So the landscape here is the same crumpled green wall of the Western Ghats, only a little to the north of the place itself. The country is high plateau cut by steep ravines, with laterite caps, forests of ironwood and jamun, and grass that turns gold by January.
Radhanagari is best known as a home of the Indian gaur, the huge dark bison that stands almost two metres at the shoulder, and in the sanctuary you can sometimes see herds moving through the clearings at dusk. The dam at the edge of the reserve was built early in the twentieth century on the orders of Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur, a ruler remembered for schools, hostels and reforms. It was an advanced work for its time and still supplies water to the region. Dajipur, inside the sanctuary, has forest rest houses and watchtowers, and in the rains the whole area is wrapped in mist and waterfalls.
The ride runs down off the Ghats toward the coast at Vijaydurg, a sea fort on the Sindhudurg coast whose walls were extended by Shivaji and which was one of the great naval bases of the Maratha fleet. The road crosses the range by one of the ghat passes, the Phonda Ghat among them, dropping several hundred metres in a series of tight hairpins through dense forest and then into a coastal landscape of cashew and mango groves, red laterite soil and white-sand beaches. The surface is mostly good, but the hairpins are steep, trucks come down slowly, and fog or rain can reduce visibility to a few metres.
Out here, services are limited. Fill before the climb. A small stall by the road will give you hot tea and fried bhaji, a welcome thing in cold wet weather, and in March the mango blossom perfumes the whole coast. Avoid the heavy monsoon, and travel in the cool dry months.