hehe.. ok. All right.. here it is
Car: Maruti Baleno (obviously)
Milage: Not checked. Expect around 12-14kmpl anyway
Onward journey: Time taken - 3.5 hours driving non-stop.
Decided to go via Tamhini ghat as I heard a lot about how beautiful this route was. It didnt disappoint as far as the scenery was concerned. But the road is a mess in some stretches. From Pune, you need to take the Paud road from Chandni Chowk, go past the beautiful Mulshi lake till you hit the ghat section. Again nice scenery around, but the state highway has been reduced to rubble in some places.. Just after you descend from the ghat, there is a fork - you need to take a left turn here towards Nizampur, othewise, if u head straight, you will end up in Kolad (close to Murud). Once past Nizampur, the road joins NH17 @ Mangaon. Just a short distance afterwards, you need to take a right towards Srivardhan (there is a board in Hindi/Marathi). Initial stretch of this road is good.. I actually hit 100kmph on this stretch.. but the road starts getting narrower and surface quality starts to go downhill.. some stretches near the resort is like a giant sandpaper - No pot holes, but road surface is a stones glued together with tar

. You pass thru a place called Mhasla and at the next junction, you need to choose between going to Harihareshwar (left) and Srivardhan (right).
I had the entire trip logged on the CarPC using Goops (
GooPs). However, I don't know what happened, but only the last part of the trip was saved in the KML file. Can anyone suggest a decent program which logs GPS data onto a KML file and doesnt lose it !!
http://spadival.googlepages.com/Harihareshwar.kml MTDC Resort: Everything well maintained, except for the restaurant. The rooms are nice and clean, air conditioned and there is a small beach close by. The restaurant has been out sourced to a private party, who employee a bunch of stupid locals in the guise of waiters. The menu is as per their convenience of course

. The restaurant has a nice view of the beach and the sea. Harihareshwar town is close by - you can visit the temple and walk up the path to the cliff and the sea shore (as seen on the pic). Srivardhan is around 30km away - we went there as we had time and we really couldnt get into the water in Harihareshwar.
Return journey: Decided to come via NH17 as I wanted to try out this route. NH17 here is in excellent condition.. a far cry from the situation down south (Refer to the Coastal highway thread by Samurai). There was a right turn off to Pune which confused me initially. But I guessed its Kolad-Tamhini ghat road and continued onwards to take the right turn off to Khopoli/Pali/Pune. The route gets better here.. scenic, yet the roads are in a pretty decent shape and you get to drive along a river for some distance. Maintained a pretty decent speed all the way till Khopoli.. and zoomed off to the sunset once I reached the e-way.