Day 5 : Dudhsagar to Dhargem

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Today we ride to Dhargem, 36 km away. The first 10 km are through Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary towards Molem and the rest is a roller-coaster ride. You take 20 min to to go uphill peddling hard, puffing and swearing for 5 minutes of pure bliss of riding downhill. The light weight bikes reach the speed of 50 km/hr on downhill slopes. A slight depression of front brakes or loose gravel and you would be road-borne to air-borne (or cruise-borne as Rana realized on the last day). Throwing caution to the wind, literally, we glided down. On the way, we saw an open pipe pouring down gallons of water in a small tank 5ft by 5ft and 3 ft deep with ducts at its bottom to carry the water to nearby farms. Baked by the heat, we just jumped in the small tank. The impact of the gushing water on the back and neck had an amazingly therapeutic effect. We reached the base camp pretty early that day around 3.00 pm. After the perfunctory dip in the nearby stream, some left for the 11th century temple at Tambdi Surla 3 km from the base camp. Not much interested in temples, I gave it a pass and read a book lying down beneath the trees at the camp. Turns out that the temple is architecturally quite different from the rest of the temples in Goa and should not be given a miss. Rana brought some amazing omelets from a nearby shop. He also requested the guy to open the shop at 6.00 am in the morning. Nothing like starting the day with hot tasty omelet and tea. Thousand blessings to Rana ! Again, we share this camp with trekkers and it also has a camp leader. This time the trekkers were unanimous in having the campfire and we did not have any excuses either. Shanmora was our saviour this time too and we did our trademark 'Jaamkhedi re Jaamkhedi' song.

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