Sunday, April 25, 2010

Last Weekend at Tarkarli

A couple of weeks ago, LC came back from a weekend at Tarkarli to give glowing reports. They went snorkeling and touched coral reefs. They went out on a boat in the sea and saw dolphins jumping out of the water. They sat out on the beach till midnight.

"I want to go too!" I whined, and dashed out an email to the Guy, Vroom, and another friend who shall be known as Blade (partly because my friend Vani refers to her as the Bank Lady, due to where she works, which makes her sound like a matronly bank employee, instead of the cool sharp person she is).

So we went. We didn't go snorkeling after all, and we didn't see any dolphins. But we had lots of fun and it was worth that long, tiring drive.

We stayed at Manali Resort, which is right on the beach. This is the view from one of the huts we stayed in. (We took two: Blade and I stayed in one, and the men in the other.)

The service, though, was bad. We weren't given the rooms at the time we were promised, and the rooms they first offered us were less than impressive. (There was some kind of construction work on right behind one room, and once I got over the idea of that background noise, I discovered that the bathroom window opened right out to the construction site, and it couldn't be properly closed.) We had been promised backwater-facing rooms, but there was no view to speak of. We decided to move to non-AC rooms, which were much better. There was no attempt at apologising to us cranky and tired travellers, and the lady in charge tried to pass it over as the fault of the agent, whom apparently she had no control over. She even charged us extra later for having the AC on for the couple of hours we had used one AC room while waiting for the non-AC room to be made available. If you go to Tarkarli - and it's a good place to go - don't stay at Manali Resort.


We had an amazing cab driver who knew the area and took us to good places to eat - and shop! We got back boxes of mangoes, and he also took us to the cashewnut factory pictured above.

Lovely beach with soft white sand, and not many people around. Oh, but it was hot!

We went on a ride on this boat, after the boatmen had pushed it onto the water. That's Vroom standing to the right, supervising.


It was a lovely little vacation, and even more special because it was the last one before the Guy goes away. Ah yes, the Guy's going away. But that should be a post on it's own.

4 comments:

apu said...

Have never heard of this place before - but sounds like fun! (And that was a somewhat mysterious end to the post...)

dipali said...

Lovely photographs. Sounds good.

Unmana said...

apu: i've been planning to write a post on that topic for weeks, but I haven't quite wrapped my head around the fact yet.

Dipali: It was fun. Way hot, though, and driving all night long turned out more tiring than we expected.

vagabond.. said...

Hi

nice article..

We host a Maharashtra travel website..puneritraveller.com
Would you like to showcase tour blog in the Tarkarli page of the website

Please let us know
Pls write to puneritraveller@gmail.com

Cheers!