced on letting him out, my mom any day preferring the thunderstorms to me hanging around the home all day. So 7.00 it was finally when all the 5 of us met in Thana and Devdatta took on the steering wheel, and the rest of us started deciding where to go [yeah, exactly you read that right where to go. As always we had chalked out a well planned itinerary with links and descriptive info about the place to visit and all, but again as usual, we wouldn’t like it the easy way would we? So instead of a beach we headed for the mountains]. There was also a bit of confusion regarding the direction, as we were not sure which was east and which was west, Devdatta of all people said no to food and we were like, has the sun risen from the east? He cleared the doubt by sharing with us that he had a heavy dinner at 2.00 in the night [only Devdatta can do that] and hence he was taking a break. Food was scarce to find and with Devdatta not in a hungry mode, we, as in me and Gau [of all people to be hungry] had to make do with biscuits and cola-pesticides.
The road was extremely scenic, but Gau who insisted on sitting in front was not doing any serious photography and was wasting a perfectly good seat. Rama couldn’t resist any longer and forced Gau to switch places. Rama finally happy to be besides Devdatta, would bully him to stop the car as and when he liked, which given Rama’s love for everything in nature would be every few microseconds.
After many wrong turns and right lane driving. I mean driving on the right side of the road and not right side of the law. Wrong to drive on the Right, Right to be not on the Right. I can only think of the British who can come up with something so “Right” and we even “Righteous” to follow it.
Who needs sides anyways when a whole road is empty, drive wherever you want, and if there is a vehicle coming from in front then surely he will have passed the license test and hence must also be following our principles and hence would be on the other side of the road as well. If only now we can get everyone to follow this model, road travel will be smooth. Jawaher [oh, I forgot to mention, we chucked tikona, kamshet, palghar, kelve beach as options and decided on jawaher as the place to visit and all of this done in flat 5 minutes in the morning. So much for our efficiency and runtime decision making abilities, Gau can you ask CD to send us MST folks on a sales pitch, I bet we can sell a fridge to an Eskimo, at least we would end up buying it for him with a IOU signed from him which says he will pay us back in seal skin installments.
Dhabosa falls, it was where we ended up at around 1 in the afternoon, for some reason it was named dhaab-dhaba falls. Now for all who know Marathi will make out the redundancy factor in the name. For the uninitiated please think of it as an reiteration of the fact that it was a fall and someone wanting to stress on the fact that it was a waterfall, how nice, why on in this earth any sane person would think of water falling from hundreds of feet from a cliff into a ditch as anything other than a water fall.
Once there, Manjusha thought the fencing and stuff on the viewer’s deck was for the buffaloes, cows and sheep not to fall into the valley when they graze serenely looking at the view and are not to keep out us mere humans. We almost thought to tie her up but for that we would have had to catch her first, so we chucked the idea.
The falls are pretty and have a decent height. The only drawback was no approach roads and only a viewer’s gallery which was quite far. There are a few goat trails to the falls which Manjusha was adamant on attempting but nothing much other than that and to add to devdatta’s woe no food available at the falls. So as always we were stuck between the views i.e. the falls and an empty stomach. Of all people, Gau had the duty of restraining Manjusha but somehow when Gau was busy practicing parking the car [so thinking of an alternate career choice Gau, by the way if you are thinking Valet means something which contains money then think again you are off by a couple of alphabets, if not by tons of moolah.] Manjusha managed to slink of and get to the edge of the cliff. Only intense coaxing which eventually turned to pleading could get her back.
Drive back was courtesy Manjusha who insisted on driving and we the rest in a temporary fit of insanity agreed, not that she is a bad driver or anything but just the fact that while driving she kept on asking “konala udvu” [kisko udao], at one point she was even giving us choice’s, “tya mansala udu ka bailala J [kisko udao, aadmi ko ya bail koh?]”.
The drive is pretty and if only the roads were better it would rival any scenic drives anywhere out there in the world, the fields are lush green with meadows of flowers [some of them yellow flowers which instantly trigger off a reaction in Gau about the yellow flower theory]. A break in between besides a beautiful lake where again Manjusha tried to use her toes as bait for catching fish, me chased a dragon fly but it out flew me, Devdatta posing for shadi.com, Gau trying to fast forward his thinking from that of a kid to one who starts thinking of bringing up kids and Rama acting the local god to all of us, we realized we needed food. Devdatta as usual had flag marked resorts on our drive to the falls as prospective sites for eating while driving back. I do not quite understand but Devdatta has this canny ability to predict that somehow humans need food eventually and cannot do without it and always makes sure he has a zillion places marked out and again without fail the one place we do a treasure hunt to find some name-I-forgot resort chose to be closed. Now why would someone open a resort and close it, if it was meant to be closed why open it in the first place. We somehow cooled down Devdatta by telling him that we would eat a dozen bull sized chickens in Thana on our way back and this place was not worth stressing out on anyways, who ever heard of good food and fun in a resort fat chance.
Again as they [Ok, I made this up just now] say luck favors the brave and the hungry find the menu, we sighted a roadside place which had somehow escaped Devdatta’s CRM [Chicken Restaurant’s Master list]. A “poth bharli” experience at the place with divine food [or was it we were so hungry we could have eaten grass and thought how lucky the cows are] I could have dozed off then and there itself.
And then the rains started, someone seriously has a problem, either god is way behind his deadlines this season or someone played a joke on us all while we were sleeping and turned the calendar a couple of months ahead. So every time there was a lightening we said cheese and put out our best faces, as someone had the bright idea that god was taking snaps. After all who would want to end up on god’s flickr site looking forlorn? Some of us wanted to put our hands out in the rain while Devdatta was scared that the lightening will come inside and insisted on rolling up the windows, what a fun-killer and what was all talk about the car getting wet so what hang it out to dry will you, and to think I am called a cribber. We somehow made it through the rains and reached Thana thanks to Devdatta who drives normally thinking the car as a bike capable of taking the smallest of gaps, and when someone overtakes us his minds starts thinking the car as a tank, if only the rest of the people [including us] thought likewise. A Monday, well spent with tones of snaps and much more memories [Random access and Hyundai brand]
So where are we heading next time… Saputara, Murud or Arunachal Pradesh?