Day 17: February 4

The dessert turned out to be (unexpectedly) incredibly delicious, with ice cream, cream, and strawberries.

And then we arrived at the viewpoint. And that’s when I understood why people come here. The views here are truly amazing; we’ve seen mountains in our time, but probably not ones like these. They’re so striped here, and there are so many of them, stretching all the way to the horizon. Very beautiful. Only there are a lot of people here, and because of that there isn’t that wonderful feeling you get in the mountains when you are alone with nature.

And there are also a lot of monkeys here. We realized that later; at first, we bought some roasted corn (Mahabaleshwar is famous not only for its strawberries, but also for its sweet corn). The corn really was very tasty, but not for long. At the viewpoint, all the trees were occupied by monkeys waiting for tourists with food. Wolf fended off a couple of monkeys, and then he got tired of it and had to feed half the corn to a monkey; they’re such scary creatures, so nimble. We humans can’t compare to them.

By that time, we were quite hungry, and we had also lost our corn, so we hid in our bus and ate cookies :)

The bus tour turned out to be very interesting and eventful. For four and a half hours, the bus took us to various viewpoints with beautiful scenery, and then brought us to a spot where we watched the sunset.

And when we returned, we bought roasted corn in the city - there didn’t seem to be any monkeys around here.