This had to be the craziest thing which we have done. We had been planning to visit the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in north Mumbai for over two months now. This weekend was not going to happen because we had plans for both the evenings of Saturday and Sunday.
Therefore, we took it easy on Sunday. I got up leisurely almost close to noon. Immediately I got a call from E-boi saying that the jam at Vicky's home was cancelled as Vicky was busy with something. In a split second, we agreed to go to SGNP.
I rode to E-boi's place and by about 2 pm we started. The ride to the proverbial 'lungs' of Mumbai, which is often compared to the Hyde Park of London and the Central Park of Manhattan, was cool excepting a little stretch of 2 km north of Malad. I was so impressed with the Eastern Express Highway and the Jogeshwari Vikhroli Link Road. The junction of the two is possibly the coolest looking junction in India. It's like an 8 lane road joining 10 lane road with a fly-over and you could see about a kilometer in all directions!
Anyway, we reached the park by about 3.15 pm and were pleasantly surprised to find out that motorvehicles are permitted inside the park. It was getting late and we had to get out by 6.30 pm.
We headed straight to the 'Lion/Tiger' safari which was fantastic. It is actually a disappointily short bus ride across arid, dry landscaped enclosures for lions and tigers. The tigers were visibly beaten by the heat of the afternoon and were laying down for tiger naps. There were three including an albino. This was the first time after my little affair with Mr. Lion that I was seeing tigers up so close. Probably because of the unkemptness of the whole thing, I wasn't amused as much as I had expected myself to.
The Lion enclosure, or the lair, was a much better spectacle. The mane of the lion really makes them appear proud and contended as compared to the tigers. There were two lions (or lionesses; I still can't pick them up from a distance) which were hanging out by the side of the narrow dirt-track. That made us for great camera snaps which E-boi gobbled up using his Sony Ericsson 810i. After that, we did some trekking and took some nice photographs of Powai and the Mumbai landscape from on top a hill inside the park.
The ride back was the coolest. It was like driving through a foreign land esepcially that bit of road connecting the Jogeshwari Vikhroli link road to the Eastern Express Highway.
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