Shri Bhuvaneshvari

18/09/2026

From 15 October, your UPI payment costs you exactly what the rate says. Not a rupee more.

India's new UPI rules kick in next month. A 0.4% merchant fee (MDR) will apply on payments above ₹2,000 made to businesses. Small transactions stay free. Person-to-person transfers stay free. And the rules are clear: the fee is the business's to pay, never the guest's.

So here's our position at Shri Bhuvaneshvari — ₹3,000 per person per night stays ₹3,000 per person per night. All inclusive: home-cooked meals, one guided outing, every amenity. We absorb the fee. You pay the rate you were quoted, by UPI, by bank transfer, however you like.

Weekends fill fast. Weekdays are where the quiet mornings and the empty trails are.

Book direct on WhatsApp — +91 91370 61457 — and ask about our direct-booking discount. Jambrung village, Karjat. Two hours from Mumbai and Pune.

18/09/2026

We say "touch wood" for luck.

The research suggests we should mean it literally.
In a Japanese laboratory, volunteers rested a palm on plain cedar for ninety seconds. Near-infrared sensors watched the prefrontal cortex quieten. The same hand on marble produced no such change. Across 24 forests, 280 people sat for fifteen minutes among trees and then on city streets; in the forest their cortisol was 13 per cent lower and their rest-and-recover nervous activity 56 per cent higher.

A survey of nearly twenty thousand people in England found that the benefit of nature shows up at about two hours a week, which works out to roughly seventeen minutes a day.

None of these findings makes a tree a medicine. The effects are real but modest, mostly short-term, and some of the most quoted studies involved only a dozen people. We would rather tell you that than sell you a miracle.

On our Nature Walks at Jambrung, in the Karjat foothills of the Sahyadris, the first thing we ask of guests is simple. Find a tree. Put your hand on the bark. Notice how rough it is and how cool it is and how it smells after rain.

When did you last touch a tree on purpose?

And if you want to see the whole detailed h-res infographic, just DM us; we will send you the whole infographic PNG image to print.

WhatsApp +91 91370 61457 · www.shribhuvaneshvari.com
Sources: Ikei et al. 2019 (J Wood Sci); Park et al. 2010 (Environ Health Prev Med); White et al. 2019 (Sci Rep); Li et al. 2007 (Int J Immunopathol Pharmacol).

15/09/2026

Protection rarely arrives as a headline.

It arrives as a line in a village list.
On 27 July 2026, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change published a fresh draft notification, S.O. 4106(E), proposing 56,826 sq km of the Western Ghats as an Ecologically Sensitive Area.

Jambrung appears in Annexure C at serial number 1032, listed as a whole village rather than a split one. It is one of 59 villages from Karjat taluka, and Raigad, with 437 villages on the list, has more than any other district in Maharashtra.

What would this mean on the ground? Mining, quarrying and sand mining would be banned, with existing operations closed within five years or when their lease ends. There would be no new thermal power plants and no new "Red" category industries. New buildings of 20,000 sq m or more, and townships of 50 hectares or more, would not be allowed. Projects would need Gram Sabha consent, and any diversion of forest land would have to be made public.

What does not change matters just as much. No one would be displaced. Farming and plantations continue. Homes can be repaired and renovated, and land ownership stays as it is. The State Government would enforce the rules and publish an annual report on the health of the Ghats.

Here is where we stand.
We welcome Jambrung's inclusion. The guests who walk with us from Mumbai and Pune come for the forested slopes and monsoon streams, not for concrete. Protection is not the enemy of livelihoods here. Degradation is.

But the draft leaves gaps that matter in Karjat. The pressure here is rarely one 20,000 sq m project. It is plot after plot of farmhouses and second homes, each too small to be noticed, together large enough to change how water runs down a hillside. The river flow conditions apply to hydropower, not to dams built for water supply. And the draft says nothing about small, locally run stays, the kind of livelihood that gives a village a reason to keep its forest standing.

This is still a draft, not law. Versions have come and gone since 2014, and village names and survey numbers may yet change. If you live, farm or work in the Western Ghats, look for your village in Annexure C and send your comments to [email protected].

The 60-day window from 27 July closes around 25 September.
If a village is worth protecting on paper, who will speak for it before the paper is final?

03/09/2026

Who said a nature walk has to be serious? 🌿😄

At Shri Bhuvaneshvari Homestay in Jambrung, Karjat, every walk brings a little fun—and something new to notice.

Follow winding village paths, listen to birdsong, spot colourful insects and wild plants, and enjoy the refreshing Sahyadri landscape. These simple outdoor moments make our nature walks enjoyable for families, children, couples and groups.

Located near Kothaligad Fort and the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary, our peaceful Karjat homestay is a wonderful base for a nature-filled weekend getaway near Mumbai or Pune.

Come for the comfortable stay. Step outside for the fresh air, laughter and small discoveries along the way. 🦋🌳

📩 Send us a DM to plan your stay and nature walk at Shri Bhuvaneshvari Homestay.

Save this reel for your next Karjat getaway and share it with your favourite walking companions!

02/09/2026

02/09/2026

There is no such thing as "the river at Karjat".

Stand above the paddy in the monsoon and you are not beside a river at all; you are on a divide, the exact line where the Sahyadri's water decides which sea it will reach. The same current a trekker photographs falling past a two-thousand-year-old cave in July arrives, months and a hundred kilometres later, as the grey tidal shallows where Mumbai's flamingos stand. One water, two worlds, and almost nobody who comes for the waterfalls ever connects them.

I have watched this catchment for years from one small valley inside it, and I have now written the whole of it down. The piece traces the rivers of Karjat and the wider Raigad district, source to sea and river by river, with a map that follows them: the Ulhas, a modest hundred-and-twenty-kilometre river that swings between a thundering monsoon channel and a summer trickle yet waters thirty lakh people and ends in the Ramsar flamingo wetland of Thane Creek; the engineered Patalganga, fed by a Tata powerhouse tailrace and now among the state's most polluted; the Amba, the Kundalika of Kolad's timed-release rapids, and the great Savitri that took a highway bridge and two buses down with it at Mahad in 2016; the small Waldhuni that periodically runs red with effluent; and the harder story beneath all of it — the Poshir dam the state cleared in 2025, the memory of the Kondhane irrigation scam that makes every village here meet a new dam with suspicion, and the plain question of whether hill water should nourish the valley it falls in or be sent wholesale to the cities below. The hills will keep sending the water down. What becomes of it is the part that is up to us.

To understand a river, it helps to stand where it is first made. Our home, Shri Bhuvaneshvari, sits in exactly that place — the Jambrung valley below the Bhimashankar range, one of the quiet rooms in which the upper Ulhas is born, where in the rains the slopes run with a hundred small falls and the Solanpada dam steps down the hillside in white sheets against a wall of green. Come and see the source for yourself. We keep it simple and price it all-inclusive, with your food, a guided outing into these very hills and every amenity included, and the best rates kept for those who book with us directly. Weekends fill early; the weekdays are ours to give. Write to me at [email protected] and I will hold you a room where the rivers begin.

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There is no such thing as "the river at Karjat". Stand above the paddy in the monsoon and you are not beside a river at all; you are standing on a divide, the exact line where the water of the Sahyadri decides which sea it will reach. The same current a trekker photographs falling past a two-thousan...

31/08/2026

I love intellectuals who ask pertinent questions. This applies to my nature walks as well. In the last corporate event, a nature walk, one participant asked me, 'Why is there this wall of the Sahyadri Mountains seen near Shri Bhuvaneshvari, right behind the site?'

These are flat bands of the mountain, and everyone who drives the Bhor Ghat or even comes to our place has seen those horizontal bands in the rock face. Most of us stop noticing them by the tenth trip.

Here's what they are. See the attached infographic!

The Sahyadris are not a mountain range in the way the Himalayas are. Nothing collided. Nothing was pushed up like the Himalayas.

What happened is stranger: around 88 million years ago India tore away from Madagascar, and around 66 million years ago the Deccan eruptions buried the west of the subcontinent under more than three kilometres of basalt in roughly 700,000 years — while the dinosaurs were going extinct.

Then the monsoon started eating the edge.

That's all the Sahyadris are. A cliff retreating eastward, roughly 200–380 metres every million years, leaving the plateau standing and the Konkan stripped bare behind it. Matheran isn't a hill. It's a piece of plateau the erosion went around and left behind.

The part I like: It is called the escarpment, which is the best exposed section of the Deccan lava pile anywhere on Earth. Geologists have mapped it flow by flow — 12 named formations in 3 subgroups. Climb from Neral to Matheran, and you're walking up the oldest flows. Stand at Mahabaleshwar and you're on the youngest, under a laterite crust that was once the roof of the whole volcanic field.
And Jambrung lies in the middle.

Three billion years of work, and we call it a weekend trek. I have a collection of stones from this escarpment done by Paresh Churi, a botanical and wildlife artist, naturalist and geologist rolled into one, kept at our homestay there.

More about rock formations in another post... Come see these, and for bookings click the WhatsApp button.

Sources: Beane, Widdowson & Cox, Gunnell, Campanile, Wang & Willett, Schoene. If you would like to read the full research report with the original references, just comment 'RR' for Research Report.

29/08/2026

Monsoon at Shri Bhuvaneshvari Homestay, Jambrung

You are allowed to take up space — and there is a great deal of it here right now.

The Sahyadri face across our valley is running with waterfalls, the pond has filled, and the whole village smells of wet earth. Best few weeks of the year in Karjat, and it does not last.

Jambrung village, Karjat Taluka — an easy drive or train ride from Mumbai and Pune. Home-cooked meals, walks through the fields and forest, and hours with nothing scheduled in them.

The next two weekends are full. Weekdays over the next two weeks are open — full waterfalls, no crowd.

₹2800 per person per night, all inclusive: room, all meals, one activity outing, all amenities. Deep discounts on direct bookings. Travel to and from your city is your own.

Message us here or write to [email protected] for a budget estimate and vacation plan!

28/08/2026

Where Clouds Fall

Kālidāsa opened the Meghadūta by watching a cloud lean into a hillside on the first day of Āṣāḍha, and decided it looked like a young elephant butting a mud bank in play. He was, as far as anyone can tell, describing exactly this.

This is one photograph, cut into five. It was taken during the monsoon on the basalt escarpment above Jambrung, in Karjat taluka, where for about ten weeks a year the cloud does not sit above the hill — it sits inside it, and the hill leaks.

Swipe through and each part of the frame carries a verse that has been describing it for anywhere between fifteen hundred and three thousand years. The Ṛgveda on why the rain comes. Kālidāsa on what a cloud is actually made of — smoke, light, water and wind — and why he asked one to carry a letter anyway. Jayadeva on an overcast forest, and everything that follows from it.

None of it is metaphor. Every thread of white you see is rain-fed, not spring-fed. The basalt holds nothing back. Three dry days and the whole wall goes silent.

Which is the honest reason to come now rather than later.

श्री भुवनेश्वरी होमस्टे — Jambrung, Karjat, Raigad.
Details on the last slide. Or write to us: [email protected]

The Formless Sky

Before there is a hill, before there is a waterfall, there is only this — grey wool pulled thin over the Sahyadris. The oldest verses we have do not describe the monsoon as weather. They describe it as an act of generosity.
The word मेघ (megha) comes from the root मिह् — to sprinkle, to pour. A cloud is not a thing. It is a verb that has not finished happening.

The Escarpment Appears

Fifteen hundred years ago a poet watched a cloud lean into a hillside and could think of nothing more accurate than a young elephant at play. Look at the cliff edge here. The cloud is not sitting on the rock. It is pressing against it.

Āṣāḍha — mid-June to mid-July — is the month the classical calendar hands over to the rains. The escarpment you see is Deccan Trap basalt: sixty-six million years of lava, stacked in steps, waiting all year to be poured over.

The Falls, All At Once
More in the Instagram link https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcl0K90jd_D/?igsi=MXY2OG1jbXJiYmQyeA==