The story of my trip begins on the morning of the 21st of december 2008. After the hustle and bustle of the early morning that seems to be a prevalent feature of all such trips, we're finally ready and seated in our rented car. The time is 8 a.m, the flags are down, and the engine of our car roars to a start, our trip has begun ! Now before I go on, I think it's only fair to mention the individuals that I shared this voyage with. I'll start with my mom and dad who I'd met after a long 2 months, my cousins Rohan and Raunak Jayavant who I'd met after 2 years ( unless you think email and facebook can be called a meeting) and my aunt and uncle ; Smita and Tushar Jayavant. So back to our journey ... it began silently, few words were exchanged, however, behind those calm, mild smiles lay a whole reservoir of subdued excitement ; the trip we'd all be waiting for had finally begun and we were all excited about the days to come. So where we headed off to anyway ? If I've got my facts right, our first stop was a place called ' Dapoli' on the western coast of Maharastra state, India. Dapoli like all the other places we went to, was a rural town where the main commercial activities were small scale fishing and farming. The residents lived in small houses made up of mud, brick and straw, the roads were narrow and laid in dusty red mud ( I suspect haematite was the primary constituent of mud in this region). After a long 3 hours in the car we arrived at our first place of residence, the Silver Sand hotel. Now I would like to remind all of you that this was a trip to rural India, this means there were no 5-star luxury hotels, no air conditioning, no soft beds, in short no luxury, and we were all reminded of this rather bitter fact at our first stop. Our rooms consisted of stone hard beds, a nonfunctional TV set, and well ... lets just say the bathrooms were not appealing ! However, with hindsight, living in this manner probably added to our experience of rural life, and it also meant that we all tried to spend as little time in the room as we could. By now, I've probably succeeded in conveying my initial reaction to the Silver Sand hotel, my initial reaction is probably best summed up in the infamous phrase ; " Oh my God, what have I got myself into !". At this point on our trip, our expectations had just taken a solid blow, but we soon realized that a bad start doesn't necessarily mean that what comes after is doomed ! No, not at all, our trip to Dapoli was just about to take a sharp unexpected turn, it was all uphill from now onwards.
As soon as we had successfully established our presence, we left our rooms for lunch. With our souls feeling a bit down, a good lunch is just what we needed, quite literally food for our souls. The food at the resort turned out to be shockingly good ; hot, spicy and full of flavor and taste.
We were also impressed by the restaurant's generosity when it came to the size of the portions. By the end of an hour of vigorous chewing and swallowing, we were all stuffed and satisfied. Suddenly the room seemed manageable !
Later that evening (by which time we had recovered some mobility after the belly stuffing lunch earlier that day), we were ready for our first 'beach walk'. The beach was magnificent ; large, flat and empty ! This place had a kind of untouched beauty that is becoming so rare in our ever developing world. That evening I stood on the beach looking towards the vast expanse of ocean beyond, and I thought of the earliest explorers of our Earth, I imagined their curious awe when they just like me looked to the vast expanse of ocean and realized that we were just insignificant members of a much larger world. For a moment I was one of them, looking to the sea and wondering what exotic worlds lay beyond this seemingly infinite expanse. Then I realized why I love science so much. I too am a explorer, I too look at the seemingly infinite expanse of space and time, I am on a journey of understanding, I use the tools of Mathematics and logic to plot my course. But where am I headed ? Where will my odyssey take me ? I am not headed to a new continent, instead I'm headed towards a truth. I know not the nature of this truth, what it looks like, or what it will tell me, I only know that it is magnificent !
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