Trek to Malavli…

I love the rains…but not in the cities where the rainwater gets mixed with garbage and muck! That’s why I wanted to venture out in the nature to celebrate monsoons. My idea of a day in the rains is going to a picturesque place- may be a hill or a forest and enjoying the cool breeze with a group of crazy friends and chatting over a hot cup of tea :) .

That’s why I decided to visit Malavli, Lohgad for that matter. Malavli is a place near Lonavla. The two forts- Lohgad and Visapur are situated here. Lohgad is a comparatively easy fort to climb but is really far from Malavli station. After two weeks of persuasion, 8 of my friends agreed to join me. Two of us came from Mumbai and the others from Pune. The walk to the fort is always the most interesting part of the trip.

With beautiful waterfalls on the way, what else can you ask for? But it is a pity to see people ruining the nature’s beauty by throwing garbage around and drinking alcohol in the waterfall and misbehaving. Anyways, we ignored all these facts, and walked past the waterfalls in the rain, teasing and pulling each others’ leg. All my friends- Rohit, Rohan, Sanket, Parag, Supriya, Rujuta, Amey and Joanna are crazy souls.

After a long and tiring walk, we decided to have lunch at a small tapri which had a hilarious name- Nature’s Miracle or something! It took those guys 2 hours to prepare anda curry for us! And we had to wait there calculating the time left with us for climbing the fort and reaching the station on time to catch the local train. We discussed history of the forts and assigned one of us as the raja and others as the mavlas and senapatis. The raja assigned constituencies to his sena. I got the Mumbai constituency (Bandra to be specific ;). After the stupid discussion, the food came and we hogged on it.



The climb to the fort was easy and we reached in half an hour. The view from the top was breathtaking. There was a lot of fog and nothing could be seen from the top. There was wind flowing in great speed plus the rains and the visibility was very less. We couldn’t see anything ahead of us and were actually freezing. We couldn’t wait there for more than 20 minutes and had to leave.

We climbed down and had a cup of tea- our saviour from the cold. The walk to the station was very unwelcome as we wanted to remain there and continue enjoying the beautiful sceneries.

We reached the station and with a heavy heart bid au revoir to our friends. That was a day to remember.