⦁
It’s 5.15 am on a Saturday morning, and Anthony Dcosta, 31, is in his home in Charkop, Kandivali, prepping for an off-road biking trip. He packs a puncture repair kit, some food and a spare tyre and heads out to the Gorai jetty by 5.40 am. Dcosta, who works as a customer service trainer for an e-commerce company by day, is a mountain biker on weekends. This, he explains, basically involves riding on unpaved roads and forest trails in and around the city. He takes the first ferry out to get to Gorai by 6.10 am, where he officially starts his ride. While Dcosta’s been cycling for as long as he can remember, he only got into mountain biking five years ago. He cycles up a hill called Manori Rockface, wedged between Manori and Gorai. The trail is beautiful, and once he’s up, he takes a break, eating a protein bar while watching the sun rise over the sea. Then he starts his ride back. “When the lockdown started, it was difficult to access [most] places, so I started mapping the whole city for places where I could cycle,” he says. “Basically, I tried to map all the locations around me in a 12km radius.” If not the Manori–Gorai stretch, Dcosta usually goes to Aarey Milk Colony or Uttan, also a short ferry ride away.


