Trek To Rajgadh - Starter

Been there Done that.

If you have been in Pune , you have done it in Pune. Whats that?? Trek to any near by places ( better word would be Fort/Torana). Name it and you have it all around Pune - to name a few Rajgadh, Raigad, Harishchandragadh. This was my second trek( first being Raireshwar), however first with such a huge and a very happening group of Cummins.

How did it all start:

My good friend, Kiran, who is supposed to leave for US of A for getting her Management Degree and wanted a kind of send off trek before leaving Pune. ( To tell you something about Kiran - She is one of the gutsy girls, a maker in her own sense but a girl with her head on the shoulders. If I have learnt few things after coming to Pune, some of those I would surely owe to her.). Her Cummins group, finally arranged for a trek to Rajgadh and we, as we got our names during trek as K1( Shubhi Mausi),K2( Vineet Kaka),K3( Tarun - my roomie) and K4( last but not the least me, Mahesh), got added to the list. Finally, in the end summed up to 27 guys altogether including girls.
Date - The Saturday, 3rd June of 2006.
Time & Venue - 5:15pm at Cummins Gate.

Preparations Before the trek
Abhijit, the organiser, gave me few tips on items to be collected before I start off with trek and those included - 2 litres of water, breakfast, something for sleeping and some other things.(However by end of trek, i myself know what all things i would be requiring for my next trek.) Myself and Tarun organized everything in the my newly bought Trek Bag and after weighing, finally came to a conclusion that it was too heavy for any one of us to carry. Remember its our kind of first trek. So things were reduced and some were moved to new bag. Everything was done and ready by 4.45 pm on 3rd evening and we were off on our bikes to the decided meet up destination.


The Biking Way
After everything was set, we started for Rajgadh via Satara Road. The ghat roads are one of a hell of patch to cross because of the bad conditions of roads. However with the greenery around, which only Tarun could enjoy, as I was concentrating on overtaking vehicles on the ghat road, it was fun to be in the driver's seat. After the ghat sections, the roads become smoother than silk. From the highway we need to take a diversion towards rajgadh village. It was around 7:30pm when we took that road and the result was much different to my thinking, road was better than I had thought. If it had not been for some of our vehicles in front of us, the road would have seemed to be untravelled soundless road. Its twist and turns providing us with unknown paths. My bike's light were really bad and hence whenever we tried leading the way, it almost seemed as if there was no road ahead of us and we would have banged our vehicles on one of the trees or could have flown the bike all the way into the stream similar to what is shown in our Hindi Movies. However that was not to happen and keeping our exploring ways to ourselves we never tried leading the way. Mid ways, one could find boards giving information about the way to Rajgadh and one of the highlights was most of the things were written about JijaMata, mother of Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaja, rather than Shivaji Maharaja. Here I realized that how wrong expectations we set when we don't know anything about a person or place. Hence all expectations should be set with all due knowledge.
Just when we were about 3 kms away from the base, the roads became difficult to drive. It had mud all over the roads and it was as slippery as walking on oil. One or two from our six lot of bikes fell in that and we were somewhat kind of lucky that managed to balance in half way of our falling. Finally we were there at the base, in a village which seemed manless.

About Village
In the above mentioned last time, I have mentioned word manless. When I said that I meant that it was only 9:00 pm and everyone was into deep sleep in there mushy beds in their homes. Most of our cities are awake till midnight and we were at a place which had long back ended up their day's work and had gone in their shelves. First thing to strike my mind was obviously the difference between the village timings and city timings, then it was calmness around and then it was the ultimate question - what would I do if I were in such a place? Still haven't found out the answer to that.
It was pitch dark in the village - only source of light was firefly's everywhere. It was after a long time that i saw so many fire flys. Nothing could have been a better welcome than this. We with our torches, which from a distant place would have seemed as fireflys , moved further to one of the places which I was looking forward to - the Hotel. It was named - SUVEDA Hotel the common name which I could find in the village and on the fort. Everyone was on the full length table and then the introduction happened. I could only take few names out of the 27 lot. I was better off as my friend Tarun who doesn't understand Marathi somewhat felt left out. I was slightly better off since half of the things I also wasn't understanding. We had a good dinner and there i was ready to start off with my Trek bag on shoulders.

When I started with the scrap I thought I would complete it in one go but now I can say it will take me atleast 4 more rounds to complete. Description about the trek to the top in the next blog.