Saputara sight seeing - 1


This will be a day wise series of the Gujarat Trip planned in the month of December. 
The days will then be merged for the final blog.

Day 11

Saputara Sight seeing 

We started by 10:30am from our accommodation for sight seeing in Saputara. First stop was the Gira waterfall. It is said to have close to 200 waterfalls during the monsoons. As this was December end, there was only one waterfall but had good flow of water. It was very hot and sunny even at this time of the year. There were some shops with stuff made out of bamboo. Next on, the Waghai botanical garden was a 15-min drive. Not a great destination, but it housed a variety of trees, plants , flowers and a namesake butterfly park. At the exit was an Amul parlour. Took a short refreshing break there and then started towards Shabari Dham. On the way was a fruti vendor selling pineapples and oranges. We stopped for a natural refreshment and savoured on some sweet pineapples and oranges and started our onward journey. Shabari Dham was 65kms away from the botanical garden. It took us 1.5 hours on the hilly terrain to reach the Shabari Dham. This temple is based on the Ramayana incident of Shabari offering ber(fruit) to Lord Rama and lakshman ji.
We then turned back to our accommodation. Had dinner at Lake view restaurant, 10 mins before our accommodation. The food was pretty delicious. We reached back to our accommodation by 7:45pm, changed , played Uno and then back to bed !! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bhigwan & Bhuleshwar

Image
Another thought of a family outing was finally put to implementation today. The initial plan was to go to Bhigwan for bird watching.  While the research was on, there were additional thoughts and inputs.  So the final plan was to go to Bhigwan and then to Bhuleshwar temple which is on the way between Bhigwan and Pune.  We started our journey very early on Saturday morning (24th Feb 2024) around 3:50am in our XUV700. We followed the google maps which took us through magarpatta/hadapsar, fursungi along the pune-solapur highway and we reached Bhigwan by 6:05am. The roads were all very well maintained making the drive pretty smooth. We reached "Nagare Flamingo Point" In Bhigwan. This was a non stop drive.  The person there, got the required stuff like life jackets and fuel, etc to take us for boating.  We again got into our car for another 5-min drive to the Ujani Dam where we were to boat.  It was very early in the morning and was quite cold by the...
Read more

A short religious day trip

Image
Annual tradition of spending summer vacations at mom's place took me to Mohali in May-June this year. The hottest summer months in Northern India. You think of stepping out of the home , rethink and reconsider looking at the scorching sun. We started earlier on a Monday morning around 7:15am. The first destination was Mata Naina Devi shrine. The routes were good, with the entire route almost in Punjab except for the final 12kms that fall under the Himachal Pradesh jurisdiction. That is a hilly terrain with quite curvy turns. Car goes almost till the foot of the temple steps. We reached there by 9:10am and starting our ascend. This is also the place where the cable cars drop the pilgrims. So, Naina Devi temple is on a height, cable cars operate to and fro carrying the pilgrims.  The steps are low and broad. The entire route is adorned with shops selling various stuff like Prasad, idols, other stuff like toys, wooden things, puja samagri, etc.  We reached the top in around 10-15...
Read more

Fireflies Festival - Bhandardara

Image
Fireflies festival takes place every year between 15 May and 15 June. This year we planned to experience it. I explored a couple of options and booked to visit Bhandardara for 18-19 May '24 with "Hire A Camp". We started around 11am from Pune. The route wasn't very good, but was average. Some single roads through the villages , some ghats, a bit of stopping for break and we reached the camp site around 4:30pm. The campsite was called "backpack camping". There was ample parking space available at the camp site. The host Shubham was available at the site to help with the check in. We chose our tents , kept the backpack and went for a stroll at the lake side. It was Rocky as expected but very clean lake side. We spent some time there, clicked some pictures, then returned back to our tents.  Bhel and tea were ready for evening snacks. We had the snacks, then relaxed for some time in and around the tents. Families and groups were still che...
Read more