This place is surprisingly free from foul odor and has become my wife’s favourite.
BHPian abhi_tjet recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
The Background:
It was quite a while – more than a year I suppose, since we (my best half & me) embarked on a vacation or a leisure trip. My wife is more of a mountain person than a beach person (if that’s even a thing, I equally love both). We were scouting for places nearby since we weren’t planning for a long vacation.
The planning:
Ganpatipule is a destination which I always wanted to visit but somehow never planned till now. Even this time, a lot of cajoling was needed to consider the Konkan coast for this short trip (remember, wifey isn’t a beach person). After looking into various places and stay options and rejecting most of them (mostly due to tariffs which were way higher than they should be as per the reviews or photos available online), we finally zeroed on Ganpatipule as the destination.
Now for a place to stay, Westbay and The Fern looked good, but they were very costly. Westbay, further, didn’t have direct beach access. It is situated on a hilltop across the road in a secluded place outside Ganpatipule village. I generally consider state tourism properties depending on the reviews and availability. MTDC Ganpatipule looked good with the usual cons of slow service and place not maintained properly kind of reviews. We weren’t bothered with these and all the rest was quite good. Accordingly, we made the bookings for 2 nights and waited for D-day.
The Execution:
Unlike what we generally do, we got up a bit late, did some household chores and were only ready to leave by around 8:45 AM. We resorted to the fact that we had lost our ‘pro’ status in the early morning start. Even my weekend bike rides are delayed quite a lot nowadays and I am only able to start around 7 AM. Ok, let me focus back to the travelogue without digressing more.
The drive – it’s been a while since Linea was on the highway.
Starting odo shot
Onward Route:
Home – Tamhini – Mangaon (merge with NH66) – Chiplun (leave NH66) – Shrungartali – Abloli road – Bhatgaon bridge – Jakadevi – Ganpatipule.
No major bad section and we reached in around 7 hours at a leisurely pace. Traffic further reduced once we left NH66 and it was almost nil from Abloli road onwards.
Distance – 317 kms
The property
Our first impression was quite good. The property is huge and with no ends (almost). It’s surrounded by beach and water from 3 sides. Our room was good with no odor, neat and clean. We were quite fresh and immediately started exploring the property.
The map. I am not sure if I have seen a bigger property than this.
Our cottage. It was non-sea view-facing since the sea-facing ones were all booked. However, the big window in the room gave a beautiful sea view. To be honest, we were in the room only for sleeping, we roamed around otherwise the entire time.
The beautiful views from the property. We just loved the place despite its shortcomings.
Sunset views, you bet!
The landscape of the property. There is unwanted vegetation at quite a few places, but nothing to bother enough
The main entrance which leads to the temple
The main reason why we took the trip. MTDC Ganpatipule property is located adjacent to the temple which helped us visit the temple quite a lot of times during our stay. We attended the evening Aarti on both days.
We started from home with some homemade sandwiches and didn’t stop anywhere for lunch en route. The famous vegetarian place in Ganpatipule which goes by the name Bhau Joshi Bhojnalay only opens after 7 pm and we waited for the same. Most of the restaurants anyways close their kitchen between 3-7 pm. We didn’t have any snacks at MTDC since their kitchen is common for veg/non-veg food. Accordingly, bought some fruits, visited the temple and had lunch cum dinner directly at around 8 PM. The restaurant actually lived up to its name and we had one of the tastiest food there. The place was clean and the food tasted like it was homemade which we anyways prefer. We had dinner at the same place, the next night as well. I need to mention that I had the best ‘Ukadiche Fashions‘ (a Maharashtrian sweet delicacy) here.
The cosy bamboo cottages
All the exploration was done on foot and the car wasn’t used much. After all this, we slept like a log.
Guess who was at our doorstep the next two mornings
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