Our first visit to Wai was by chance. We were on the way to Satara, to attend a festival at the temple there. I was then pregnant, and my tendency to throw up on the road was higher than normal, which led to frequent stops on the highway. One such unscheduled stop found us near a board that said, �Wai � 10Km�. My father-in-law suddenly remembered a visit he had made to the area almost half a century ago, on his first job in the PWD. �There is a river there, and lots of temples� he said, and we decided to take the turn and see if they were still there. The river turned out to be almost completely dry... and what was left of it, extremely dirty... but the promise of temples was true. The whole riverbank was dotted with temples of all shapes and sizes, and there were also tiny shrines on the bed of the now-dried-up river, which obviously would disappear when the river filled up in the monsoons. I made a second trip to Wai some years later, but the river was just the same. The temples had more visitors, but what I remember about that visit was a delicious Maharashtrian Thali we had in a small make-shift hotel off the main road. It took me my third visit to see the river at Wai � the Krishna.
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| A view of the river Krishna at Wai |