In the region of southern India, about 2oo km from Bangalore there is a quite little hill station (sort of) known as Coorg. Also known as the Scotland of India, this place is very suitable as a weekend getaway from our boring and monotonous lives. I accept the fact that there are numerous places in our country for the nature lovers but this place has its own charm. The unvarnished environment makes you feel rejuvenated and the affable locals make it a pleasant vacation.

The town is pretty small and has limited resources, so let’s say there is not much of shopping you can do in this place, which means you can forget about taking a souvenir for your girl friend unless of course she is a coffee lover because in this place one thing you will never run out of is coffee! Public transport is quite good in this place and is not very expensive, you can also rent a car or a bike (don’t forget to take your driver’s license or you will end up cursing yourself or cursing the govt. like me) There are a few places you can check out around the town like Raja’s tomb, Medikeri fort, a museum, a temple, and some more small and boring places (now c’mon you do need some places to take a few snaps).

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First of all let me start with a plot spoiler. If you have been to hill stations in North India, to the likes of Simla and Kullu manali, Mahabaleshwar may come as little disappointing. Without spoiling the fun any further, here’s what we discovered about M’war.

I live in Pune, and to people around here Mahabaleshwar is the Strawberry County. I haven’t in my whole lifetime seen so much strawberry, as I saw in 2 hours at M’war. The whole experience was so mouth watering seeing so many ripe and luring strawberries all strewn around you.

We started from Pune on Christmas morning at 7AM and it took me about an hour’s time to touch the Mumbai Bangalore highway. Mahabaleshwar is all of 110km from Pune. I am fairly new to car driving so I was at my cautious best all through the drive. It was a smooth ride on the Bangalore highway, but the trip from Shirwal, where you take a right turn from beneath the flyover up to M’was was quite chaotic, since it was a narrow village road.
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