Since I have an extended weekend, me and my wife after a lot of deliberations (yes/ no) decided to go to Nasik for the weekend. Nasik is approximately 172 kms from Mumbai. One of the reasons we chose Nasik over other locations was that one of my friends has an empty apartment on the outskirts of the city which we could use and save some money on the stay. Other than that, there are plenty of things Nasik has to offer and we decided to explore it to the fullest. Also it was our (me and wife together) first holiday for this year. We keep traveling with friends, but this time it was just us and we were looking forward to the time together. We left for Nasik around 3:30pm. After finishing some petty work on the way and picking up the house keys from my friend, we were finally on our way to Nasik around 5pm. The drive to Nasik is very nice. The roads are good and the scenery is excellent. There was a lot of traffic near Bhiwandi and Kalyan junction, but post that there was hardly any traffic and it was a pleasure to drive on. We took a break near Asangaon at a rest area – they had Dominos, KFC and other variety of food over there. In between, we came across Kasara Ghat and it was my first ever experience of driving on a proper ghat. The best part of the drive on the ghat was that it was unidirectional – no two way traffic. That really helped in negotiating some of the curves. We reached my friend’s place around 8:20pm and waited for him for 30 mins to give us further directions. Once we got the next set of directions, we reached within 10 mins and unloaded the car and decided to go find dinner. I had visited Nasik earlier (may be around 7 years ago), but a lot of things have changed since then. We wanted to find a local dinner place where we can eat authentic Maharashtrian food. The sad part about travel nowadays is that anywhere you go, all you get pizza, dosa, idli, pav bhaji, Punjabi, and Chinese food. In this rat race to get customers, the local cuisine of the area is lost. I call it the influence of the traveling Gujaratis. I will write a detailed post on that later. We really wanted something local and went about finding it. Luckily, we didn’t have to drive too far and found a local food place called as Kolhapur Express which serves authentic Maharashtrian food. They have thali system (they have 2-3 varieties of dishes, chapatti, sweet, rice and curry (dal for veg) all served in a single plate – picture below)and have a variety of thalis – chicken, mutton, fish, prawn, eggs, and veg. For vegetarians, there isn’t much option to choose from. However, that’s expected. The food was good and after dinner we decided to call it a day. Next stop – Sula Vineyards.
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