Pune to Gokarna by Road, With a Night in the Jungle

The story

Gokarna is a fourteen-hour drive from Pune if you insist on doing it in one go. We had done that once, years earlier and without children, and had promised each other never again. So this time we broke it deliberately: a night in the forest on the way down, and the Konkan coast on the way back. It turned a drive with a beach at the end of it into a trip.

The night at Dandeli earns its place

Dandeli is not on the way to Gokarna so much as slightly above it — a little over four hundred kilometres from Pune, off the highway and into teak forest along the Kali river. It splits an unreasonable drive into two reasonable ones, and it does it somewhere worth stopping rather than at a hotel beside a toll plaza.

Be honest with yourself about the safari. This is not East Africa. You go out at six in an open jeep and you will see hornbills, langurs, spotted deer, and if the morning is generous, an elephant crossing the road a long way ahead. What you are actually buying is two hours in a forest at first light with the engine switched off, which is quite enough.

Our two remembered the coracle for far longer than the jeep. A round basket boat, one man with a paddle, and twenty minutes of being spun in deliberate circles on the Kali river. The six-year-old still calls it the best boat in the world.

Four nights in Gokarna, not two

The temptation with seven days is to keep moving, and it is the wrong instinct. We gave Gokarna four nights out of six and it was the single best decision of the week. Two days of driving needs a place you stop unpacking, where the children learn the way down to the beach and the shack knows what you order.

• Sleep in the town, not in a hut, if you have arrived by car — the huts are cheap and lovely and reached down a footpath nobody wants to carry a suitcase along.
• Take the boat to Om Beach rather than the headland walk. It is twenty minutes instead of an hour, and it is the part of the day the kids talk about.
• Kudle in the morning, temple street at dusk. The middle of the day is for lying down indoors.
• The last week of December is peak. Book ahead, and expect the beach to be full of Indian families doing exactly what you are doing.

Four nights in one place, after two days of driving, is the whole trick. Anything less and the beach is just another stop on the way to somewhere.

— note to ourselves, written on the drive home

Home the long way, along the Konkan

We could have driven back up the highway the way we came. Instead we went north along the coast into Maharashtra and stopped a night at Tarkarli, which exists in our family memory now as the fish. Surmai, a pomfret, solkadhi the colour of pale rose, rice bhakri, and a coconut curry that took the top of my head off. Eaten at a plastic table thirty metres behind a sand dune, cooked by the family who rented us the room.

One night there was not enough, and that is the honest verdict on the whole itinerary. If we did it again we would take a night off Gokarna and give it to the Konkan, because the coast road between Malvan and Ratnagiri is the part of the drive we keep talking about and the part we saw least of.

The last day is simply long. Out at six, over the ghat, breakfast somewhere around Kankavli, and home by the middle of the afternoon with a car full of sand. Everybody slept. Nobody asked how far was left.