Yesterday, I went on an awesome breakfast ride from Pune (that beautiful city surrounded my mountains I call home) down to Mahabaleshwar. It was an incredible ride—the ghats were absolutely stunning in the rain, and wrapping it up with a classic sandwich at Mapro Garden made it perfect. The whole round trip logged about 240 KM.

Our group from the BAC Pune club gathered early morning, hitting the road around 5:00 AM from Chandni Chowk. If you want to enjoy the ghats before they get packed with traffic, starting early is the only way to go.

However, right at the start, we ended up waiting at the toll plaza on the Satara highway for about an hour for the rest of the group to catch up. We passed the time the way riders always do—talking about bikes, gear, and life over repeated rounds of hot tea. Honestly, sipping hot cutting chai in the foggy, freezing early morning feels like heaven. Finally, Brijesh and Mr. Sridhar joined us. Mr. Sridhar’s bike chain was looking a bit loose, so we got that sorted out first before finally kicking off the journey.

Just before the ghats started, we pulled over for breakfast at a local dhaba (I can’t remember the name for the life of me). I haven’t had such a delicious plate of poha in a really long time. We also used the break to snap a few photos of the group—Brijesh is fantastic behind the camera. Since we were already running a bit behind schedule, we wrapped things up quickly and got back on the saddle. And that’s where the real fun began.

As soon as we hit the ghats on the Satara road, our hearts sank—the road was completely under construction. Even though the traffic wasn’t too heavy, we were forced to crawl along at maybe 20 or 30 km/h because of the rough patches. We were doubly worried because, being late, we expected the main Mahabaleshwar ghat to be a total gridlock.

To our absolute surprise, that wasn’t the case at all! The roads were surprisingly clear, and believe me, riding on those open ghat roads in the hills was pure bliss. We spotted quite a few other riders out there with the exact same energy and excitement. For any rider in India, finding an open, winding road is pure joy.

We finally rolled into Mapro around 9:15 AM. If you ever visit, I highly recommend ordering the Classic Sandwich, it’s so massive I guarantee you’ll end up skipping lunch.

After hanging out and relaxing there for over an hour, we turned around and headed back home. By then, the sun was beating down hard, and we were all absolutely roasting. To make things worse, the traffic in the ghats had completely built up. We had to stop twice along the way just to down some cold lemonade to beat the heat, finally making it back home around 2:00 PM.

Here are a few pictures from our stop at Mapro!