Trekking trip to Rajmachi...08-09 August'2009

It was the best as well as the longest trekking experience in my life...the trip to Rajmachi fort was simply awesome and will always be as fresh as it is today. We were six people altogether from IIT Bombay. I always prefer to go in a group of less than ten people and six was perfect for me. The trip was fun from the very start..we had to walk almost four kilometres from our hostel to Kanjurmarg Railway station to catch the 0455 hrs local train to Karjat. We walked like anything to reach the station just in time. I wanted to sleep in the train itself since I took a very small nap that night, but that didn't happen. The beautiful landscape on the way to Karjat did not let me sleep at all. We reached Karjat at around 6:30 AM. Then we took auto rickshaw to reach the place which was at the bottom of a hill, in fact that was the place where we started our trekking. The way to Rajmachi from Karjat is not like a normal road..it was just a narrow strip which sometimes become invisible and you may feel like going nowhere. But that's where the fun part of trekking is ;)

We kept going up and up..got lost also in two three places, found a dog as our guide for some part of the journey, got some hints from two-three local people whom we met on the way. Finally at around 11:30 AM we reached the village which is around 100 metre below the fort. We were so tired that we decided to stay there overnight. Since there were no hotels there we approached a family in that village if it would be possible for them to give us a room and food for one night. Fortunately we got a "yes" from them. After taking a little rest and some food we started the second phase of our trek to the forts. There we found lots of other people who had come through the way from Lonavla which is like a proper road. The forts namely Manoranjan and Shree Vardhan were truly amazing. It's hard to believe that people built such huge forts in early days at such a location. We came back from the fort just before nightfall to the house. There was no electriity in that village, they have a solar power system but that operates only in sunny weather. We had nothing to do other than having dinner and then sleeping.

We got up very early in the morning next day since we had to cover the longer route to return from the village. We took the way to Lonavla from the village which was a very easy one with little fun. But the view was superb with lots of waterfalls, rivers in between. We took a bath in one of the rivers, it was really amazing. I never took a bath like that in a river and that too inside a forest, with hills in the surroundings. We kept moving on the way to Lonavla with another dog this time as our guide :D. We reached Lonavla around 1 PM. We were very hungry as well as tired, had lunch there and then took a train back to Bombay. Lonavla was a little scary as we could see lots of people wearing masks ( as a preventive of swine flu). Finally we reached the institute at around 6 PM. I was not being able to make any movement after that..Although it was damn tiring (My muscles are still paining a lot..:( ..) yet the memories will remain evergreen...:)