At 1 o�clock on a balmy afternoon, we had driven through the mango country of Ratnagiri and were sitting among the landscaped hills of Chiplun, watching the River Vashisti working its way through the valley below. We were half-way through the day�s journey, Goa was 310 km behind us, Bombay another 270 km ahead, and we had landed on the dot of lunch - a buffet of Konkan and Malwan food was being laid out at the Riverview Restaurant. The place is known as Riverview Lodge, one of The Taj Group�s Gateway hotels. God and Camelia Panjabi could not have chosen a better place. The hotel stands on the crown of what are known as the Lathe Parsuram Hills, a 700-year-old Parsuram temple is behind the hotel, and in front is a wooded valley with hills on three sides. The Vashisti emerges from Koyna and gets a backflow of the ocean. Chiplun town is on the other side of the hills, a dusty, disorganised Maharashtra town of little consequence, and the brand new Chiplun Station on the brand new Konkan railway is 20 minutes from the hotel. If you want to spend a weekend at the Riverview Lodge, you may drive to it, as we did, or take the Mandovi Express, leaving Bombay at 5.15 a.m. You are in Chiplun at 10.10 a.m. and hotel cars are at the station to take you up the hill in 20 minutes.

We were returning from Goa. Being slightly different from normal people, we had travelled to Goa by air and were returning by road. We had left the Taj Village at 6 a.m., searching for a petrol pump that had opened for business. Finally, as night blended into day, we found one at Mapusa, filled up, the driver bodily shaking the car in a mistaken attempt to squeeze in extra drops, then took the highway to Bombay.

It is some 600 km from point to point, and soon we were out of Goa and passing the customs-octroi barrier into Maharashtra at Patradevi. At a wayside restaurant in Savantwadi, there was a Maharashtrian breakfast of batata pahuva, usual pau, and special tea. Never ask for special tea in a village, all they do is add two extra spoons of sugar to it, killing the tea. Then we moved on, through country towns playing loud film music, cycle rickshaws dancing to their tune, and the fragrance of onion bhajias being fried in the air. These are the same onion bhajias that the West recently discovered as onion rings.

The Chiplun Riverview Lodge, as mentioned earlier, came at 1 p.m. The hotel stands on two decks, 32 rooms on eight-and-a-half acres, terrace gardens, a swimming pool, and the grandeur of the river gorge. There are islands in the centre of the river, picnic spots, and as most of the hotel staff comes from the villages in the valley, there are enough guides to take guests down to the river bank. Plus old acquaintances from the main Taj flagship in Bombay. Prabhat Verma, GM, Rahul Kanungo, F&B. Our lunch was a mixed bag, beginning with a kokum sherbet, red in colour like a Roger�s raspberry, with a rind of lime floating in it. We had it with soda. And a tomato shorba with a strong tadka of jeera. The masala bhat was as authentic as made by a Maharashtrian housewife, a turai made with channa dal was the speciality of the restaurant. More authentic was the local Malvani mutton, in a coconut gravy, eaten with vadas, which are small pancakes, prepared with lentils, whole garam masala, and coriander seeds. For some reason, there is a hole made in the centre of the vada with a finger.

The chef in charge is Eknath Dhuri from Savantwadi. Every day he sends a man to the Hernai, a Shivaji port near Dopoli, two hours and 70 kms away. Pomfrets, baby lobsters, surmai, halva, and prawns that are salted and peppered and grilled in their shells, just right.

Then it was back on the road for Bombay. Goa was a dream painted by Mario Miranda in a caju feni bottle.