Pagdandi, Khayee and Loose Pathhar

My ever-enthusiastic PM, Anup’s long awaited “Trek” plans worked out this time and we baselined the trek to Shivaji-Maharaj’s very famous & historic fort (which is very close to Pune city) – The Sinhgad !

To make the things more exciting and adventurous, the girl’s party suggested a night trek instead of a day one. With some minor initial opposition (which was natural resistance to change), the suggestion was accepted and we decided to start directly from office on bikes on Friday, 17th June.

Just as we started, my bike gave up…. A puncture :-(. So the plan was slightly modified and five of us went in Anup’s car and 8 people started with earlier plan, on bike.

Our first halt was at Khadakwasala Dam. Though we wasted a lot of time due to my bike, we were fortunate enough to catch the wonderful sunset at Khadakwasala!

After watching the beauty of the nature and of-course having the “Bhutta”, we left the place to our base camp of Sinhgad.

After doing some “pet-pooja” at our base-camp, we started off (9 p.m.)…

We started on the correct lines… It was a leisurely walk watching the sparkling fire fly in the dark background!!! Many times the things look simple as we don’t know what lies in the future J

Sooner the stroll changed into real trek… and the flat road changed into steep climb and then into the very famous “Pagdandi”!

From this point the team work began! Every next person started giving the clue about what lied ahead to the person at the back. We had only 3 torches and 2 mobile phone torches J. Even the whether was not supportive. There was no sign of Moon and moonlight. We kept on walking with support of each other (we were so optimistic that till that time we felt we are on the right way :-( ).

Ultimately we reached the spot from where there was no way upwards… Just a straight cliff…

We tried all possible options to climb up! In that process the most enthusiastic person Rajesh got into a very uncomfortable situation from where he couldn’t get down and Harry got hurt by the rolling stones. Then we realized that we neither had the material to do the rock-climbing, nor we had the expertise required to do that...

There was no place to even sit for the 13 till that time exhausted trekkers! Moreover it was just 12 midnight. We had so many hours left for the morning… We had two options… one … stay there till the morning and then get down (though we would have had the feeling of losing the dream of conquering Sinhgad ) and other… get down and search the right path.

At that instant, Vivek mobile rang!!! Ohh my god! Call from onsite… To negotiate on the estimates… That too in a situation like this… But Vivek handed over the responsibility to his PM ji (Anup) and Anup was confident as always on the call :-).

Finally common sense prevailed and we decided go get down.

Getting down was even tougher job. Just slipping of one of the stones from the top and each of the people who were down would have had to suffer. We took utmost care… Literally telling the person behind where to keep the foot, how to get down… Ye loose pathhar hai, ispe bilkul pauv mat rakhna… Yaha pe mitti hai… Ye pathhar to bahot bahot loose hai J … Yaha pe khayee hai (though the khayee wud be just 2-3 foot deep J)… These were the extracts of our conversation!!! Quite funny isn’t it !

And we kept on getting down…

But our bad fortune continued. Due to the darkness, in the momentum of getting down and a bit of mistake J … We got sooo down that we ended up in the valley… Then we realized that the path which we had taken was not a path for human instead it was the way for water (Just that water was not flowing)…

We lost the way again and got struck in even worse condition… Here hardly any of us could sit or stand… Again we had the tough job of finding the right way…

Our ever-enthusiastic navigators Harry-Rajesh-Mukesh got to their job! Finally they rediscovered that famous Pagdandi! And we proceeded one by one…

Finally we found the “conventional” way which people use to trek and we took a much required break!

2.00 a.m.

Then our luck seemed to have changed… The moonlight was favorable… The road was not steep and tough…

Just that our bodies were not supporting us… Some of us could barely lift the foot… Our sacks seemed like huge burden on us… We had no water left… And the top of Sinhgad kept alluring us… It always seemed to be far away…

But we never gave up… and we persisted !!!

Finally all over efforts paid of… After 7 hours of exhaustive trek, misses and corrections, in-spite of all the pagdandis, Khayees, and loose pathhars, we finally captured “Sinhgad” !!! (4 a.m.)