June 01, 2005

Summer holidays II: Son of a beach!

The second part of the holidays were spent on the konkan coast at a place called murud. not murud-janjira, but the murud further south, near harnai bandar.
i shall draw a veil over the initial family-run bednbreakfasty place we were supposed to stay at. lets just say searing heat and bathroom horrors and leave it at that.

so we moved to a more salubrious environ, separated from the sea by beach, dunes with some vegetation and casurinas acting as windbreaks. sitting on the oh-so-soft sand and casurina needles, in the afternoon with a book and a lil munchie from budhanis.. ah, that's the life.

another good time to be on the beach was at night- we had the full moon out in all its glory. forget bhaji on the beach, we had pinot grigio on the beach! it may perhaps have been a little better if we couldve cooled it, but even as it was, yumm!
what am i saying?? yumm? nobody says that about a fine italian wine! ok, let me go again. an inquisitive wine. unpretentious. shy, but with a hint of sterness. the kind of wine that would like listening to beatles and beethoven. would read georgette heyers and spinoza..
oh wait, that's not the wine, that's me!

the koli fishermen took tourists out on their boats to see some dolphins. the boat ride in itself was great- we rode the waves like a rollercoaster. knowing that there was no lifejacket or inner tube on board just made it more exciting. once we headed out onto the open sea, the engine was shut off and the only sounds to be heard were the put-putting of fishing boats at a distance and.. the breathing of dolphins! they bounced about at a distance, then came closer, flipped.. and breathed quite audibly. dont' wanna anthromorpho-disneyize them, but what happy animals they seemed to be!
i'll redeem myself with some d adams:

“It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons. ”

won't blather on about bodysurfing, fish and crustaceans eating, sol kadhi and kokum juice drinking, ukdiche modak avoiding, miles jogging and sand in all my clothes and shoes -ing.. you get the general idea: beach, family, sun, food, good.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

on animals, a quote from Henry Beston's "The Outermost House"...

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

thanks for a nice post.

Nandan said...

That was my favourite quote from HHGTTG. Have been reading your blog quite often and like what I read. May I add you to my list?
I blog at: http://nandan.blog-city.com

Orcaella brevirostris said...

checked your blog nandan and found it refreshingly free of nazi memorabilia and alien abduction stories.
so link away!

(am trying to be blase' about my first link request)

Nandan said...

checked your blog nandan and found it refreshingly free of nazi memorabilia and alien abduction stories.

Hmmm...so you haven't seen my other site. Guess that's good :-)

Gaurav said...

Ukdiche modak avoiding? So I am not the only Maharashtrian who abhors those ghastly concoctions? Yippee!!

I also hate the following - shrikhand, amrakhand, jilbi, karanji, laadoo, purnaachi poli.

So far I boast of being the only ghaat who has all those things in the list. Who dares challenge me?

Orcaella brevirostris said...

gaurav, what are you, some kind of wild-eyed anarchist?

passion for puran poli is what separates us from the beasts!

i only avoided ukdiche modak, because on my last treep to the konkan, we asked for a plate of them. and the incredibly stingy way the tup (ghee) was doled out made me really mad. decided to have em only at home, where i could swim in tup if need be.

you don't have khvyachee poli on your list. redemption?

Gaurav said...

Add Khavyachi Poli too!!

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