Beauty of a lush landscape

Today is our (India’s) Independence Day! Incidentally, it is a Sunday too. I mean basically it is a holiday. Neeraj, Mohit, and myself decided to go for hiking Rajmachi. We left TIFR at early morning and caught a local train to Karjat from CST station. We caught an auto-riksaw from Karjat to the base of Rajmachi. Unfortunately, at our starting point, we took a wrong trail, and for several hours we were lost. In the forest we met few local people, and they said we were on the right trail to Rajmachi peak. It might be a language problem, as the local people there did not understand Hindi properly.

After several hours of wandering, we discovered a man-made arrow mark. After that we could find the actual trail very shortly. It was around noon, and we were really tired.

On the way there was a village, there was a school at that village, also a tube well, where we filled our empty water bottles. Another road from Lonavala meets there. After that we had to climb again, there was a cave on the way (though it was very dark inside and we dare not to enter inside).

On the way, an old uncle and auntie was selling lemon water and baked corn. After so much of exhaustion, their lemon water felt one of my life’s most refreshing drink. We all really felt very energetic and climbed the last part. The end part of the trail was very stiff. After reaching the top we felt great, some people hosted the Indian flag at the top.

The above picture was the view from the top. Isn’t it enough to justify our climbing effort? It was raining sometimes, sometimes everything was covered by thick mist, we would not see anything downhill, and sometimes the cloud curtain moved to reveal such wonderful panoramas. Recently, UNESCO declared this landscape as a world heritage site.