The plan was simple. Saputara is hardly 300 kms from Pune. Just ride, chill once there and come back. What could go wrong?
BHPian abhi_tjet recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
A riding buddy asked for an overnighter trip to Saputara during the Republic Day long weekend, and I committed to the same to break my jinx of never doing an overnighter on a bike. The plan was simple. Saputara is hardly 300 kms from Pune. Just ride, chill once there and come back. What could go wrong?
I bought a bungee cord from the nearby Rynox store and was all set for the ride. Got the bike fueled a day before the ride and was all set for the D day. We were a total 3 rider and the ride started as planned. Since the distance wasn’t much, we were taking it at a relaxed pace with a couple of breaks for breakfast, photographs, refuelling, etc. We started on time at around 6:15 on 24th Jan and reached the property of Gujarat tourism – Hotel Toran around 12:30 PM. Traffic was quite heavy till we crossed Rajgurunagar towards Nasik.
And they were 3
Breakfast stop – Met a fellow Ducatisti here.
The luggage setup
The convoy
There isn’t much to do in Saputara and we just relaxed, chatted about bikes and did almost all the touristy stuff including the cable car ride which is actually quite good.
sight seeing in Saputara – The lake
The property
On Sunday morning, we planned to go for Sun rise point. We reached there on time and despite it being cloudy, Sun god showed mercy and gave us some beautiful captures.
We were starting for return to property for breakfast when my bike just refused to start I told my riding buddy and we did a quick check on relay wiring and cranked again. All the lights, controls were working but somehow bike wasn’t taking self.
After doing some brainstorming, it was time to do a ‘dhakka’ start- the good old way. However, the normal slope didn’t helped and after giving onlookers some joyful moments, my rider buddy – Devesh who was helping throughout advised me that it will need a proper slope to start and we should try taking it downhill since sunrise point was at some elevation.
Desperate time – desperate measures and I agreed. Now, Devesh is well built 6 plus foot guy and I was confident that he can handle Multi easily since he himself rides a Tiger 1200 explorer. He took the bike down on slope which was quite steep and he came up in 2 mts with Multistrada engine running in full glory.
Sunrise point
People got a good show here 
View from ropeway/cablecar
Other side – sunset point actually. Hence, no one here.
There were empty helipads. We just went mad here in clicking pics.
Lake during evening
Bike behaved nicely since then. I gave the bike to service after return and they were able to reproduce it. They confirmed the root cause as battery not good enough for crank if it hasn’t been run long enough after last start.
A new OEM spec Yuasa battery was arranged by the dealership and was fitted during the weekend. I was getting cost more or less similar outside as well so stuck with dealer sourced vendor.
New battery
A background here which I had mentioned earlier in this thread itself – I had a finger fracture last year in April during which bike wasn’t ridden for 2 months. It looks like battery wasn’t optimum since then but soldiered on and failed when! I am still counting my blessings that I wasnt alone when this happened since I venture out mostly alone on bike.
Coming back to the trip and return ride, we started our return journey around 10 AM on 26th after having breakfast at property. We then had our lunch at Akash misal at around 2:30 PM, started around 3:30 from there and were at home a while before 5 PM.