My girlfriend finds it genuinely irritating how bad I am at remembering how to get anywhere in Pune. Tamhini is the exception. It’s most of the way across the city from where I live and I can ride there and back without opening Maps once. When I don’t know where to ride, I ride to Tamhini. That’s been the rule since September 2021 and I’ve long stopped counting the runs, somewhere around one a month, sometimes more. The stretch I mean is the 47 kilometres between Paradise Café and Orchard Café. Getting there is the worst part of it. From my side of Pune it’s an hour to the start, more if I leave late, and leaving before 6 AM saves twenty minutes of that, which means a 5 AM alarm, which lately I’ve become very good at snoozing. What I lose by snoozing it is the quiet. There’s nothing else on the road at that hour, the sweet symphony of the triple comes back at me off the mountain walls, and the sun is only just reaching the tarmac ahead. It feels like a video game about chasing sunlight.
I didn’t get through the first time. It was July 2021, COVID restrictions were still in place, and my girlfriend and I were turned back at the police checkpost. Two months later I went again with a friend on the Interceptor and got through, and Tamhini spent that afternoon showing us everything it had. Cool breeze near Mulshi Lake, fog and drizzle higher up, sun by the time we came down the other side. One road, one afternoon, three kinds of weather.
I’ve never stopped at Paradise Café. Plenty of riders do and the name suggests you should, but by the time I get there I’ve already spent an hour in traffic and on broken road, and standing around with a coffee is the last thing I want. The road starts there. Coffee happens at Orchard, or at one of the tea stalls past it, once the ghat section is finished.
From Paradise the lake stays beside you for about 25 kilometres. After that the terrain turns to mountain, the road climbs gradually to the point where you can look down into the valley, and then it starts working its way back down. Five years of the same road builds a map in your head that isn’t on any map. There’s a gap in the barricade maybe ten feet wide, no tree in the way, where you can see Mulshi Lake properly, and it’s easy to miss if you don’t know it’s coming. That’s where I stopped and photographed the Interceptor. The photograph has been downloaded 888 times on Pexels, which is more than anything else I’ve taken from a random roadside stop.
Further on, the lead-up to the valley viewpoint stays narrow and closed in by trees until it opens onto a view completely out of proportion with the road that got you there. At the top of the ghat you can pull over, take the helmet off and watch other riders disappear into the next corner, with nothing else around but the monkeys. Some days that’s the whole stop. My favourite section comes later, once the ghats start flattening out, where the road runs straight long enough to see what’s ahead and forest closes over both sides of it.
That straight is one of the few places you can properly open the throttle, and it ends at a sharp corner that catches people out. They come into it carrying too much speed, turn in late, lose traction and go down, and I’ve seen it happen there enough times to shut off early. There’s one other patch I hate, which I hit once at a speed it didn’t deserve. The Interceptor came off it high enough that I thought I was leaving the motorcycle and I stayed on mostly by luck. The road is only half of it, though. Saturday mornings bring the cars, and a certain kind of driver seems committed to overtaking whether or not the corner, the width and the oncoming traffic agree. Creta and Thar owners, you know who you are. It ends the way it always ends, near misses, a jam, and everybody stuck behind the man who was in a hurry. The fastest way through Tamhini has very little to do with riding fast.
That first proper run was on the Interceptor. These days it’s Snowpiercer, the Triumph Street Triple 765 R, built for exactly this, sharp corners and quick direction changes and no long straights. Tamhini is nothing but that. The Interceptor gave me a different road, slower, more time beside the lake, more stopping for photographs. I used to think that was the motorcycle. It was me. I’ve watched riders take Royal Enfield 650 twins through those corners at speeds that made me wonder whether we were on the same road, and making that bike dance through Tamhini takes a kind of nerve I didn’t have.
My favourite version of the ride is an early afternoon on a working day. Take the break, pick up the keys and go. There’s nothing to plan when you’re riding alone on a road you already know. Last week was one of those. I’d finished a long UAT session, needed the reset, and Savlya Ghat has been getting popular this monsoon so I thought I’d have a look. Left at 3:30, arrived at 5:05, and found out the viewpoint is a two-kilometre trek with entry closing at 5. So I didn’t see Savlya Ghat. I got a wet, windy ride through Tamhini on a Wednesday evening instead.
The road is never quite the same twice, and part of that is because I’m often only passing through it. Tamhini is the way to everything else. The Konkan coast is on the other side, so Shrivardhan and Aaravi both start here, and so does Kumbhe. Last monsoon I crossed in the rain heading for Kumbhe Waterfall and everything past Tamhini turned into its own adventure. Rain rewrites the surface, the visibility and the way you take every corner, and a bend that lets you carry speed in summer is one you read carefully in July.
On 1 January 2026 I was riding to Aaravi Beach, shivering inside the jacket, when the fog came down. Cars and motorcycles crawling through it with hazards blinking, visibility down to almost nothing. It felt like riding into a small town in Alaska with the snow missing. There was no question of going fast, and it’s still one of the rides I remember best. Summer gives you the opposite. In 2025, heading for Shrivardhan, I got clear air and an empty road and long stretches with nothing in front of me, and that was my quickest crossing of the section. Andharban comes off the same road, and I’ve taken Snowpiercer through the forest trail to Tiger Hill at Lonavala, which turned into more offroading than I’d signed up for and isn’t something I’ll put the Triumph through twice.
Almost every photograph I’ve taken in Tamhini was taken on the way back. Going in I have one thing in my head, which is to get through the section, and somewhere along the way I turned those 47 kilometres into a race against a stopwatch nobody is holding. The ride back is the cool-down lap, the one MotoGP riders take after the flag. The adrenaline drops, the clock disappears, and I start seeing everything I rode past on the way in. That’s when I stop for photographs, when I sit and watch traffic go by with the breeze coming off the lake, and when I finally have the coffee I refused at Paradise. I call the whole thing a coffee run. It’s 220 kilometres there and back for one cup, and the coffee only tastes like that once the adrenaline has gone.
If motorcycles were banned from Tamhini tomorrow, the corners aren’t what I’d miss. It’s how little sits between the road and everything around it, and that’s getting harder to find. Forest keeps coming down across the country for roads and projects, all of it in the name of development.
Construction is already working through it a section at a time and more will follow, cafés and resorts and private plots. I’ve watched it happen at Pawna Lake, where you can still see the water but getting near it is another matter, most of the shoreline now owned, gated or built over. I don’t think Tamhini gets to stay this way. Until it changes I’ll keep going, sometimes before sunrise, sometimes on a Wednesday afternoon because a long session at work has convinced me I need to be somewhere else, and I’ll keep finding spots on the way back that I missed while trying to get through it quickly.
