CKRT Day 07 - Malvan to Vengurla

Continued from CKRT Day 06 - Devgad to Malvan (Tarkarli)

Route: Malvan -> Vengurla -> Terekhol -> Aaronda -> Vengurla

Day-7 was going to be our penultimate day, and the blues were already showing. This was a life that people long to live. And this very pleasure of travelling, seeing places, moving around, meeting different people, was going to end within a day. This feeling was something that we hadn't planned for, nor had we thought about before. 

We somehow shrugged off the blues and decided to enjoy the day while it lasts. The plan was to go check out Tsunami Island (which, in reality, turned out to be another marketting gimmick), and then move on to Vengurla. 


Tsunami Island

Boats for Tsunami Island leave from Tarkarli boating club facilities. There are multiple groups which arrange these rides. 

We had to wait for people to join, since the charges for the ride are a steep 1000/- rupees onwards. Eventually, we got onto the same boat, with, as luck would have it, the group of those nice young retirees that we had met in Kanakavli. 

The Devbaug Tarkarli part of Sindhu-Durga is seperated from the mainland by a massive creek. The ride to Tsunami Island goes through this creek. The views from both sides of the creek are very beautiful. Sometimes there are mangroves, sometimes deserted jungles. On the right coast it's Devbaug, while on the left, it's Bhogave. The width of the creek is quite large, so the boat ride is quite easy and comfortable. You can spot an occassional eagle, kingfisher or a seagull flying around and fishing in the creek. I saw one Small Blue Oriental Kingfisher diving into the water, catching some fish, and then perching on a coconut tree stem, which was bent over the waters, near Devbaug temple. Unfortunately, I had a wide-angle lens on my DSLR and the boat would have been long way from the bird till I would switch to a telephoto. 

The very beautiful shore of Devbaug creek

The Tsunami Island, as they call it, is a small island formed out of bulk of sand broken off from mainland during the tsunami tides. It's more of a marketting gimmick than something really interesting. When we go to the isand, water sports were being carried out off it. The boats are purposefully halted there for half an hour if someone wants to participate in those sports. None of us got down. We had already tried our hands at it, and were not keen on getting drenched with camera and other electronics on us. 

The place where the creek of Devbaug meets the sea, is an interesting place due to two opposite forces acting against each other, resulting into multi-directional strange tides. 

After halting at Tsunami Island for about 15-20mins, the boat started back towards the boating club. The island was completely submerged in water due to high tide, and seeing those huts and peeople floating on water was probably the only interesting part about it. 


The Corals in the Seas and in the Men of Konkan

From boating club, we came back to the jetty and arranged for snorkelling since we had some time in hand. The boat took is to the left of Sindhudurga fort (left as seen from the jetty), called King's Garden. Pravya went in alone, since I had already done it an year back. Unfortunately, it was a high tide time and that too of a full-moon, so the water level was way too high than usual and though he was impressed with the variety of colourul fishes he saw, he probably couldn't see those corals in their full glory. 

When I was in Malvan, an year and half ago, I had forgotten my costly wristwatch here. I couldn't get it delivered back to me by any means in the meantime. So now that I was in Malvan once again, I decided to call the host where I had stayed that time, and see if he still has it. To my biggest surprise, he still had it and asked me to collect it from him! With springs in my leg (it was a costly watch damn it), I wend to his place and collected it. It was as it was. Unused, and wrapped in a slight layer of dust! This would't have happend anywhere else. But I was in Konkan. 


Vengurla

In next half an hour, we had checked out from our room, and were on our way to Vengurla. The road to Vengurla, was again partly through barren lands, and partly through dense jungled ghats. You dont feel any heat in the atmosphere here. In fact, it felt quite cooler that anywhere else. 

In about an hour and half, when getting down the final ghat of Vengurla, we got a glimpse of real paradise, that is Vengurla. The sun was right over head, and the Vengurla beach, with those many white frothing tides, the Sagar Bunglow on a small hillock on the right with a few coconut trees adorning it, a hill and a group of coconut trees seperating Vengurla beach from an adjoining beach (probably Mochemad beach), quite a few fishing trawlers docked in the vengurla dockyard, and a few beautiful small houses  peeping through a dense tree cover in the mainland that was Vengurla. I instantly fell in love with the town. It was so picturesque!!

Vengurla - First Impression

We slowly trickled down into the town, found a room, threw in our luggage, had a lunch and decided to keep Vengurla for the next morning, and move on towards Terekhol instead, for the rest of the day. 


Terekhol

Terekhol is about 20kms from Vengurla. The route is picturesque and beautiful. It's very nice drive except for the mining area around the Tata Metalics plant, which is dusty and irritating as hell. 

Enroute Terekhol, we also came across some temples, and the historical salt-beds of Shiroda. The Terekhol Fort itself, is a very small Portugese fort. It's very very well maintained by Goa Tourism, despite it being such a small structure. It's more or less converted into a hotel with a sea-view restaurant on the top. 

The build of the fort is quite different from that of Marathi forts, and it screames of its European genes. 

The views from the top of the fort are plain amazing. The Terekhol creek - a vast expanse of it - is visible from the top and its natural beauty and cleanliness of the beach in front, are striking. 

	The Superb views from the top of Terekhol Fort

Aaronda and Kiranpani

We had heard about the Aaronda and Kiranpani villages in the nearby area and went to check them out after leaving Terekhol. The route and the village of Aaronda is quite small, green town with naturally a laid-back lifestyle. For going to Kiranpani, there are ferries being operated between the two shores of the creek. But when we got there, a new bridge between the two shores, was being constrcuted and was nearing completion. It looked like it would get commissioned within a month or two. 




Back to Vengurla

Idling there for sometime, we retuend back to the Vengurla dockyard. Sunset was nearing, and since there was a hill between us and the setting sun, we moved to the top of the hill from where we had seen Vengurla for the first time in the afternoon. But from that spot too, unfortunately, the hill was blocking the view. It appered that due to उत्तरायण, the sun was more towards hilly north side of the town during evening. Probably, during दक्षिणायन (months of Nov/Dec maybe?) the sun would set over the dockyard of Vengurla, and that would make one heck of a sight. 

After spending some time there, on top of the ghat, we returned back to the town when it started getting dark. It was our last dinner of the trip and we had an expensive one, in one of the quality restaurants of the town. 

And then thinking about all the awesome time that we had spent over the last week or so, I went to sleep with a little morose feeling owing to the end of those happy days.


Next: CKRT Day 08 - The Long Drive Back from Vengurla to Pune