Taad-gole, Parasailing and Shredded feet

Just spent the best day of my Pune stay so far. It's hard to see it being topped easily. A team from work planned a trip to Alibag, to visit the beaches there. Since not everyone from that team could make it, there were a few vacant spots on the rented bus and I jumped at the offer. This team is a very close, fun-loving group of people so that made the trip a lot of fun. There was antakshari and Bingo on the journey. So much screaming and shouting :) The thing was, it didn't feel like a trip with co-workers, it felt more like a college trip with the casual camaraderie and banter.

1. Coming to India I decided to indulge in all sort of foods, including fruits and vegetables that I won't normally find in the US. One such item is "tegalu". These are sprouts of the palm tree that are planted, sprouted and then boiled. Another item is called "munjulu", basically fruits of the palmya tree. I love these things. I used to look forward to my annual trips to Vizag to eat them because you didn't get one ones in Hyderabad. And now, after maybe 15 years I got to eat them. At first I didn't believe my eyes when I saw a cart selling them. I ran to the cart, found out they were selling 3 for Rs. 10, and started. The vendor was amused by how eager I was to eat them. Soon the other members of our trip were curious and tried eating a few. It kinda made me sad to realize that there are people growing up in India right now who don't know these things.
2. At one of the beaches we visited, this guy was running a parasailing operation on the beach. He saw our group and approached us with an offer to carry us for a reduced price since we were a big group. For the low price of Rs. 250, I got to fly behind a jeep for a couple of minutes. It was great fun.
3. The worst thing about the beach though was the rocks under the water. In all the inital excitement we didn't mind that these rocks were sharp but after the adrenalin wore off we realized that our feet were cut up pretty bad. A few guys were even bleeding from their cuts for a while. Luckily we had a few bandages to wrap. Also the salt water helped keep the wounds infection free while they were still raw.
4. One interesting aspect was the flat nature of some of the beaches there. The land there was so flat that we had to walk about 150 meters to go from the high tide point to the low tide point. This of course meant that you could walk quite some distance into the water as well. I prefer that to the Vizag beaches where the drop-off is quite steep and scary.
   
5. The drive to and from the beach itself was worth the cost of the trip. We drove through the beautiful ghats and as beautiful as they were in the daytime, they were even more beautiful at night, under the full moon. Just a beautiful vision the entire way back.

(Picture and videos coming up later.)